Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion

In this illuminating account, memoirist Osgood (How to Disappear Completely) interweaves her own story with those of six other women who found religion in a rapidly secularizing society. All millennials currently in their 30s, Osgood’s subjects converted to faiths ranging from Mormonism to Islam. Their motivations are wide-ranging and complex: Angela found in Quakerism an emphasis on innate human worth in a sometimes unfeeling world; Sara sought respite from her struggles with PTSD, binge-eating, and binge-drinking in Evangelicalism’s promise of renewal. Threaded throughout the narrative is the author’s account of her own path from a nonreligious upbringing to Orthodox Judaism following a long struggle with anorexia. Religion, for Osgood, provided an opportunity to defer to “something larger” and seek a second chance precluded by a medical system that often assumes “if you had an eating disorder, you would always be grappling with it.” More broadly, Osgood sees the move toward religion among a small but significant percentage of young people as stemming in part from a foundational quarrel with today’s knowledge-obsessed culture—a recognition “that we aren’t in total control, and that the act of submitting the self to something else is a talent we’ve forfeited.” It’s an intimate and often moving look at faith’s enduring appeal. (Mar.)