A Los Angeles Times BestsellerA Lit Hub | Chicago Review | Ms. Magazine March pick A Lambda Literary Most Anticipated BookIn this perceptive and provocative essay collection, an award-winning writer shares her personal and reportorial investigation into America’s search for meaningWhen Jordan Kisner was a child, she was saved by Jesus Christ at summer camp, much to the confusion of her nonreligious familyShe was, she writes, “just naturally reverent,” a fact that didn’t change when she—much to her own confusion—lost her faith as a teenager. Not sure why her religious conviction had come or where it had gone, she did what anyone would do: “You go about the great American work of assigning yourself to other gods: yoga, talk radio, neoatheism, CrossFit, cleanses, football, the academy, the American Dream, Beyoncé.” A curiosity about the subtle systems guiding contemporary life pervades Kisner’s workHer celebrated essay “Thin Places” (Best American Essays 2016), about an experimental neuro