Raised as an Evangelical, Macy Halford eventually left Dallas for college and a career in New York City, where she found her life and beliefs evolving in a more secular direction. Yet every day she continued to read My Utmost for His Highest , a classic Christian text beloved by millions of Evangelicals. Eager to understand the book’s unique ability to bridge her two worlds, she quit her job at The New Yorker and began to look more deeply into the background of the devotional and its author, Scottish preacher Oswald Chambers. As Halford wrestles with what Chambers believed and why his book is so important to her, she gives us a captivating and candid meditation on what it means to be a Christian, a reader, and a seeker in the twenty-first century. “Funny, smart, literate—a journey, not into or away from religious belief . . . but through that belief.” — The Dallas Morning News “Ardently told. . . . Will be enjoyed by those who feel, as Halford does, ‘a complicated nostalgia’ for the evangelical faith—those who can’t and won’t defend all the old doctrines but find that religion still pulls at them.” — The New York Times Book Review "This timely memoir seeks to reconcile an evangelical upbringing in Texas with literary life in a godless New York. . . . Halford is self-conscious about her love for Oswald Chambers’s daily devotional. . . . She reclaims Chambers as an artist manqué and a radical thinker.” — The New Yorker “Absorbing . . . One of the best books of [its] kind I’ve read over the past twenty-five years or so.” —John Wilson, Commonweal “Enlightening. . . . Chambers’s life and legacy, along with Halford’s own personal journey, prove to be a powerful lens through which to examine the roots of fundamentalist evangelicalism and its rocky relationship with the modern world.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) MACY HALFORD was born and grew up in Dallas, Texas; graduated from Barnard College; and worked at The New Yorker , where she eventually wrote most of the book reviews for the website. This is her first book. She is now living in Paris. A river touches places of which its source knows nothing. —september 6 Dallas, 2011. The slender blue book had been lying on my bedside table for years before I started reading it, ever since the night of my baptism, when my grandmother had presented it to me as a gift, a sort of token of my entry into religious maturity. I’d tried to read it then but hadn’t gotten very far. At thirteen, I was a keen enough reader, and My Utmost for His Highest was an inviting book— a daily devotional, with a brief reading for each day of the year—but at the start it suffered unfairly from its association with a senior citizen. After one sentence, I’d decided it was old-fashioned, as fusty and tedious as everything else my grandmother liked—the book equivalent of boiled vegetables, potted pansies, needlepoint, PBS, Chanel No. 5, and the taupe-colored Chevy she’d been driving for twenty years. All of these things bored me—I think they even bored my grandmother. If she liked them, it was because they were set to her frequency. Once, when I asked her why she never talked about her life, or anything, really, beyond the weather, she offered this as an explanation: “The Macys are a very boring people,” Macy being her maiden name and the source of my own. I replied that I hoped she wasn’t including me in her assessment, and she smiled and said, “Oh, no, Macy dear, you are always fascinating.” It is tempting to read into this comment a slyness or even a bite, but my grandmother’s was not a mind given to doubleness. On the rare occasions when she spoke of her own parents and grandparents, who had all lived out their lives “back on the farm,” she used the expression “salt of the earth” without irony. But I shouldn’t employ the past tense when I talk about my grandmother. She is still alive. It is merely her mind—or much of it, anyway—that belongs to the past, having begun its final flight several years ago, around her eighty-sixth birthday. Otherwise, she is well and still going about her daily rounds as she always has, in the little red-brick house on Wabash Avenue, in Dallas, Texas, where in the 1980s and ’90s she helped my mother to raise me and my brother and my sister, and which I left—to go north, to New York—just after my eighteenth birthday. It was a recent visit to this house and my grandmother that prompted me to begin thinking about Utmost, or rather to begin thinking about it in a different way than I usually did. At that point, I’d been reading the book more or less every day for fifteen years, and so I thought about it often. Or maybe it makes more sense to say that I thought with it, since its presence in my life had become so fixed that I hardly noticed it was there anymore. It wasn’t until this visit, when I happened to spot my grandmother’s own ancient copy on the kitchen countertop, where we were sitting drinking coffee, that I began to w