A fluid faith

Accounts of spiritual journeys from and toward belief

CALLED OUT OF DARKNESS: A Spiritual Confession
By Anne Rice
Knopf, 245 pp., $24

DESCARTES’ BONES: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason
By Russell Shorto
Doubleday, 299 pp., illustrated, $26

THE MIND THAT IS CATHOLIC: Philosophical and Political Essays
By James V. Schall
Catholic University of America,337 pp., $34.95

HOLY ROLLER: Growing Up in the Church of Knock Down, Drag Out; or, How I Quit Loving a Blue-Eyed Jesus
By Diane Wilson
Chelsea Green, 210 pp., illustrated, $24.95

SACRED TERROR: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen
By Douglas E. Cowan
Baylor University, 315 pp., $24.95

A humorous Christmas card some years back suggested the lesson of the Nativity journey and its finale in a lowly manger: Next time, phone ahead for reservations. Irreverence aside, the journey is an integral motif in the Christmas story, and it figures in several of this season's more interesting religion books.

Granted, these are some decidedly oddball spiritual odysseys. But if they sound more spine-chilling than religious, the Holy Family's onerous trek to Bethlehem in Luke's gospel was no day at the oasis, either (to say nothing of their escape from Herod in Matthew's account).

One author studies horror movies for insights into our feelings about religion. "Religiously oriented cinema horror remains a significant material disclosure of deeply embedded cultural fears of the supernatural and an equally entrenched ambivalence about the place and power of religion," religion professor Douglas E. Cowan argues in "Sacred Terror." The stilted academic writing hints at a dilemma that must be plaguing the publisher's marketing department: Serious film students look down their noses at monster movies, while fans of such films watch them for fun, not clues on the state of religion in culture. But Cowan shows how demons can be abetted by clerics in these films, reflecting the metaphorical distance we've traveled from medieval faith to modern wariness of religion's potential for doing wrong as well as good.

Long before she wrote her "Vampire Chronicles," Anne Rice was a Catholic schoolgirl in pre-Vatican II New Orleans. Hers was a faith of Latin liturgy, certitude in the one true church, and shunning outsiders. Then Rice met good people who weren't believers. She began reconsidering teachings that kissing was a sin and suggestions that excessive reading should be discouraged since it could lead to questioning your religion. In 1960, she became an atheist. Why did she come back after 36 years? "Called Out of Darkness" maps her journey. After researching the survival of the Jews over the centuries for her novels, she judged that remarkable story something "for which there was no convincing sociological or economic explanation at all," leaving God's hand the likeliest reason.

The novelty to Rice of writing nonfiction shows. Darting between time periods and topics, she liberally uses clunky narrative transitions - "Let me return to the year 1959," or "But I get ahead of my story. Let me drop back." And she admits that scholars will dismiss her contention that the Gospels were penned by eyewitnesses to Jesus' ministry. But this heartfelt love letter to faith will appeal to her fans.

If Rice's journey is circular, winding up where it began, Diane Wilson's was a straight shot out of fundamentalism. In "Holy Roller," her memoir of a Pentecostal childhood in 1950s Texas, her focus is the journey's starting point, the crucible of religious passion that fueled her adult work as an environmental activist. Religious primitivism would repel her as an adult; the book shows why.

If manhandling rattlesnakes takes a leap of faith, so does her prose: She piles paragraph on paragraph between quotation marks, indicating either that a tape recorder was her constant companion or that she's risking revocation of her artistic license. In the end, Wilson's childhood Pentecostalism appears to embrace a good bit of superstition, even by religion's relatively lax standards of empirical proof, and those without some anthropological interest in such practices likely will find the book dull after a few chapters.

"Descartes' Bones" bills itself as "a record of a journey" on several levels. Russell Shorto offers the bizarre tale of the titular bones' grave-hopping over the decades as a metaphor for humanity's journey from medieval thinking - grounded in the authority of king and church - to modernity's emphasis on individual reason as the basis for morality and politics. You may recall from philosophy class the 17th-century French thinker Ren?? Descartes and his exaltation of reason ("I think, therefore I am"), but it's a safe bet that you didn't have his ideas or enemies this clearly or exuberantly explained.

Shorto masterfully weaves narrative details with analysis of Descartes's contributions to both the public good (he helped inspire the revolt against religious authoritarianism) and the awful (utopian faith in reason to remake corrupt societies fueled atrocities from the French Revolution to Stalinism). Like Wilson, though, he's verbose; the book should have been shorter.

Shorto's work is nonetheless a breeze compared with "The Mind That Is Catholic." It is admittedly bracing to read a Jesuit, whose order is not known for cranking out Republicans, emphasize the "war" part of the "just war" theory. But the Rev. James V. Schall of Georgetown University writes like the academic he is as he chauffeurs us on an intellectual trip connecting reason to revelation, Aristotle to Jesus. It's an important message. But Schall makes it resemble a ride along an unchanging interstate.

To his credit, Schall thumbs his nose at Christian exclusiveness, saying Christians naturally are open to truths from other religions. We have not outgrown religious faith and the good it can do. But even many Christians at this holy time of year have outgrown the need, in their spiritual journeys, to tote the baggage of believing that any faith holds the monopoly on absolute truth.

Rich Barlow is at barlow81@globe.com.