Darren Dochuck

R. O. Kwon has jokingly said that everything she writes “is, in some way, about the God I lost.” Raised Catholic, she planned to be a missionary from a young age. Then, in high school, she lost her faith—a loss that fractured her sense of self and the world and that she still feels deeply today. Her superb debut novel, The Incendiaries, reimagines this loss, examining the gifts that faith provides and the injuries it leaves behind once it’s gone.

In examining any encyclical like Humanae vitae (“An Unhealed Wound,” June 15), four caveats are in order: the facile resort to “natural law” (slavery, usury, contraception); the uncritical reliance on “just cause” (death penalty); tradition as immutable (the “centuries-old” teaching on religious liberty that “error has no rights”); and the indiscriminate use of “the church teaches.” Of these, “the church teaches” is the most overused and misunderstood concept.

The problem for FitzGerald’s book is one of scope and proportion. For all the depth of analysis that Evangelical theology and ministry receive in the first five chapters, the next twelve are consumed with politics.