Girl Meets God: A Memoir

Random House Trade Paperbacks, December 2003. Paper Back. Good. Twenty-something Lauren Winner -- a former Orthodox Jew turned Episcopalian -- offers a conversion tale worth the read. A doctoral candidate in the history of American religion, Winner is funny, candid, well-educated and curiously wise at once. Her style moves somewhere Between Anne Lamott and Frederica Matthews-Green, making for (as one reviewer puts it) an ''addictive readability'' -- without losing any credibility as to the nature and struggle of her journey. Like most converts, Winner initially rides the pendulum of extremes, trading in her Jewish prayer books for the Book of Common Prayer, but (thank God) she can't escape or divorce her Judaism as easily as she might have thought. This tension becomes the ground in which she continues her work of salvation, drawing from the wells of Christian spirituality (you'll find everything from Cyril of Alexandria to Billy Graham, Sven Birkerts, Jane Austen and Dietrich Bonhoeffer) while recgnizing the invaluable sustenance of her Jewish upbringing. With characteristic charm, Winner expresses the paradox best: ''When I hear Anglicans talk about spiritual formation, I remember the finger paint and the honey and the fasting lessons, and then I am happy that I was formed at Congregation Beth Israel.'' Clean & solid, ex library markings, minimal wear.