Growing Pains: Learning to Love My Father's Faith

by Randall Balmer

Offers guidance to those raising children in a Christian home, with narrative essays exploring the challenges of handing down faith from one generation to the next.

Genres: Religion, Biography, Memoir

142 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2001

About the author

Randall Herbert Balmer, Ph.D. (Princeton University, 1985), is an ordained Episcopal Priest and historian of American religion, and holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth College. He also has taught at Barnard College; Columbia, Rutgers, Princeton, Drew, Emory, Yale and Northwestern universities; and at Union Theological Seminary. Balmer was nominated for an Emmy Award for the PBS documentary "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory," based on his book of the same title.

Reviews

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book shortly after it came out. Randy went to the same college I went to, and came from the same part of the country that I hail from, so I found the pathos of growing up in an evangelical family particularly poignant. His father really wanted Randy to follow in his footsteps and become a pastor, but a different kind of teaching appealed to Randy. He became a highly respected professor of American religion. This book is a more personal treatment of his path away from the faith of his father, and how he found his way to compassion and respect for his dad, and a new understanding of what it means to be Christian.

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 2 out of 5]

Evangelicals and former evangelicals who came of age in the 1960s and `70s will likely make an emotive connection with this short book of undated, and somewhat redundant, essays and talks by Randall Balmer, a noted professor of, and writer about, American religion. In this compilation, Balmer provides a number of poignant reflections--though none seem to lead on to ideas of any profundity. Further, although Balmer dedicates the book to the memory of his father and closes with his father’s eulogy, I was not convinced that the author had learned to love his father’s faith. At least, it’s difficult to imagine the father (to whom Balmer refers as a “fundamentalist”) endorsing Balmer’s assertion that since “gospel” and “gossip” are etymologically related, we ought to “offer our own narratives to the community of faith...telling stories about ourselves and listening to the stories of others without censure or condemnation, without responding with pieties or proof-texts.” (62-63)