Why Religion?

Narrator Lynde Houck provides a calming voice to an tumultuous memoir full of raw grief and surprising losses. Houck's narration offers listeners the opportunity to fully enter a deeply personal story that is also an exploration of the foundations of Christianity and its influence today. The narration is deeply intimate, sometimes suggesting the tears of the author. However, when the subject matter becomes more academic, the words of the Princeton professor are delivered with strength and intelligence. With its fascinating look at how people are influenced by their religion and a powerful performance from the narrator, this audiobook is both a cathartic and educational experience. V.B. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Starred review from September 10, 2018
In this beautiful memoir, Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels), professor of religion at Princeton Univ. and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, addresses the titular question by recounting her life story. Raised in an intellectually atheist household, she “came to Christ” at a Billy Graham Crusade in the late 1950s. While her traditional Christian beliefs tempered over time, that conversion unlocked her spiritual imagination. With haunting echoes from the Book of Job (which she unpacks with skillful clarity), Pagels tells a story of love, marriage, and family life alongside a vibrant academic career. Her 1979 bestseller, The Gnostic Gospels, launched her to academic fame. Nearly a decade later, her six-year-old son, Mark, died of a heart problem, and her husband of 20 years, Heinz, died in a hiking accident. In her deepest grief, Pagels’s body was covered with boils, like Job’s—an acute stress reaction. She writes of feeling empty but fighting to remain strong in order to care for her two young children (“When we confront the unknown, any interpretation is provisional, necessarily incomplete”). Pagels treats readers to the examined life behind her intellectual feats with extreme grace and depth. This luminous memoir strips religion to its elementary particles: love, suffering, and mystery.

November 1, 2018

This latest work from renowned religion historian Pagels (Harrington Spear Paine Fdn. Professor of Religion, Princeton Univ.;{amp}nbsp;The Gnostic Gospels) is much different than her previous books, providing readers with both a personal and professional memoir that shares the experiences and relationships that have shaped the contours of her career and how loss has offered an opportunity for new interpretations of familiar texts. Pagels relates her intimate relationship with religion and the role spirituality has played in her life, particularly as she attempted to make sense of her grief. Readers are given insight into the origins of the author's scholarly works and the questions that influenced her journey, as she also addresses why religion is necessary and discusses its historical and present-day psychological, cultural, and sociopolitical impacts. VERDICT Both fascinating and heart-wrenching, Pagels's highly personal account presents behind-the-scenes glimpses into the inner workings of a brilliant scholar's mind. [See Prepub Alert, 5/7/17.]{amp}mdash;Amanda Folk, Ohio State Univ. Libs.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2018
A famed religious scholar's poignant life story.Pagels (Religion/Princeton Univ.; Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, 2012, etc.), who is especially renowned for her work studying the ancient Gnostic brand of Christianity, provides a raw and often moving autobiography. The author begins in the postwar suburbs of Palo Alto, California, where she was raised by emotionally detached, and certainly nonspiritual, parents. A visit to a Billy Graham crusade awakened the young Pagels to the world of religion. "It changed my life, as the preacher promised it would," she notes, referring to Graham, "although not entirely as he intended, or at least, not for as long." By the time she was a student at Stanford, she had lost her basic faith in Christianity but remained intrigued by religion as a whole. She went on to earn a doctorate at Harvard, where she first encountered the newly discovered writings of the Gnostics, a sect that had been branded as heretical and was extinguished early in the history of Christianity. The author's academic pursuits unfold alongside a touching personal life story. After marrying physicist Heinz Pagels, the couple went on to have a son, who was eventually diagnosed with a fatal heart condition that took his life while he was still in kindergarten. As she was recovering from this tragedy, her husband fell while hiking and was killed. Much of the rest of the author's story involves her attempts to remain sane and stable while raising two other adopted children and continuing her career at Princeton. In the process, she went back to Scriptures and early Christian writings, not due to faith but as a way of understanding how others dealt with tragedy in the past. Pagels is a controversial figure in Christianity, heralded by many scholars and modernists yet derided by traditionalists, and her approach to God--amorphous and skeptical--will either offend or resonate with particular readers. The story of her grief, however, will touch all.A meaningful tale of pain and hope on the edges of faith.

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Starred review from September 15, 2018
Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? is the provocative question Pagels, Princeton professor and distinguished historian of religion, poses in this memoir cum meditation. It's offered in the context of the almost unimaginable tragedy that befalls her when, first, her six-year-old son dies and then her husband, too, a year later. She is unsparingly honest in reporting and examining the conflicting emotions, especially anger, that visited her life in the wake of these events. Earlier she describes the conditions that inspired her first interest in religion when, as a girl, she attended a Billy Graham crusade and became intrigued by Evangelical Christianity. After receiving B.A. and M.A. degrees from Stanford, she went on to earn a doctorate in religion from Harvard. Meanwhile, she met the physicist Heinz Pagels, and they married. She goes on to write fascinatingly about her burgeoning interest in the Nag Hammadi library, discovered in Egypt, which led to the writing of her landmark book, The Gnostic Gospels (1979), the focus of her final chapter in which she explicates various texts, hoping that they will open up more than a single religious path, engaging both head and heart. The same might be said of this brilliant book, which stimulates intellectual curiosity and thought while giving equal weight to Pagel's emotional life. It is a felicitous mixture that will excite both those familiar with her work and those for whom this volume will be an intriguing introduction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)