Between a Church and a Hard Place: One Faith-Free Dad's Struggle to Understand What It Means to Be Religious (or Not)

One day, after Park picks his son up from his preschool classes at the local Methodist church, the three-year-old utters the word ""God."" A few evenings later, Park overhears his son telling his little sister how cool it is that when we die we go back to God. Because he has lived most of his life free of any faith tradition, Park finds himself anxious about how to address his son's questions about religion, and so begins to research what it means to be religious in the modern world. Part memoir and part summary of recent studies about religious belief and practice, Park discovers his great-grandfather's staunch commitment to the Pentecostal Holiness Church, and he talks with his own brother about his brother's Presbyterianism. The research about American religion that Park culls from George Barna's polls and Rodney Stark's books is so familiar that it appears as if Park has been living in a cave for the past ten years. Park's own story of his search for faith is so unremarkable and superficial that it has no features to distinguish it from hundreds of other similar memoirs. This book would have been better as a magazine article.