Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America (New Directions in Narrative History) Review

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Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America (New Directions in Narrative History) ReviewTo write about history in an engaging and informative way is one thing but to then mine that history for meaning that has profound personal implications and addresses modern themes is yet another. Both are deftly accomplished by Craig Harline in his superbly written Conversions, Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America. Harline tells two compelling stories about the struggles of an individual to sacrifice familial harmony in order to embrace religious convictions that run counter to their upbringing. One is the tale of a young Dutchman in the seventeenth century who seeks to return to the Catholicism that his Protestant parents and other progenitors rejected. The other recounts the journey of a young man in recent history who jeopardizes his relationship with his parents in order to convert to Mormonism. This latter individual, upon coming to terms with his sexual orientation, ultimately chooses to leave his new-found religion and yet again risk rejection from his family in order to live a fulfilling life as a gay man.
Most impressive is the ability with which Harline sheds the comfortable realm of the academic authorial voice to write the latter portion of the book in the first person with honesty and forthrightness. A personal friend of the contemporary individual, he lays bare his own struggles to reconcile his Mormon faith with what he had learned about his friend. This book will add significantly to the dialogue surrounding this issue and all others that involve the chasm between gay men and women and their search to embrace their sexual orientation while being observant in their various religious faiths. At the core of the book is the broader underlying issue of treating everyone with respect and validation, regardless of race, religion, politics, gender, or orientation. Like any great work, Conversions transcends time and place and is ultimately about self-determination - the challenge each one of us faces to decide for ourselves what ideological paths we will take in life - and about self-invention, the brave and creative ways in which we can bring into harmony our inner selves and the outer manifestations of our lives.
Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America (New Directions in Narrative History) OverviewThis powerful and innovative work by a gifted cultural historian explores the effects of religious conversion on family relationships, showing how the challenges of the Reformation can offer insight to families facing similarly divisive situations today.
Craig Harline begins with the story of young Jacob Rolandus, the son of a Dutch Reformed preacher, who converted to Catholicism in 1654 and ran away from home, causing his family to disown him. In the companion story, Michael Sunbloom, a young American, leaves his family's religion in 1973 to convert to Mormonism, similarly upsetting his distraught parents. The modern twist to Michael's story is his realization that he is gay, causing him to leave his new church, and upsetting his parents again—but this time the family reconciles.
Recounting these stories in short, alternating chapters, Harline underscores the parallel aspects of the two far-flung families. Despite different outcomes and forms, their situations involve nearly identical dynamics and heart-wrenching choices. Through the author's deeply informed imagination, the experiences of a seventeenth-century European family are transformed into immediately recognizable terms.

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