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Matthew Lickona: Swimming with Scapulars
Patton Dodd: My Faith So Far

Ever since Augustine groaned over his sins (to his readers' secret delight), the best spiritual memoirs have laid bare the contours of the soul in ways that burst the seams of words like “sin” and “salvation." Matthew Lickona and Patton Dodd, though new to the genre of holy self-exposure, are already proving their knack for it. Each burrows into the innards of his Christian experience as a 20- to 30-something to uncover—or recover as the case may be—the inherited truth for himself. Lickona’s Swimming with Scapulars skewers the matter head on: what does it mean for a Roman Catholic to root himself in a premodern faith in the postmodern world? There’s no shilly-shallying for Lickona, whose neighbors describe him as “Catholic all the way.” He dives deep into tradition and up again into the world of cinema, literature, politics, and his ripening experience as a young father. We get a picture of a soul alternately relishing the Eucharist—“‘Listen. I have a secret. I eat God, and it’s the best thing in the world”—taking itself to task, and twining its convictions around the day-to-day: Lickona brands his seven-year-old a “tremendous materialist,” recounts the agony of an extra four days of abstinence after marrying his ovulating wife, and blunderingly shares the good news of Flannery O’Connor with a fellow Catholic. It’s all done in precise, sometimes rollicking language that is charged with a taut energy that comes with tying the firm line of formal religious practice to the anchor of devotion. Moving from the ancient to the emerging, Patton Dodd rolls onto the charismatic scene in My Faith So Far to skillfully depict the turning of his own spiritual season. From the ravenous glee of a new convert to the suspicious mind that drops into full-fledged doubt at Oral Roberts University, each moment is expanded with care and wit. Dodd shunts us into the unbridled joy of pulsating bodies dancing in worship and spontaneous plunges into prayer on the ORU campus. His is not a bitter razing of faith, but a poignant shedding of a version of it that claims to be untouched by its surroundings. The niggling questions that leave him stranded in the “rambling middle” of a tale with no “Over” are less bulldozers of faith than chisels that test for fracture lines in the constantly shifting relationship between religion and culture. In the end, it’s the recognition of that complexity that beats at the heart of both Lickona's and Dodd's spiritual memoirs, a recognition that bodes well for the genre as a whole.

For more on Swimming with Scapulars, click here.
Go to Patton Dodd’s blog here.