The Joyful Heretic: Smuggling God Back Into Their Own Story

Two women. One grave between them. Fourteen years of silence about to break.Ruthanne Steiger has preached at Margit Thorvaldsen-Kessler's family gravesides for nine years, and Margit has watched her the whole time - checking, without ever quite saying so, that the ground stays sealed the way she needs it sealed. Neither woman knows that a dying scholar four hundred miles away has been writing to them both, separately, for over a decade, building toward the week he'll finally put them in the same room.The Joyful Heretic follows Ruthanne to that room - a final seminar with her dying mentor, where a single mistranslated word threatens to unmake everything she's told the grieving for a decade - and back home again, where Margit is waiting to find out whether the truth is something the church can survive telling.A novel about what it costs to stop protecting the people you love from what you actually believe, and what's left standing after you do. For readers who loved the moral seriousness of Gilead and the small-town reckonings of Leif Enger.