Grace Without God is the outgrowth of the years-long quest Katherine Ozment undertook when a young son, who’d just watched a Greek Orthodox procession pass by their home, asked her, “So what are we?” “We’re nothing,” she admitted. Dissatisfied with her answer, true though it was, she set out to find for her family what Publishers Weekly calls a “religious identity”. What she discovered, the magazine reports, is “how to fulfill the need for ritual, story, community, and more—minus religion.”
“Christians believe that it is God who grants us grace, but I believe we create it for ourselves,” she writes. “Grace comes from knowing that to be alive and conscious in this world is a rare gift. If we are open to it, we can see that there is grace all around us, with or without God.” In a story about the author and book, the Chicago Tribune concludes, “Above all, it reads like a clarion call to live more deliberately.”
Former senior editor at National Geographic, Ozment writes engagingly. “The author’s candour, openness, and reflection are strengths throughout the entire book,” TheHumanist.com observes. She is “an astute journalist with a keen ability to draw relevant and revelatory stories….”
Grace Without God: The Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging in a Secular Age, by Katherine Ozment, Harper Wave, 2016
