Earlier this year, at the age of 68, my father became an Anglican priest. He's never attended seminary or any other formal training, but he'd been serving as a lay reader and extremely dedicated volunteer to an extremely tiny and aging rural congregation, helping to keep it alive and even building it up.

I'm not a religious person (I have that same vague attraction to mystery and 'spirituality' that so many of us can't define and can't easily reconcile with the rest of our outlook, but it's never manifested as an explicitly religious impulse), and I certainly wouldn't call myself Christian, though I was raised in the Anglican church. My father respects my choice in the matter, but it doesn't stop him from--gently--trying to push me towards the church. Most recently he's been doing this by buying me books, because he knows that I use literature in part as a way to parse the world. And so that's how I came to own a book like Basic Christianity (I have other religious books, including classics of Christian thought, but that's more about understanding the history of Western ideas than anything else).

Stott's book is clear, open, and written in plain language, which made for very easy reading. It did not move me to join a church, or become a Christian or anything like that. What it did do, was allow me to understand my father better, and get a kind of detailed look at how he sees the world. It's an interesting book because it emphasizes the acknowledged goods of Christian thought (the primacy of concepts like love, forgiveness, and charity), and openly acknowledges that the Christian community at large has just a big a history of hypocrisy and willful blindness as the rest of us. I don't imagine that I'll ever find religion, but I'm glad I read it, because I now feel closer to my father, and know more about the man he is, and the man he tries to be.