An American gospel

From the award-winning author of Lost Mountain, a stirring, inspiring work of memoir, spiritual journey, and historical inquirya dazzling chronicle of a personal and national identity reclaimed.Erik Reeces grandfather was a Bible-thumping, fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher. He loved to hunt and fish and explore the Kentucky woods, but for him, existence on this earth was about denying the pleasures of this life in preparation for the next. Eriks father was a Baptist minister, too. But at the age of thirty-threenot coincidentally, Jesus age when he was crucified Eriks father violently took his own life, and Erik ended up spending much of his childhood in the care of his grandparents.So, while Erik grew up with a conflicted relationship with Christianity, he also grew up with an acute awareness of a part of the country suffering ongoing economic, environmental, and even spiritual collapse. When he himself neared age thirty-three, he found unexpected comfort and guidance in his intellectual hero Thomas Jeffersons famous Jefferson Bible, especially when he began to track similarities between it and the Zen-like message of the Gospel of Thomas. Inspired, he undertook what would become