A passionate pilgrim

"James A. Pike, the fifth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California, was a man of many faces. To some he was an iconoclast, a restless and radical visionary, a man decades ahead of his time who modernized the Church with his call for "more belief, fewer beliefs" and rendered it more progressive and open to inquiry. To others he was a heretic, who polarized and desecrated the Church. Always controversial and charismatic, with clever witticisms on hand, he took America by storm in the 1960s with his best-selling books, A Time for Christian Candor and If This Be Heresy, and his weekly television talk show, Dean Pike, which won him a cover story in Time." "A Passionate Pilgrim is an illuminating biography of Pike, and an examination of the tragedies, triumphs, and difficulties that shaped the man under the chasuble. David Robertson traces Pike's life from his childhood in Los Angeles and his upbringing as a Roman Catholic to his conversion to the Anglican Communion while a student at Yale Law School. His aggressive drive to succeed led to a meteoric climb to the highest echelons of the Church, causing him to push aside colleagues and intimates - first at his church in Poughkeepsie, New York, then at Columbia University and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Married three times, he participated in romantic entanglements that became notorious under the increasing media spotlight." "Robertson describes Pike as a man of formidable intellect and spiritualism, a presence to be reckoned with. When, in 1969, he disappeared in the Israeli desert - a pilgrim come to commune with the Biblical land only to be swallowed by it - the question arose: Why did he let himself enter the harsh environment, accompanied by his wife, with only two bottles of Coca-Cola for hydration and no detailed map? Were his personal troubles so deep that he let himself disappear? What was Pike's ultimate religious quest?" "A Passionate Pilgrim richly captures the many facets of the man and his impact on contemporary theology and the social fabric of his time."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.