A passionate pilgrim

"James A. Pike, the fifth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California, was a man of many faces. To some he was an iconoclast, a restless and radical visionary, a man decades ahead of his time who modernized the Church with his call for "more belief, fewer beliefs" and rendered it more progressive and open to inquiry. To others he was a heretic, who polarized and desecrated the Church. Always controversial and charismatic, with clever witticisms on hand, he took America by storm in the 1960s with his best-selling books, A Time for Christian Candor and If This Be Heresy, and his weekly television talk show, Dean Pike, which won him a cover story in Time." "A Passionate Pilgrim is an illuminating biography of Pike, and an examination of the tragedies, triumphs, and difficulties that shaped the man under the chasuble. David Robertson traces Pike's life from his childhood in Los Angeles and his upbringing as a Roman Catholic to his conversion to the Anglican Communion while a student at Yale Law School. His aggressive drive to succeed led to a meteoric climb to the highest echelons of the Church, causing him to push aside colleagues and intimates - first at his church in Poughkeepsie,