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  • The American Scholar

    Of Faith and Tragedy

    Dec 03, 2018 4 minutes
    Review by B. D. McClay

    WHY RELIGION? A PERSONAL STORY

    BY ELAINE PAGELS

    Ecco, 235 pp., $27.99

    “WHY RELIGION, OF ALL THINGS?” a confident young physicist asks the young Elaine Hiesey, while she is pursuing her graduate studies at Harvard. “Why not something that has an impact in the real world?” His question is, for her, more than a little charged—he’s very handsome, she’s in love with him, and later, when they get married, she will become Elaine Pagels. But her future husband’s skepticism was not unusual. As Pagels makes clear in her new memoir, she’s been fielding this question from her peers ever since starting graduate school.

    The daughter of a decidedly antireligious father,

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