God Knows My Heart

Raised as a fundamentalist Southern Baptist, religion journalist Wicker (Dallas Morning News) fell away from her faith as a young woman and spent several years searching for God and meaning in different religious and cultural settings. In this rather typical memoir of a fall from grace and a return to the fold, she tells us about her youthful religious idealism, her rebellious years, her failed marriages, her materialism and her looking for God in all the wrong places. After she leaves her Southern Baptist roots, Wicker continues to search for a way of being religious that fits with her own ideas about God and the world. Though she cannot express her goals articulately, she knows she is searching for a religion that is as far away as possible from the rigidity of her Southern Baptist church. When she begins working for the Dallas Morning News, she focuses on her material success rather than her spiritual goals. When she loses her original position with the paper, she is given the task of religion reporter. Despite her initial negative reaction to this job, she slowly comes to recognize, primarily through the interviews she conducts with ordinary religious people, the presence of God in the world around her. Wicker's honest skepticism about the possibility of having faith and knowing God pervades her memoir. She includes some of her interviews, including one with biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, and she adroitly draws insights from her readings of Buddhist, Jewish and Christian writers. In the end, she admits that, in spite of all she continues to learn in her search, she cannot journey away from the teachings of her childhood, and she returns to her Southern Baptist roots. Wicker's memoir is a record of a spiritual search that is by turns both painful and exhilarating. (Mar.)