Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith.

The only other person I have fallen in love with that way is Jesus, and I hope that goes more smoothly. I hope I remember, when I'm bored with Him, and antsy, and sick of brushing my teeth next to the same god every morning, I hope I remember not to leave Him. I am not so worried that He will leave me. The Bible, after all, is full of stories about God sticking with His Bride, no matter how stiff-necked and prideful and unfaithful she may be.

Scholars have endlessly written about antebellum Protestant thinking about slavery. Now, finally, Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon turns a spotlight on a new, crucial question: how did antebellum Protestants parse capitalism? For anyone who seeks to understand the political economy of the antebellum era-or, indeed, the complex entanglement of Christianity and capitalism today-this book is critical. I, for one, am very grateful to Stewart Davenport for having written it.

Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt, or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchanted, and not left alone. I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze.

God is a novelist. He uses all sorts of literary devices: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, synecdoche, onomatopoeia. But of all of these, His favorite is foreshadowing.And that is what God was doing at the Cloisters and with Eudora Welty. He was foreshadowing. He was laying traps, leaving clues, clues I could have seen had I been perceptive enough.

Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith.

Sometimes, as in a great novel, you cannot see until you get to the end that God was leaving clues for you all along.