In this invaluable contribution to the continuing debate about religious
belief, David Adams Richards offers an exhilaratingly fresh perspective
and a voice more impassioned, heartfelt, and sometimes furious, than
anything written about God by an atheist.
David Adams Richards, one of Canada's most beloved and celebrated
authors, has been wrestling with questions of morality, faith, and
religion ever since he was a child. They have always informed his
fiction. Now he examines their role in his own life and spells out his
own belief, in what is his most self-revealing work to date. With
characteristic honesty, Richards charts his rocky relationship with his
cradle Catholicism, his battles with personal demons, his encounters
with men who were proud to be murderers, and the many times in his life
when he has been witness to what he unapologetically calls miracles. In
this subtly argued, highly personal polemic, David Adams Richards
insists that the presence of God cannot be denied, and that many of
those who espouse atheism also know that presence, though they would not
admit it to anyone - including themselves. Every follower of today's
battle between faith and atheism, and every lover of David Adams
Richards' superb fiction, will find God Is revelatory. "I believe that
all of us, even those who are atheists, seek God - or at the very least
not one of us would be unhappy if God appeared and told us that the
universe was actually His creation. Oh, we might put Him on trial for
making it so hard, and get angry at Him, too, but we would be very happy
that He is here. Well, He is."
Questions of faith, morality, the role of unseen forces in our
destinies, have been central to the fiction of David Adams Richards. Now
he directly addresses what these questions have meant to him in his own
life, and what he has come firmly to believe. He has always been a
courageous and uncompromisingly honest writer - but never more so than
here.
