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Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar Jonathan Kozol moved to a poor black Boston neighborhood in 1964 and became a fourth-grade teacher. Three years later he wrote Death at an Early Age, which chronicled his first year in the classroom. The poignant volume won a National Book Award. He has written nine more books since then. In his newest, Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope (Crown, 400 pp., $25), Kozol introduces readers to an after-school program at St. Ann's of Morrisania, an Episcopal church in the South Bronx. As he did in 1995's Amazing Grace, Kozol exposes the horrific conditions of America's inner-city public schools and reminds readers that behind the political debates about public education are tenacious and loving children.

The children in Ordinary Resurrections go to public elementary school in the South Bronx. These are some of the poorest children in America, living under conditions of grossly inferior health care and savagely unequal education. Seventy-five percent of men in their part of the South Bronx are unemployed. Many of the families have a yearly income of $10,000.

The high school into which most of the kids are tracked held, as of 1999, about 2,000 students in four grades. Ninety of them made it to 12th grade, and 65 graduated. Far more children from that high school will end up in prison than in college.

The same elementary-school children go after school to St. Ann's& amp;mdash;a small Episcopal church, extremely poor, run by one of the most astonishing preachers I've ever met. Mother Martha was a high-powered corporate lawyer who gave it up in the '80s to become a priest. She has created a remarkable after-school program for children& amp;mdash;about 80 children come to the church every day for intensive tutoring, supper, and prayer.

I did not intend to write a religious book, but people tell me this is one of the most religious books they've ever read. That pleases me, because I came to this as an outsider. I'm Jewish. These are Christian children, devoutly Christian children.

Like many overeducated people, I have tended for many years to pretend that I had a detached, ironical attitude about religion. This is a typical pretense of many people who imagine themselves to be sophisticated. When I was very young, I was deeply religious. I went to synagogue. I had a bar mitzvah. My grandmother was an immigrant from Russia and an Orthodox Jew; she was a strong religious force in my life.

When I went to Harvard, it all got washed out of me. The students at Harvard were very supercilious about religion& amp;mdash;if you said you believed in God, they would look at you cynically. If you wanted to be urbane and truly intellectual you didn't speak about religion except with that ironical detached tone that is so familiar in newspapers like The New York Times. So when I met these children at St. Ann's, they gave me back something that had been stolen from me. It was the first time I felt I could give in to those religious feelings that had been there all along.

I'm learning about religion through the eyes of children. They would ask if I would pray with them. I would be shy at first, and I would wonder if I had the right to pray with them, since I was Jewish. But the children would insist. They know I'm Jewish, but to them I'm their friend& amp;mdash;if they're sad, why shouldn't I pray with them?

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June 12 2000, Vol. 44, No. 7