The Appeal of Evangelical Piety

I FOLLOW a lovely blog called “There Is a River,” written by a young Christian evangelical named Christie Purifoy, whom I knew when we both lived in Chicago. She lives now in an old brick farmhouse in southeastern Pennsylvania. She writes about the changes in the seasons: the sudden spring flowering of her big magnolia, the last of the tomatoes. What I find moving about her words is how hard she works to adapt to the imperfections of the world, and the way she interprets disappointment as compost: “Some beginnings are brown. There is nothing fresh or new about them.” This insistent recasting of the negative as positive, of suffering as love, marks the writing, to my mind, as Christian.