IN THE END

A writer and artist explores her coming-of-age crisis of faith through a blend of memoir and fiction.

Luidens’ book begins with “Fact,” a section detailing her rather charming childhood in Altamont, New York. As the second of three children, she grew up adoring her father, who worked as the minister of the Reformed Church next door. Early on, she soothed her worries through imagined, nighttime conversations with God, but as she got older, playground questions about hell caused her to question the Bible’s authenticity. In the book’s second section, “Fiction,” Luidens recounts her freshman year at a Christian college, where her intellectual curiosity about biblical origins got her accused of “heresy” and set her on a path to abandoning her faith altogether: “No more mysterious, iridescent Trinity blowing like long curtains through my theology,” she writes. The third section, “Truth,” follows Luidens into a more pronounced existential crisis during her art-focused study abroad in France. As she wandered Paris, she imagined conversations with the likes of St. Thomas Aquinas, Socrates, John Locke, and David Hume, at last finding herself considering a life without God. Luidens’ prose describing her early years is ethereal and affecting—especially the moving descriptions of her father’s love, juxtaposed against her burgeoning skills for sharp analysis and introspection. She skillfully transforms her dreamy prayer-time conversations with God into the hard, academic debates that later occupied her adult mind. Luidens is also graceful in her portrayal of her frustration with traditionalist views without ever mocking her Christian peers. Exchanges comparing the Bible’s account of the great flood to historical fact are humorous but never mean-spirited. The author’s notes on the differences between the book’s sections and how to interpret them as either fact or fiction feel superfluous and unnecessary, though; what Luidens has put to the page will clearly come across to readers as her owntruth—no disclaimer necessary.

An intriguing religious perspective, told through skillful prose and smartly crafted arguments.