Letter to a Godchild: Concerning Faith [Hardcover]

Reynolds Price (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 9, 2006

In the year 2000 acclaimed author Reynolds Price became honorary godfather to Harper Peck Voll. As a christening gift, Price composed a letter to the child, one intended as a brief guide for Harper's spiritual future. The letter sketched the crucial roles which faith had played in Price's own life and whittled down those lessons the author felt were most valuable. Later, Price realized that in a rapidly complicating world, his thoughts might also be useful for other children and their parents. Here, then, is an expanded version of the original letter -- an eloquent, thoughtful, and inspiring look at faith from one of the most revered American writers and most respected students of religion.

In Letter to a Godchild, Price recounts how his life has been shaped by numerous and varied spiritual influences -- from the Bible-story books his parents bought him before he could read, to the childhood days spent exploring dense woods near his home (woods where he searched for arrowheads and spied on numerous wild animals), to Sundays at church with his father and mother, his travels around the world to magisterial structures as various as St. Peter's and the old Penn Station, and years of study both in and out of the classroom. With no trace of self-pity, he explains how his faith grew and deepened when in 1984 -- after a life of robust health -- he suffered a cancer that eventually led to paralysis of his lower body.

Letter to a Godchild includes striking pictures of the buildings, objects, places, and events that have deepened the author's religious sensibility. He has also compiled a comprehensive section on further reading, looking, and listening that provides suggestions for books, art, and music that will entertain as well as enhance this volume. A profoundly intelligent and moving explication of religion and spirituality, Letter to a Godchild is an exhilarating experience for readers of all faiths.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Novelist Price (The Good Priest's Son) began setting down this lyrical letter on the occasion of the baptism of his godchild, Harper Peck Voll, in 2000. In it, he gently offers Harper wise and insightful nuggets on matters religious. It's one of the most revealing glimpses of Price's own religious journey we've had the privilege of seeing. Price recalls his own early religious vision of the circle of life: "In a single moment, I was allowed to see how intricately the vast contraption of nature... was bound into a single vast ongoing wheel by one immense power that had willed us into being." He also retells the story (found in full in A Whole New Life) of his vision of Jesus and the powerful healing that followed it. Price offers practical advice for when Harper seeks to whet his religious curiosity: Harper should read the sacred texts of his native culture and immerse himself in the lives and works of the great believing composers and painters. Price encourages his godchild to work with the poor and hungry, to attend some regular religious ceremony and to search ardently for the truth. Although his novels, poetry and essays provide glimpses of Price's vision of religious experience, this marvelous little missive comes closest to being a spiritual autobiography. (June)
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From Booklist

A true godfather sees to the godchild's religious education, and so Price addresses the mildest of hortatory letters on his convictions to his six-year-old godson, to be read much later, "if ever." He affirms that he believes in God and that most other people do, too, at least occasionally. Unconvinced by theological proofs, much less by dogma, he rests his assurance on a mystical experience in his childhood and another from just before the surgery for spinal cancer that rendered him paraplegic in his fifties. His rehearsals of those moments, greatly illuminated by a photo of him at the time of the first and his drawing of the vision of Christ that he had during the second, constitute the core of an extraordinarily diffident apologia. Price is almost debilitatingly aware of how greatly his own academic and professional circles disdain Christianity, in particular. The faith he encourages may strike some as vanishingly self-effacing, while others, however sadly, may feel it is the only faith possible to the well-informed nowadays. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (May 9, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743291808
• ISBN-13: 978-0743291804
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,296,794 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he has taught at Duke since 1958 and is now James B. Duke Professor of English.

His first short stories, and many later ones, are published in his Collected Stories. A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award for a best first novel. Kate Vaiden was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Good Priest's Son in 2005 was his fourteenth novel. Among his thirty-seven volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations. Price is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars duke professor's spiritual advice, January 17, 2007

By 

Daniel B. Clendenin (www.journeywithjesus.net) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Letter to a Godchild: Concerning Faith (Hardcover)

This slender volume originated as a gift to Reynolds Price's godson back in the year 2000. He has expanded the original letter in order to describe "succinctly, and as honestly as I could manage, the advancing line of my own religious life, [so that] I might provide a useful sense of how one person's existence shaped itself round an early inexplicable event and moved onward from there till now, the start of my eighth decade" (he was born in 1933). His intention is not to write a children's book, or even a book to read to children, but to produce "a document that would be genuinely helpful to a friend in his early adult years."

The "inexplicable event" that Price mentions was a vision that he had when he was only six or seven of a wheel that symbolized the intimate unity of the vast complexity of all life, all of which was cared for by a benevolent power. Combined with beloved Bible story books, and then his own reading of the Bible, Price wrote himself into the narrative of the Christian story early on. By age seventeen he knew he wanted to be a writer and a teacher, and by any measure he has enjoyed enormous success and acclaim--professor of English at Duke University since 1958, author of thirty-seven volumes of fiction, poetry, essays and plays that have been translated into seventeen languages, and a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

After graduating from Duke and then Oxford University, Price began his tenure back at Duke. By that time he still understood himself to be distinctly and intentionally Christian, even though his "renegade" faith has expressed itself ever since in decidedly non-institutional and unorthodox ways. At age fifty-one tragedy struck when he was diagnosed with cancer of the spinal cord. Subsequent treatments resulted in the entire paralysis of his lower body. At this point Price recounts a second vision, more vivid and profound than the first, of standing in the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus washed his massive surgical scar and pronounced over him words of healing and forgiveness. In his mind he was miraculously healed, for against the medical prognosis of his doctors, Price survived both the cancer and the barbaric radiation treatments. He writes eloquently about how his life has flourished in far richer ways because of his paraplegia. In the last few pages of his testimonial Price offers his godson practical advice for spiritual formation, including suggested readings, serving the poor, identifying with saints, and frequenting sacred spaces.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Gospel According To Price, October 28, 2006

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Letter to a Godchild: Concerning Faith (Hardcover)

In this the third Reynolds Price book "concerning faith", he ostensibly is writing to a godchild, Harper Peck Voll, who is still a child. Price is aware that when the youngster grows up, he may have no interest in what the writer has to say on the subject. One suspects that Mr. Price is in the company of that rather large number of other writers who keep private journals and their letters to friends and family over the years while their real motive is in publishing for a wider reading audience. If that were not the case here, there would be no need for Mr. Price to publish this latest book on faith.

Mr. Price bases his faith on traditional Christianity although he acknowledges other religions and says that they work too. He has not attended church since his youth because of the organized church's silence on race. (He could have included the church's outspoken shrillness on homosexuality as well.) He is not interested he says in converting anyone to his beliefs. He is completely certain that he has had two revelations from the Creator, one as a small child, the other after his diagnosis with cancer when Jesus appeared to him to inform him that he had been healed.

It would be fair to say that one has to accept Price on faith by faith. He like the rest of us-- with the exception maybe of the most rabid of fundamentalists-- picks from the religious tree only the fruit that appeals to him.

Every time I read Mr. Price on religion, I am reminded that he is a much better fiction writer than a theologian. Case in point: there is a very sweet and moving account in the book of Harper's [though he is only eighteen months old] seeing Mr. Price's wheelchair for the first time and then pushing a long coffee table out of the way of Mr. Price and his chair. That is Price at his best.