Why Religion?: A Personal Story

by Elaine Pagels, Eunice Wong (Narrator)

New York Times bestseller

One of PW’s Best Books of the Year

One of Amazon’s Best Books of the Month



Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? Why do so many still believe? And how do various traditions still shape the way people experience everything from sexuality to politics, whether they are religious or not? In Why Religion? Elaine Pagels looks to her own life to help address these questions.

These questions took on a new urgency for Pagels when dealing with unimaginable loss—the death of her young son, followed a year later by the shocking loss of her husband. Here she interweaves a personal story with the work that she loves, illuminating how, for better and worse, religious traditions have shaped how we understand ourselves; how we relate to one another; and, most importantly, how to get through the most difficult challenges we face.

Drawing upon the perspectives of neurologists, anthropologists, and historians, as well as her own research, Pagels opens unexpected ways of understanding persistent religious aspects of our culture.

A provocative and deeply moving account from one of the most compelling religious thinkers at work today, Why Religion? explores the spiritual dimension of human experience.

Genres: Religion, Memoir, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Biography, Biography Memoir, Christianity

Audible Audio

First published November 6, 2018

About the author

Elaine Pagels is a preeminent figure in the theological community whose scholarship has earned her international respect. The Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University, she was awarded the Rockefeller, Guggenheim & MacArthur Fellowships in three consecutive years.
As a young researcher at Barnard College, she changed forever the historical landscape of the Christian religion by exploding the myth of the early Christian Church as a unified movement. Her findings were published in the bestselling book, The Gnostic Gospels, an analysis of 52 early Christian manuscripts that were unearthed in Egypt. Known collectively as the Nag Hammadi Library, the manuscripts show the pluralistic nature of the early church & the role of women in the developing movement. As the early church moved toward becoming an orthodox body with a canon, rites & clergy, the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were suppressed & deemed heretical. The Gnostic Gospels won both the Nat'l Book Critic’s Circle Award & the Nat'l Book Award & was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best books of the 20th Century.

Reviews

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

What surprises me, after reading six or seven of Dr. Pagels’s books, is to learn that she may be something of a mystic. She’s endured enormous suffering: losing her young son and husband. She’s able to write keenly about her irrational moments, when she was waylaid by grief, including her anger at those hoping to condole with her. At the same time, she uses what she’s learned from her work as a scholar of the so called secret gospels. So the book’s to an extent a recapitulation of her agony and subsequent self-analysis. What she had to do to come through. It’s astonishingly moving and filled by uncanny coincidences that remind me of what C.G. Jung said about synchronicity.

“This second loss [of Heinz] striking like lightning, ignited shock and anger beyond anything I’ve ever imagined, and I fiercely resisted both. It wasn’t just that my parents routinely stifled such feelings; much of our culture worked to shut them down. For as the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo notes in his powerful essay ‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’:

Although grief therapists routinely encourage awareness of anger among the bereaved, upper-middle-class Anglo-American culture tends to ignore the rage devastating losses can bring . . . . This culture’s conventional wisdom usually denies the anger in grief.

“In his essay Rosado tells us how he shared such denial until a devastating loss shattered it. Before that, he says, when talking with men of the Ilongot tribe in the northern Philippines, he was at a loss to understand what motivated their tribal practice of headhunting. When asked, the men simply told him that grief— especially the sudden rupture of intimate relationships—impelled them to kill. Their culture encouraged the bereaved man to prepare by engaging in ritual, first swearing a sacred oath, then chanting to the spirit of his future victim. After that, he swore to ambush and kill the first person he met, cut off his head, and throw it away. Only this, his informants explained, could ‘carry his anger.’

“Dismissing what they told him, Rosado kept looking for more complicated, intellectually satisfying reasons to account for this ritual—until his young wife, the mother of their two children, accidentally fell to her death. Finding her body, he says, the shock enraged and overwhelmed him with ‘powerful visceral emotional states . . . the deep cutting pain of sorrow almost beyond endurance, the cadaverous cold of realizing the finality of death . . . The mournful keening that started without my willing, and frequent tearful sobbing.’ At the time he wrote in his journal that, despairing and raging, he sometimes wished ‘for the Ilongot solution; they are much more in touch with reality than Christians. So I need a place to carry my anger— can we say that a solution of the imagination is better than theirs?’

“His question challenged me: Are the elusive [uncanny] experiences noted above, which I dared hope hinted at something beyond death, nothing but denial—what Rosaldo derisively calls ‘a solution of the imagination’? Noting that some Ilongo men converted to Christianity after headhunting was outlawed, Rosaldo initially suggested that such converts were simply turning to fantasies of heaven to deny death’s reality. What he wrote of anger, though, helped me acknowledge my own. Much later, for me as for him, raw experience poured into what I was writing, as I sought to untangle my own responses, while sensing how powerfully our culture shapes them.”

(p. 141-142)

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This memoir in addition to being of an account of overcoming personal tragedy, adds the unique dimension of insights of a respected historian of religion. Elaine Pagels is not only knowledgeable of the historical circumstances under which early scriptures were written, she found personal solace in those ancient words by identifying with the emotions and feeling that may have motivated those early writers. This book tells the story of how her personal and academic life combined to provide a unique reservoir of spiritual wisdom when facing the death of her 6-year-old son followed a year later by the death of her husband while mountain climbing.

Elaine Pagels participated in the translation of the Nag Hammadi library and provided insights into them with her books, The Gnostic Gospels (1979) and Beyond Belief (2003). Her other books, including Adam, Eve and the Serpent, The Origin of Satan, and Revelations, have contributed additional understandings of early Christianity and highlighted common issues shared by people of both ancient and current times.

This book, as indicated by the subtitle, is very much a candid “personal story,” but it is also a quick review and tour of much of the interesting religion scholarship over the past forty years. It can perhaps serve as an extended synopsis of her other books for those readers who don’t have time or motivation to read all of her other books.

Pagels draws on a wide array of religious influences including the Gospels, letters of Paul, Gnostic writings from the Nag Hammadi library, Buddhism, and Trappist monks. It is clear that her spiritual journey has not been confined by the strictures of orthodox Christianity.

Why Religion?—Was that question answered? It was a question that was asked of her when she applied for graduate school. She came from a family that was opposed to religion of any sort, and when she applied to graduate school she applied to five different schools in five different disciplines. Because of her background and scattered interests up to that point in her life, "Why Religion?" was a logical question to ask. I got the impression that she selected religion because it was Harvard University, though the quota of women had already been filled the year she applied so she had to wait a year to begin her studies. She has a "me too" story from her graduate study years at Harvard that would cause the dismissal of a professor from his job if it happened today. But it happened in the late 1960s, and things were different then.

Other than the above, the question in the book's title is not explicitly answered. However, her life as recounted in this memoir provides the lived answer.

The following are some excerpts from the book that I found poignant. (Thanks to David Nelson for highlighting them in an email he sent out for Vital Conversations book group. The introductory comments to the individual quotations are my own.)

I liked this definition of "being religious."

“Am I religious?” Yes, incorrigibly, by temperament, if you mean susceptible to the music, the rituals, the daring leaps of imagination and metaphor so often found in music, poems, liturgies, rituals, and stories – not only those that are Christian, but also to the cantor’s singing at the bar mitzvah, to Hopi and Zuni dances on the mesas of the American Southwest, to the call to prayer in Indonesia. But when we say “religious,” what are we talking about?” (p.32)

This is a reminder how pain and grief can strip away the usual comforts of religious faith.

Whatever most people mean by faith was never more remote than during times of mourning, when professions of faith in God sounded only like unintelligible noise, heard from the bottom of the sea. (p. 98)

This distinguishment between "find meaning" and "make meaning" makes sense to me.

We found no meaning in our son’s death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to create meaning. (p. 104)

The following is an articulation of how sorrow from the loss of a loved one can linger for years, and can return at unpredictable times.

“You have no choice about how you feel about this. Your only choice is whether to feel it now or later.” Although her comment helped a little at first, during the next twenty-five years I would keep discovering that how much I was able to feel, or not, and when, was not a matter of choice. (p. 121)

I agree with the following

“Do you believe in life after death?” “Yes, of course – but not my life after my death.” (p. 137)

Wouldn't it be nice if we could depend on God to make sure that life is fair?

I still wanted to believe that we live in a morally ordered universe, in which someone, or something – God or nature? – would keep track of what’s fair? (p. 167)

The followings is Pagel's description of the experience of emerging from grief.

Emerging from a time of unbearable grief, I felt that such sayings offered a glimpse of what I’d sensed in that vision of the net. They helped dispel isolation and turn me from despair, suggesting that every one of us is woven into the mysterious fabric of the universe, and into connection with each other, with all being, and with God. (p. 177)

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rare lung disease killed Elaine Pagels’s 6-year-old son, and then about a year later her husband fell to his death while mountain climbing. After that Job-like run of tragedies, no one would have blamed Pagels if she had decided to “curse God and die.”

But she held on. Through rage and terror and despair so overwhelming that it made her faint, she held on.

“I had to look into that darkness,” she says at the opening of her new memoir, “Why Religion?” “I could not continue to live fully while refusing to recall what happened.”

Pagels acknowledges that “no one escapes terrible loss,” but as the country’s most popular historian of religion, she brings a unique reservoir of spiritual wisdom to bear on the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. A MacArthur “genius” and a professor at Princeton University, she has long been one of those rare bilingual academics capable of speaking to lay and scholarly readers. Her foundational work, “The Gnostic Gospels” (1979), revolutionized our. . . .

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...

[CanadianReader · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1945, two years after Elaine Pagels was born in northern California, an Arab farmer on the other side of the world made a stunning discovery. In a cave near the village of Nag Hammadi in Egypt, he found a six-foot-long jar containing 52 secret texts. They were gospels in Coptic Egyptian, which presented mystical sayings, beliefs, and ideas of Jesus that were quite different from those found in the New Testament. Deemed heretical at the time of their transcription, the scripts were apparently buried by defiant monks, who’d been ordered by religious authorities to destroy them. About a millennium and a half later, Pagels, now a Harvard-trained religious scholar, would be part of a team who translated those texts. In 1989, she wrote a best-selling non-academic book which explores them. One reviewer, referring to Pagels, observed that women were “easily seduced by heresy”. Some readers sent personal letters damning Pagels to hell. Yes, preoccupation with textual purity and heresy remains alive and well in the modern age.

Early in Why Religion? Pagels explains that over the course of her career she has been regularly asked about the role of religion in her own life. Is she, for example, a believer? Or is her interest in religion purely academic? Why Religion? is a focused memoir which seeks to explain how and why Pagels was attracted to the discipline of religious studies, a very unconventional calling for a young woman coming of age in the 1960s (and one in which she encountered a fair bit of male chauvinism). She also addresses some of the ways in which religion and a sort of mysticism have given shape and meaning to a life marked by significant tragedy.

Pagels’s family of origin was repressive and not at all religious. Her mother, who was uncomfortable with both physical closeness and emotional displays, did sometimes take Elaine and her brother to the local Methodist church for Sunday school, but the children’s attendance was not a significant part of their lives. Pagels’s father, a research biologist, had traded his Calvinist upbringing for Darwinism. Passionately anti-religious, he was also given to unpredictable fits of rage, and his daughter learned early on to adhere to a code of silence. Being quiet was the only way to be safe. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that when she was 15, Elaine was attracted to evangelical Christianity. Some high school friends were attending a Billy Graham “crusade” at a Palo Alto stadium. Pagels went along with them. Swept up in the emotional intensity of the experience, she found herself walking towards the altar, moved by Graham’s words to surrender herself to Jesus. She believed that if she were “born again”, she could break out of her family and “enter into the family of a heavenly father . . . [who] loved her unconditionally.”

Pagels’s parents were horrified. “Their reaction,” she writes, “secretly pleased me, confirming that I’d struck out to find a different world.” Hers was an atypical teenage rebellion; for several years during adolescence she attended an evangelical church once or twice weekly. However, when Paul, a young Jewish artist friend (from a different crowd) died tragically in a car crash, church members harshly pronounced that since he had been a Jew, he could only have gone to hell. Pagels was shocked. The exclusiveness and superiority of the group was exposed, and she broke permanently with evangelicalism. Her friend’s sudden death had left her not only grieving, but questioning, too: Where do the dead go, and how do we go on living when death is ever present and inevitable?

Around the same time, Pagels participated in a UCLA seminar on the sociology of mental illness, which also played a role in her decision to pursue religious studies. The course required students to make regular visits to Camarillo, a state psychiatric hospital. There she met a young Mormon who’d had a mental health crisis after he’d begun reading texts along the lines of The Origin of Species. These had filled him with “bad thoughts” that made him question the religion he’d been raised in. Pagels’s interest in the religious impulse and the early days of Christianity was further stimulated. She was particularly curious about the persistence of religion in an age of science.

In her memoir, Pagels considers major events in her own life through the lens of religion. One point that she hammers home is that the old stories, the myths of the Old and New Testaments, do not have to be accepted as the truth to exert an influence on even a fairly liberal person’s mindset. The stories of the Bible are repositories of the cultural codes of a nomadic sheep and goat-herding people, and we may not be aware of the degree to which they still govern modern attitudes. For instance, biblical texts reflect a culture that valued fertility and therefore condemned sexual activity of a non-procreative kind. Such views have echoed across the millennia and still impact modern attitudes to homosexuality.

A discussion of the rage that is part of intense grief leads to a stimulating and fairly accessible discussion of the figure of Satan, who was invented, Pagels says, to deflect blame (about the injustices of life) from God. (The Ancient Greeks, she explains, had no need for Satan, since their prophets never claimed that the gods were unequivocally good. Buddhists, too, don’t wrestle much with “the problem of evil” for different reasons: for them, the most basic premise is that all life is suffering.) Biblical storytellers, however, chose not to blame God for disasters, but a member of his heavenly court instead: “a malicious trickster who throws obstacles into one’s path . . . to lure his targets toward danger and death.” He is a kind of psycho-religious construct, an “invisible antagonist” envisioned for millennia by people “bushwack[ing their way] through rough emotional terrain”. Pagels tells about one of her own powerful dreams featuring Satan—whom she doesn’t believe in—which she had the anxiety-ridden night before her son’s open-heart surgery.

Quite bravely for an academic, Pagels writes about many spiritual experiences she has had during her lifetime. For many years Pagels and her first husband, Heinz, struggled with infertility. When she finally did have a son, Mark, quite late in life, the boy’s time would be cut short by untreatable congenital heart disease. Shortly after Mark’s death at the age of six and the adoption of two young children, Heinz, too, would die. Most of the mystical episodes Pagels recounts are related to these tragic personal losses. Before the deaths of her son and her husband, she had taken for granted that death was the end; her experiences challenged that assumption.

Pagels also touches on a number of other unusual experiences—including a controlled LSD “trip”, being the focus of a fertility ritual, and attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where she recognized that willpower alone could not release her from alcohol’s anesthetic powers. Through these personal stories and others, she shows how religion meets the imaginative needs of humans, serves the significant irrationality within, and receives, contains, channels, and sometimes inflames some of our most intense emotions.

Pagels’s memoir took seven years to write. That doesn’t surprise me. For the most part, it is a rich, stimulating, and thoughtful work, simultaneously personal and scholarly. Unfortunately, in the last chapter, the personal is almost entirely abandoned for the academic. Pagels provides an analysis of The Book of Revelation and looks at the ways it has been used fairly recently in the War on Terror. Some of the epistles of Paul the Apostle and a few of the secret texts found at Nag Hammadi are also examined. The discussion might have been meaningful to me if I had some background knowledge of the material. I don’t, so it was pretty hard-going. I didn’t enjoy reading it, and I felt that Pagels was no longer telling the personal story promised in the subtitle of her memoir. I thought this was an unfortunate way to end a book that had otherwise melded the personal and the scholarly quite well.

Rating: 3.5

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5) Pagels is a religion scholar best known for her work on the Gnostic Gospels of the Nag Hammadi library, such as the Gospel of Thomas. She grew up in a nonreligious Californian household, but joined a friend’s youth group and answered the altar call at a Billy Graham rally. Although she didn’t stick with Evangelicalism, Christianity continued to speak to her, and spirituality provided a measure of comfort in the hard times ahead: infertility, followed by the illness and death of her long-awaited son, Mark, who underwent heart surgery as an infant and died of pulmonary hypertension at age six. Little more than a year later, Pagels’s physicist husband Heinz fell to his death on a hike in Colorado.

The author doesn’t gloss over the horror of these events, the alternating helplessness and guilt she felt, or the challenge of continuing in her normal life as a Princeton University academic and mother (to their two adopted children) in their wake. Nor does she suggest that religion was what got her through. It’s more that she sees religion’s endurance as proof that it plays a necessary role in human life. She also had experiences that she couldn’t explain away as coincidences, including dreams, moments of consolation, a vision of the connectedness of life while on LSD, and the continued presence of her husband and son after their deaths. These are more successfully conveyed than in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Living with a Wild God.

Along with her continued scholarship on the Gnostic Gospels, Pagels has published works on the Adam and Eve myth, the origin of the concept of Satan, and the book of Revelation. There is more about her academic output than I expected from a memoir, and less than I expected about what happened in the 30 years since these major bereavements. I wanted to know more about how she rebuilt her life, but the book sticks doggedly to loss and its immediate aftermath, and focuses on Pagels’s intellectual development, sometimes to the exclusion of her emotional journey. It’s comparable to Claire Tomalin’s A Life of My Own in that respect. Potential readers should keep the title in mind and ponder whether they’re interested enough in the question to read a whole book about it – it really is all about religion. (Releases November 6th.)

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been reading Elaine Pagels since 1990, the summer after my sophomore year in college. I remember stealing little reading breaks while canvassing for Greenpeace in Kansas City. I'd sit on the grass and read 10-20 pages of The Gnostic Gospels, and feminist theologian Carol P. Christ's Laughter of Aphrodite, and Catherine Keller's From a Broken Web. A few weeks later I'd begin Adam, Eve, and the Serpent - I was finding such intellectual excitement in these books! At school, I recalled hearing that Pagels's husband, Heinz, a renowned physicist, had died in a tragic hiking accident. I wondered about her story.

This is sort of two types of memoir in one: Pagels describes her family, youth (she hung out with with Jerry Garcia in the Bay Area as a teenager), early attraction to evangelical Christianity, academic career, marriage, and she explains what inspired her to research each of her books and then short synopses of the book topics - but readers most interested in the scholarship don't really need to read this (read the books instead). The other memoir here is of her heartbreaking, life-shattering losses, and this is what I can't forget. Her story of her grief is as truthful and sad to read as anything by Joan Didion or Isabel Allende (in Paula). I cried for her as I read.

I was surprised to learn that Pagels is herself quite spiritual - not religious - but spiritual and rather mystically-minded. When I was majoring in religious studies my peers and I, and most of our teachers, tended to assume that the academic study of religion eventually made us LESS religious (if we began that way at all) and less capable of spiritual experience. (This is a whole topic of its own that I don't want to write about today.) But Pagels's question of "why religion?" is not just a book title for her - she seems to be continually searching in some way for meaning, and like any religious scholar she is fascinated why human beings have turned to religion for answers. Unlike the New Atheists she knows that to understand human culture we must study religious history as well as religious experience.

[Mary Novaria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Elaine Pagels is clearly more comfortable addressing her chosen field of study than she is writing about her own personal struggles. While she outlines the horrific tragedies of losing her young son and husband within a year of each other, she never does a deep dive into her agony and any ramifications it may have had on her own religious experience or faith.

To say it's "A Personal Story" is only partially true. She gives us the physical details but, unlike most successful memoir, there's too much "telling" and too little "showing." We understand the events and can imagine their devastation, but that's all we can do is imagine because Pagels keeps the reader at arm's length. We are not drawn into her raw emotion on a deep, personal level. We are moved because of our own empathy and not because she strips herself bare and invites us in.

We learn nothing of the childhoods of the two children she adopted and suddenly we're at the end of the book with a lengthy, scholarly discussion on reframing the gospel narrative. The question of Why Religion? never quite dovetails with her own journey.

She writes: "My own experience of the 'nightmare'--the agony of feeling isolated, vulnerable, and terrified--has has shown that only awareness of that sense of interconnection restores, equanimity, even joy."

So this is what Pagels tells us, but she never shows us what that isolation, vulnerability, terror and joy look or feel like. I think fans of Pagels earlier work (The Gnostic Gospels, for example) will love this book. Others, who are looking for a memoir along the lines of Mary Karr's Lit, Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle or, more recently Tara Westover's Educated and Julie Barton's Dog Medicine will be sorely disappointed.

[Chrystal · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5 stars (I am being generous).

I had so many problems with this book even from the first chapter, but I wanted to finish it because I thought surely this lady has something meaningful to say about why we seek the comfort of religion; after all, she has suffered the loss of a child and her husband. Also, she is a professor of religion so presumably she knows what she is talking about. Disappointingly, she never answered the question Why Religion? which is odd since it is the title of the book.

This book was all over the place. Apparently she could not decide whether she wanted to write about the Gnostic texts (she is supposedly something of an "expert" on this subject, although this is highly questionable to me as she seemed to know very little about the New Testament Gospels themselves), about her personal stories of loss and experiences with death, or about the meaning of the New Testament gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) and the letters of Paul to the early church. She jumped all over the place, seemingly at random. The most interesting and cohesive part of the book is about the death of her 6-yr old son and her husband one year later. She tells these heartbreaking stories unflinchingly, although as far as I can remember, never really talks about religion during this part of the book. I would have thought that was the whole point of the book (Why Religion? A Personal Story).

Her ideas about the Gnostic texts (not accepted in the Biblical canon) and about the supposedly real gospel message of the New Testament (as interpreted by Elaine Pagels) made me so angry. For someone considered to be a scholar, she made broad, sweeping generalizations based on her own opinions. She didn't back anything up with facts or footnotes. She would say things like (and I am paraphrasing here, these are not direct quotes) "Mark obviously added this coda later in order to convince people of so and so..." or "John clearly wrote Revelations as an attack against the Romans who he hated" or "Paul was contemptuous towards the other disciples and angrily cursed them" or that Paul gave one gospel to the Corinthians because they couldn't understand the real gospel, then secretly gave a different (true) gospel to those more mature Christians, a different gospel other than Christ crucified...This last one is utter hogwash as anyone who has read Paul's letters knows. In Galatians 1:8 he says "even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we have preached to you, let him be cursed." He would never have given one gospel to one group of believers and then another gospel to others.

Pagels seems to have contempt for the accepted canon of the New Testament, but she accepts the Gnostic texts wholesale, even though they have been discredited as heretical by the Church at large. At the end of the book we can see exactly where she stands when she states, and I quote: "With so many people offering different 'revelations,' someone asked, how do we know which to trust? That question pushed me further: Why trust any? Why had I, or any of us, looked to 'authorities' to validate our sense of what's true--whether what 'the Bible says,' as Billy Graham loved to claim, or what he or any other religious leaders say?"

That quote explains the whole book. Here is a "religious scholar" who has total disregard for the reasons why--and the conscientious methods by which--the Christian Church, over 2000 years, has been very careful about what is accepted doctrine, holding church-wide councils to come to an agreement about what is orthodoxy and what is heresy. She ignores the church councils and church fathers throughout millennia and chooses to believe whatever suits her fancy in the last 20 years.

This book is very sloppy and presents some outrageous, bizarre, and patently unfounded ideas about Christian belief. It is based wholly on the author's opinions and feelings (I don't like Paul's strict letters to the early church, so I'm going to cherry pick some writings found at Nag Hammadi that appeal to me even though they are considered heretical by the church, and I will present these as the true meaning of Christianity). This is very slipshod writing and it is unconscionable, let alone embarrassing, to call it "scholarship."

And another thing, name dropping is not attractive. You have descended further in my esteem when you tell me about all the famous people you know and hang around with.

[Eilonwy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elaine Pagels is fairly well-known for her writing about early Christianity, especially the Gnostic Gospels and the Gospel of Thomas. This memoir doesn’t so much answer the question of “Why have religion?” as it does the question her not-yet-husband asked her with the two title words, which was “Why study religion, of all possible subjects?”

Pagels was brought up in an atheist family. But she was drawn into evangelical Christianity as a teen when she attended a Billy Graham rally (where he preached a fiery socialist message that sounded very different from what evangelical Christian leaders seem to preach these years). She then lost her specifically Christian faith after the death of a close Jewish friend, when her Christian friends insisted that he could not enter Heaven on account of having the wrong religion. But she never lost her fascination with why people have religion at all. Then, with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi scrolls in Egypt and their delivery to Harvard when she was studying in the divinity school there, her curiosity was fueled as to how modern Christianity came to be the particular collection of books that it is, when there were so many gospels to choose from 2000 years ago.

Around these intellectual concerns, she married and gave birth to a doomed son, whose heart defect at birth led to fatal pulmonary hypertension. (If you would rather not know what it’s like to care for a child who has no hope of ever reaching adulthood, do not read this book. It will tear your heart out.) She also had several mystical or psychic experiences: the feeling of the presence of her deceased friend and the awareness that a group of friends was praying for her while she was giving birth, among others.

Then her husband also died, only a year after their eldest son, leaving Elaine to care alone for two small children.

This is a memoir about grief as much as it is about religion. And while it doesn’t really answer the question “Why religion?” -- at the same time, it does. In Pagels’s experience, at least, religion mitigates grief. It provides a hope that we may know our lost loved ones again, even as we miss them with all of our hearts every day that we are here and they are not. It provides comfort, whether it seems like a “rational” comfort or not.

This book is beautiful, moving, and thoughtful. I’m glad I read it, but at the same time, parts of it left me so sad that I’m hesitant to recommend it. Judge for yourself whether you want to experience this vivid recounting of love, loss, and continuing onward.

[Lynne King · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an absolutely brilliant and compelling memoir. I just didn't want to put it down either to eat, do the shopping, sleep etc. Pagels' interpretation of religion explained a lot to me. And this then combined with the tragic loss of her six year old son Mark, to be followed eighteen months later by the unexpected death of her husband Heinz rather shook me as it obviously did her. He had been enjoying a hike on a well known pathway, with a friend in Colorado when suddenly death decided to enter into the equation.

This did indeed make Pagels wonder "why me"?

This book magnificently succeeds in re-enforcimg my view on life as that of the twenty-four hour mayfly. Literally here today and gone tomorrow. Also my continuous questioning of what were we before we were born? Food for thought and a book to browse through on a regular basis.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was drawn to this title because years ago I read and admired Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels. This audio version, narrated by Lynde Houck, was a fantastic listening experience. Houck creates just the right tone for the content.

Pagels tells her life story from how she first became interested in Christianity, to her graduate studies and early career, to the death of her son and a year later the unexpected death of her husband, physicist Heinz Pagels. These tragedies both compelled and shaped her scholarly interests. The relationship the Pagels shared seems like such a true partnership and a beautiful intertwining of their love and intellectual interests.

One of the things I admired about this memoir is how Pagels seamlessly weaves together her interest in religion and her love for Heinz and their children with her work. I can't recall reading a memoir that so deftly and relevantly entwines the writer's work, love, and life. Perhaps this is due to the nature of Pagels' work in religion. She also brings in anthropology, philosophy, and science to look at issues of emotional pain, loss, and mourning. Pagels' work in religion after these tragedies was an exploration of how others have dealt with death and grief. She blasts traditional Christian platitudes around pain and death (e.g., God doesn't give us more than we can handle).

An excellent read (and listen) for those interested in a scholar's journey, religious studies, and dealing with the pain of death.

[Megan Stroup Tristao]

I went back and forth about whether or not I should even assign a star rating to this book, but I don't think I'm going to. What I was expecting was vastly different from what this book offered, and I once read you should review a book based on what it was, and not what you wanted it to be (thanks, Pamela Paul), and my star review would not be favorable.

That being said, here were my issues: I realize the subtitle is "A Personal Story," but I did not expect the book to be SO much personal memoir. The marketing begins: "Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? Why do so many still believe? And how do various traditions still shape the way people experience everything from sexuality to politics, whether they are religious or not?" I did not feel this book answered any of these questions. Even in the second half when Pagels talks more about religion, I felt she was debunking Biblical myths rather than talking about "why religion" from a larger social context. However, I don't know how much control authors have over the marketing blurbs for their books, so I don't want to punish her for the misleading material.

I almost didn't finish this audiobook after the first few chapters, and having finished the whole (because it was so short), I probably should have abandoned it.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I happen to have been acquainted with Elaine Pagels. My first encounter was through her 'The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis', one of scores of books read--and one of the better ones--for an undergraduate thesis at Grinnell College on scholarly debates on the nature and origins of 'Gnosticism'. Later, my girlfriend/roommate at Union Theological Seminary, Janny, was doing a Religion major at Barnard while Pagels headed their department. Meanwhile Pagels taught at course at the seminary about Genesis which I took, not so much because I was interested in the Torah, but as an opportunity to do further study in her field of speciality. She was kind enough to allow me to produce what I titled 'The Procession of the Heresiarchs of Gnosis' which was basically an encyclopedia of all patristic references to that tendency--and, yes, I actually read the relevant volumes of the Antenicene Fathers for that. The result of all of this was that Janny and I were invited to a small party at the Pagels apartment in Manhattan where we met Heinz, her husband. Overall, we thought quite highly of our hosts and since then I think I've read almost all of her books.

This particular book is a departure from her early, scholarly, writings and her later, more popular, books. It might be called a psychobiography as its focus is on her reactions to the deaths of her husband and their son, both of which occurred within the space of months, years after our acquaintance. It is also, in a way, an essay about theodicy, about losses and suffering which happen by chance, at hazard as it were. In it, she writes from the heart and conveys the impression of transparency about her emotional reactions while relating this, and other experiences of her life, to her religious development in general and her interest in the texts of Nag Hammadi in particular.

[Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly · Rating 3 out of 5]

She is not asking (you) “Why Religion?” with a tone of incredulity. Rather, she’s explaining why she has religion.

This surprised me a little bit for she was the author of The Gnostic Gospels and so knew that the story of Jesus in the New Testament was incomplete, perhaps deceptive and artificial. That the Jesus in the New Testament was a creation of Bishop Irenaeus who whimsically chose just four gospels among the many in existence during his time and whose persona was made more permanent by another bishop, Athanaseus , who branded the discarded gospels as heresies and therefore should be destroyed. Through editing and suppressing they created the Jesus they liked and this became the bedrock of a religion given power over life and death and the beyond by Emperor Constantine who made it the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Additionally, the author’s husband was a man of science and was an atheist who, when asked if he believes in life after death, replied: “Yes. But not my life after my death.”

So why does the author have religion? To my understanding, the deeply painful and personal tragedies she suffered had a lot to do with her faith and her affinity with Christianity. She and her husband took a long time before they had a child. Then when the child (a boy) was about a year or so old, he was diagnosed with a rare, incurable disease which gave him, at most, a few years to live. Her husband tried to look for help in science, while she was drawn to the hope of divine miracles. But the child eventually died. Then about a year later, the author’s husband perished in a hiking accident.

I must admit that there are things religion or faith can do which may or may not be ultimately beneficial to people. First, faith can console. Second, it can also give hope. Sigmund Freud said man invented gods and religions primarily because of the fear of death. But I think it’s not just the fear of death, but also the terror of meaninglessness.

So the dying takes his last communion (or whatever constitutes his religion’s last rites) and is ushered into the void with less fear. Bereaved relatives and friends would console themselves that he who is no longer is now “in a better place” or “in the bosom of Allah” or, in case of the pointless deaths of innocent infants or the very young, that they were called early because God wants to add more “angels in heaven”. Then they also imagine they will see each other someday, some place (which always make me wonder if they really believe in this for if they do, why grieve? Isn’t the dead in a better place, happy, and you will see him/her again? What is so sad about it—IF YOU REALLY BELIEVE IT?)

The author seemed to have theorized that even in the face of the fact that religions are most likely, man-made and propped up by myths and tall tales , people who are more emotional will still be drawn to them while the more cerebral ones (like her scientist husband) will go secular. That the latter shy away from belief because to embrace it would be living a lie, or being untrue to oneself. In contrast, the more emotional ones by nature would feel the need for faith and worship to cope with life’s vicissitudes. Like the author, they are the ones who could feel deeply with meaning what Jesus said (in the gnostic Gospel of Thomas) as follows:


“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

I can understand perfectly if one will be “touched” or will get teary-eyed ruminating on this, finding layers of meaning within this profound saying of the Lord; but I would also understand if another person would construe this as just an ancient medical advice on the importance of moving one’s bowels regularly.

[Josette · Rating 1 out of 5]

Disliked this book intensely! First off, it never really answered its title question ("why religion?") and instead offered a personal litany of privilege and "grace" as antidote to terrible suffering. Yes, of course, I felt sorry for the author in her shattering grief, having lost her young son and then her husband soon after. The writing was quite bad, though. Despite claiming the gospels pablum for the masses and the secret writings wisdom, she herself seems to be writing simplified summaries for the bestseller-reading types, full of glossed-over experiences and mixed metaphors. I expected too much from this book, perhaps. I'm clearly not its intended audience, being widely read (an English major no less), Jewish, having read and listened to countless rabbinic talks on the Torah (which stated in more complex terms than what's offered here). I expected her to comment on and interpret texts dealing with the suffering of humanity, taking into account a much wider world than the upper-middle-class, white, educated echelon she inhabits. I found myself bristling on most pages at her naiveté and name-dropping presumption. Why wasn't the book called "Why Christianity for Rich, Educated White People?" when clearly that's the sole context she's writing to justify? Slightly curious now about what made her so famous in the first place — are her academic works better written, more disciplined and complex? I got hints of this possibility in the sections where she delves into a close readings of the gospel of Mark; yet even there, I wondered how she could have missed the obvious -- pointed out to me by my professor of Humanities 101 years ago! -- that that book was intended to convert people, specifically Jews, and so many of the religious/spiritual considerations she attributes to its author seem also unsophisticated. I found her interpretation of the Book of Job equally simplistic and cliché. Furthermore, I have heard good things about (but not yet read) Harold Kushner's classic "Why Bad Things Happen to Good People" and wonder how it compares.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very moving and well written memoir that doesn’t even come close to answering the title question

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Religion scholar Pagels (now age 80) tells the tragic story of losing her 6-year-old son to a congenital condition, pulmonary hypertension; then a year later in 1988 losing her 49-year-old physicist husband Heinz, who fell 1,300 feet to his death (300 feet, then another 1,000 feet, his body dismembered) while hiking Pyramid Peak in Colorado. His death left her with two adopted children under age two. Their daughter Sarah couldn't process Heinz's disappearance and months later was still playing hide and seek, vanishing into closets and calling, "Daddy, come find me."

Pagels weaves into these stories discussions of her scholarly research into the gnostic gospels, Satan, and the book of Revelation. I found these latter discussions to be - disappointingly, given her scholarly profile - lite. I couldn't dodge the impression that Pagels was picking theological "beliefs" based on what she liked, and wanted to be true, and giving more weight to "evidence" that she preferred to be true (essentially, the gnostic gospels) and discounting "evidence" she preferred not to be true (the canonical New Testament). For example, the verse of John in which "God so loved the world that he gave his only son..." Pagels, having just lost her son, felt that "any god who did that...would have to be crazy."

I'm not the only person who got this impression; she tells an anecdote about discussing the gnostic gospel of Thomas with another scholar and he objects: "Stop right there - now you're no longer writing history. What use is the Gospel of Thomas if you're simply reading your own experience into those cryptic sayings?"

Pagels was raised in a slightly dysfunctional family which had trouble showing emotions (neither of her parents attended the funerals of her son or husband). She became a Christian as a teen at a Billy Graham crusade, shocked and impressed by his scolding of America for dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and "denounc[ing] Christians who used scripture to justify slavery and defend racism while ignoring the poor and our own spiritual poverty." She enrolled in the Harvard doctoral program in religion to study with Krister Stendahl, professor of New Testament. She relates how Stendahl asked her why she had come. "To find the essence of Christianity," she mumbled. "How do you know it has an essence?" he asked. She imagined that "if we went back to the first-century sources, we might hear what Jesus was saying to his followers when they walked by the Sea of Galilee - we might find 'the real Christianity,' when the movement was in its golden age. But Harvard quenched these notions; there would be no simple path to what Krister Stendahl ironically called "play Bible land" simply by digging through history."

We discovered that even the earliest surviving texts had been written decades after Jesus's death, and that none of them are neutral. They reveal explosive controversy between his followers, who loved him, and outsiders like the Roman senator Tacitus and the Roman court historian Suetonius, who likely despised him. Taken together, what the range of sources does show, contrary to those who imagine that Jesus didn't exist, is that he did: fictional people don't have real enemies.

Pagels was in graduate school in the 60s, and her next adviser, Helmut Koester, demanded that she babysit his four children without pay. The first time she babysat, at his house 30 miles away from campus, he told her she would have to spend the night on a couch in the basement. He then crept in the room and began to grope her, as she fended him off. He remained her adviser, but she made sure they were never again alone together. Decades later, other female graduate students confided in each other their stories about Koester, whom campus therapists had named Koester the Molester.

My reading, random and serendipitous, arrived at three back-to-back books featuring widows: this memoir, Wave by a mother who lost her entire family in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami; and the mystery Death of a Dormouse by Reginald Hill.

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first Elaine Pagels book I've read, and I am aware of her other books and general philosophy.

For most of the book I struggled with the title "Why Religion" because the book was about tremendous loss in her life with a bit of history of some of the books she'd written. I kept wondering when she was going to answer the question.

By the end of the book, I realized that she had been looking for something in her beliefs to help her make sense of the tragedies that befell her young son and a bit later, her husband. She quotes William James' definition of religion - "total reaction upon life."

This is more a memoir than about religion, but I appreciated some insights she gave about the cultural aspects of the Bible and why it's been so easy to believe things we've been raised to believe. This book made me think.

[Deyanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I may not agree with all of Elaine Pagels' beliefs, I completed this book with a deep respect for the author and her probing and questioning mind. Her personal story is told with tenderness, honesty and openness. She has my admiration on many levels.

[Age · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unsurprisingly, I loved Elaine Pagels’ book Why Religion? given I’ve loved most of her other works. I will say that as a memoir goes, it is not for everyone. Unfortunately, I think “memoir” gives people license to critique the book on the basis of how emotive the author is or is not. I read some reviews where people felt she could not adhere to that standby “show, don’t tell” and that readers were unable to fully feel the pain Pagels felt at the loss of her child and then husband, but the thing about memoirs over fiction is that it must be the person’s voice we hear, and Pagels should not have to perform or even write emotions in a way that does not feel authentic to her. Her methods for coping or describing her pain are unique to her, and in many ways the realism and simplicity with which she describes these losses rang truer to me than if she had included overwrought description of pain and suffering.

She’s an academic writer, first and foremost, and that shows – even in her memoir, but I did not find it distracting or unexpected. Eddie Izzard’s memoir was funny and repetitious and out of order at times, much like his standup. John Barrowman’s had a winking, flirtatious feel. Memoirs mirror their authors, so expecting Pagels to sound different in another format seems like an odd thing to expect or ask for.

Also, the book is not simply about the losses she suffered. It is also about religion, her study of the subject, the way her research helped her grapple with the questions her losses left her with, and the spirituality that exists in her own life. She mentions again and again that for her religion is less about belief and more about “approaches to spiritual practices”and that some people need different spiritual “food” (206). For Pagels, it seems that she is willing to accept that some things exist that cannot be explained. From her experiences and feelings at the death of her child to the odd dreams she had throughout her life, she doesn’t discount their potential spiritual significance, but she also does not assign to them a purely religious source.

I was lucky enough to see her at the Free Library of Philadelphia, and she went on to say these experiences are things she cannot explain and that while she may not subscribe to a particular practice, she feels comforted by the music and ritual of an Episcopalian service, the quietness she experienced with Trappist monks, and the calmness of a session of yoga. It could probably said that research is a spiritual practice for her as well as it helped her confront the pains she endured.

Around details about her personal life and history, she mentions the events that led to some of the work she published before like The Origin of Satan and Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. It was interesting to me to see how life experience impacted her professional, academic work. One observation she makes that rang particularly true for me is that “we use stories to ‘think with,’ we also use them to ‘feel with – that is, to find words for what otherwise we could not say”(168).

Her study of the Gnostic Gospels gives her something to look on and think about, making her academic research at once a professional pursuit as well as a personal one. While she’s fully capable of viewing the works within the historical context from which they arose, she has to acknowledge their impact now as well, and this goes for canonical texts, too. While she talks about the comfort excerpts like “the kingdom of God is within you, and outside of you. When you come to know yourselves then…you will know that you are children of God” (176) bring her, she also acknowledges how works like John’s Revelation have helped perpetuate hateful rhetoric and wars for hundreds of years. It seemed to me she deftly juggles the dangers of religion with the comforts religion is capable of providing for some.

Overall, I loved how the material was handled. Pagels doesn’t preach, quite possibly because she’s not beholden to any particular practice, but she also doesn’t belittle those who are not as knowledgeable about early Christian history and writings as she is. She’s a privileged person. Reading her life story, it is more than apparent that she had opportunities that many did not have at the time nor have now. She notes it, but doesn’t have any pretensions about it. I came out of my reading feeling glad that I actually liked the author as much as I liked her work, which I can’t always say. Sometimes, you don’t wan to “meet your heroes” because they let you down in some fashion. Fortunately, Pagels presented herself well. She seemed open-minded when she remarked that works like the Testimony of Truth “invite us to uncover hidden continents of our own cultural landscape. And when we do, we gain perspective on reflexive attitudes that we may have unthinkingly inherited, just at a time when countless people are exploring a much wider range of gender identity, letting go of the assumptions that gender difference, as our culture defines it, is built into our DNA” (56). She also displayed a pragmatism and honesty I appreciate when she discussed the sexual harassment she experienced in higher education.

This memoir had a narrow focus. So while some may have questions about her other children, I’m curious whether they wanted their story told. I’m also not sure if Pagels has plans for another memoir in the future. For now, it seems this was meant to address a series of extreme events she experienced and how they influenced her work, and it did that handily.


Lastly, some will say she fails to address the question of the book “Why religion?” But is there any answer? For any of these questions, I can think of no single answer on which everyone will agree: “Why does she study religion? Why religion?” Or “Why do we need religion?” I don’t think there is an answer. There are ANSWERS though, and she gives some of them. Religion offers some comfort in times of tragedy. Religion offers a reason to hate or love others, depending on one’s purpose and interpretation of these biblical texts. Religion provides a pathway to self-knowledge. All of this is brought up in this book, so if one does not feel she satisfactorily answers the question, well I am not sure what the expectation was but I think it is definitely an impossibility to fully address why humanity has created, needed, or perpetuated religion. She couldn’t possibly have done that, so instead she provides possibilities. And as she often says, it isn’t about belief; it is about the spiritual approach. You may not find the answer to “Why religion?” But searching for it will provide much more than a single answer could.

[Charlene · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short book may have deserved an extra star. I felt I was handicapped by not having read any of her works. Book is both a personal and academic memoir -- Pagels, coming from a non-believing family, is a historian of religion, Harvard educated and one of the experts (and translators) of the Gnostic gospels. She talks about what religion has meant to her, particularly as she struggled with Job-like tragedies (losing her 6 year old son to heart defect and her husband in a climbing accident in a one year span), and also about her academic scholarship, translating and studying many of the early Coptic gospels as they became available, and writing well known books on the Gospel of Thomas, on the history of the idea of Satan, and Eve & women in Christianity.
Pagels's husband was an award winning physicist and she muses at times about the theories of chaos and randomness in physics and how religion, throughout history, has sought to make sense of human life.
Pagels is in her late 70s now, she attended Harvard when her Ph.D. program limited the number of women and had to wait an extra year for a "female" slot to open up.
Book reminded me a bit of a shorter version of Jill Ker Conway's books about her academic/professional and personal life.
Now I've added her book about the Gospel of Thomas, her favorite, to my list of "to read one day, I hope".

[Libby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elaine Pagels shares her life's connections with religion beginning with going to a Billy Graham crusade at the age of fifteen; she was "born again" that day. Her father, hating religion, was very angry, believing in Darwinism, and her mother just wanted to keep the peace at home. Pagels describes her life growing up as "flat" and emotionally devoid, so she was drawn to the emotive world of spirituality. Later, when a friend dies in a car accident and Christian friends tell her that he will not go to heaven because he was not born again, he was Jewish, Pagels walks away from the church with huge questions that would lead to her life's work.

When Krister Stendahl, a Swedish theologian and New Testament Scholar at Harvard's Divinity School interviews Pagels for a place in the doctoral program in the study of religion, he asks her "why did you come here?" Pagels knows she's in the right place when he picks apart her answer "to find the essence of Christianity" by saying "How do you know it has an essence?" When accepted into their program, the discovery of the secret gospels and many other writings found at Nag Hammadi in 1945, now copies of which resided in files at Harvard would provide Pagels with the material for her first book.

I came across Pagels writing several years ago in Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas and was enthralled with its message, its history, and Pagels style of writing, her intellectualism as well as her credibility and down to earth presentation. This book is no different but her personal life is laid bare and its connections to her work. What in the end religion means to her. Very compelling!

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The description seems to imply that the book will answer certain questions about why people follow religion, etc., but it doesn't really. I wanted a book to see an opposing view to my own about religion and while in ways it did, it also didn't. (?) I felt she talked a lot about the "what" of religion but it never got to the "why" in a satisfying way for me. She approached religion in a very academic way but still couldn't seem to understand or explain some basics of those who follow religion. (?) It seemed superficial? I'm not sure, but I felt it fell flat somehow. She talked a lot about the gnostic gospels she helped translate in the 1970's from ancient scrolls and how later on in life during great personal tragedy these "secret gospels" spoke to her and brought a measure of comfort. I've not read her other book on these and don't know what they are but they don't seem to contradict any of my Christian beliefs in the way she implies they contradict some Christian writings or beliefs. I guess what I'm saying is that I personally didn't glean any new information or find anything inspirational from this book. Mostly I just found myself wanting to comfort her during the tragedies she faced.

[Meena · Rating 2 out of 5]

I should not read autobiographies.

This book is supposed to be story of Pagel's life, focused around the death of her son and husband in close proximity, and how it impacted her reading of the Gnostic gospels.

Pagels is a scholar, but you would never know it from reading this book. It is a mix of a tragedy focused sob story with a popular interpretation of Gnostic texts. I read one of Pagel's books years ago but this was not my cup of tea.

Pagels comes across as a crazy un-self-aware hippy with some pretty unconventional ideas about Christianity. I'm fine with unconventional Christianity, but this book it to vague to be informative and doesn't tell a coherent story about the Gnostic Bible. Instead, Pagels name drops (I knew Jerry Garcia before he was famous!) and throws in antidotes about using LSD. Much of the book talks about her grief after the death of her son and husband, but in a way that seems unproductive. She describes it but does seem to be teaching any lessons from it (other than the self-realization that impacted her academic pursuit).

As I told my co-workers, I read this book so you don't have to.

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elaine Pagels is a well known writer about religion. In this book, which is in many respects a memoir, she examines her own religious life as a jumping off point to look at what purpose religion serves and why people still turn to religion. She examines her own religious experiences, her skepticism about religion, her religious research, and how she experienced religion during the traumatic loss of her son as a young child followed by the unthinkable death of her husband only a year later. 

I first read Elaine Pagels during a course in college when I was questioning my own religious beliefs, so it only seems fitting that her personal story of faith resonates with me. There is very little in our lives that mirrors each other, but I can certainly identify with seeming push and pull she experiences with her intellect and all the hateful things done in the name of religion telling her one thing but her personal faith experiences telling her another.

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is part memoir and part scholarship. It works mostly and doesn’t work at times. I actually preferred the parts where she goes into her scholarship on ancient scripture and I plan to read her other books. The tragedies of her life make the book real and heartbreaking. I don’t think the book is an answer to its title, but it’s still a worthwhile read

[Suus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly moving personal memoir written by a scholar who has done fascinating work on the study of religion and the gnostic gospels.

[David Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shortly after getting my first real job with a salary I splurged on a membership in the Book of the Month Club. One of the first books I ordered was Adam, Eve and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity. At the time I was reading my first Pagels work I was assigned to my law firm’s recruiting committee which involved lots of lunches and dinners with eager recruits. One particular applicant had attended a well-known very religiously conservative evangelical undergraduate institution. At dinner our conversation naturally drifted towards religion. I know that’s a no no in interviews. But it was quite natural. I mentioned that I was reading Pagels. The reaction was almost violent in denouncing Pagels as a heretic. That was my introduction that in fact led me to read more and more of Pagels. I loved the book and greatly admire Elaine Pagels and her work. This latest edition is not a scholarly work but rather an honest and moving autobiography.

Her story begins in the postwar suburbs of Palo Alto, California, where she was raised by emotionally detached, and certainly nonspiritual, parents. A visit to a Billy Graham crusade awakened the young Pagels to the world of religion. By the time she was a student at Stanford, she had lost her basic faith in Christianity but remained intrigued by religion as a whole. She went on to earn a doctorate at Harvard, where she first encountered the newly discovered writings of the Gnostics, a sect that had been branded as heretical and was extinguished early in the history of Christianity. She and her teenage friends also hung out with some pretty amazing rock icons (e.g. Jerry Garcia) who back then were just local musicians doing small gigs.

Pagels’ academic pursuits unfold alongside a touching personal life story. After marrying physicist Heinz Pagels, the couple went on to have a son, who was eventually diagnosed with a fatal heart condition that took his life while he was still in kindergarten. As she was recovering from this tragedy, her husband died from a hiking accident in Colorado. Much of the rest of the author’s story involves her attempts to remain sane and stable while raising two children and continuing her career at Princeton.

In the process, she went back to Scriptures and early Christian writings, as a way of understanding the age old question of pain and how to deal with tragedy. As realized from that interviewee over 30 years ago Pagels is a controversial figure in some Christian circles, heralded by many scholars and modernists yet derided by traditionalists, and her approach to God—amorphous and skeptical—will either offend or resonate with particular readers. The story of her grief, however, will touch all.

Quote:

“Yet I also saw that this hope of finding “the real Christianity” had driven countless people—including our Harvard professors—to seek its origins. Naive as our questions were, they were driven by a spiritual quest. We discovered that even the earliest surviving texts had been written decades after Jesus’s death, and that none of them are neutral. They reveal explosive controversy between his followers, who loved him, and outsiders like the Roman senator Tacitus and the Roman court historian Suetonius, who likely despised him. Taken together, what the range of sources does show, contrary to those who imagine that Jesus didn’t exist, is that he did: fictional people don’t have real enemies. What came next was a huge surprise: our professors at Harvard had file cabinets filled with facsimiles of secret gospels I had never heard of—the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Truth—and dozens of other writings, transcribed by hand from the original Greek into Coptic, and mimeographed in blue letters on pages stamped TOP SECRET. Discovered in 1945, these texts only recently had become available to scholars. This wasn’t what I’d expected to find in graduate school, or even what I wanted—at least, not so long as I still hoped to find answers instead of more questions.”

[Paul Womack · Rating 4 out of 5]

This gentle book combines personal story, theological reflection, and a fine summary of her academic work. The questions she asks are familiar, as are the answers she finds. Her scholarly work has informed my own thinking, although the life experiences which prompted my questions were deeply existential and quite unlike her own life and work. This is a book I recommend to my clergy colleagues and seekers of all kinds.

[Cor T · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unbearably sad premise, faced with courage and professorial skill. The author's purpose is to process the loss of her son and her husband, the child from a heart condition and her husband from a hiking accident one year later. Following this double trauma, after 25 years and a career as a religious studies professor, Elaine Pagels shares how she found solace in ancient texts.

I re-listened to Chapter 7, "Wrestling with the Devil," which I found one of the best acknowledgements of the guilt, anger, and shame associated with experiencing a disastrous loss. After her husband's death and discovering that his mother, instead of becoming closer, avoided her and their two adopted children, she observed how western culture moralizes grief as if the universe is ordered. Her examples were Bible stories in which those who experienced bad luck and loss were portrayed as deserving of their punishment, the moral being that if you're grieving, you somehow brought it on yourself, "heaping guilt on grief." Her husband had been a physicist, and she shifted her view to his favored chaos theory because to deserve what she had to live through would be unbearable. Instead of 'Why have you forsaken me?' which was so devastating and unacceptable an ending to the Jesus story in the Gospel of Mark that 'He is Risen' was added later, she chooses to acknowledge there is an eternal "cosmic conflict" between Satan and God, a divine mystery that holds her husband's and child's lives in a way that's beyond understanding.

How then could she go on living without giving in to Despair? She quotes Wallace Stevens: "After the final no, there comes a yes. Yes is this present sun."

Lines from the (secret) Gospel of Thomas comforted her, portraying the Kingdom of God as a state of being where we come to know ourselves, the light inside. Every one of us is woven into the mysterious fabric of the universe and into connection with one another, much like the Indra's Net of Buddhist and Hindu traditions.

I didn't expect to get so much out of a book with "religion" in the title, but western culture (aka mine) is imbued with religious morality and that's hard to get distance from. By getting closer to the text, the author moves away from a grief she "deserves" and toward the Divine Mystery that connects us all, living and dead.