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His parents are both long dead, but another central figure in Father Tim's childhood is still alive: Peggy Lambert, who, to put it bluntly, was Father Tim's mammy, the black household servant "he loved … almost as much as his mother." Peggy had worked for Father Tim's family since she was 17, and it turns out that Peggy was a bit more intimate with the family than Father Tim knew: her son is Father Tim's half brother.

And here is where Karon's treatment of forgiveness and reconciliation becomes less satisfying. Karon is no stranger to the problems—and indeed sins—of Southern racism. According to a 2005 article in The Charlotte Observer, she participated in a 1960 march to integrate the lunch counters of Charlotte, North Carolina. (As the caption to a photo in the Observer notes, the women in the march "dressed up to make the further point that one could be a proper Southern lady and still support civil rights.")

But unfortunately, in Father Tim and Peggy's reunion, there is more than just a bit of paternalism. Father Tim asks "Were you happy with us?" and Peggy affirms that she was. Then Father Tim says, "You devoted yourself to us," and she agrees. Though Peggy does a lot of the talking in this book, we never fully enter her point of view. As the dialogue about her happiness makes clear, Peggy and Father Tim's conversation manages to subtly perpetuate the idea that nothing more than bonds of affection connected black employees and their white employers in the Jim Crow South. The scene evades the exploitation inextricably interwoven into their relationships, and it evades the fact that, however affectionate these relationships might have been, they were not relationships that black employees chose freely.

This novel will undoubtedly enliven the faith of many readers. As in all of Karon's writing, several folks Father Tim meets in Holly Springs freely testify to the power of Jesus in their lives. As one character puts it, "I was 14 when I threw out my agenda and asked for his." That kind of simple, powerful testimony is sure to stir readers. As Karon's writing always does, it certainly stirred me.

But it is not just the straightforward testimony to life with Christ that stirred me. Ironically, in the week since first reading Home to Holly Springs, I have found that it is Karon's limited reckoning with racism that has most deeply convicted me. It is one thing, an easy thing, for me to sit at my desk—next to a trash can that was emptied this morning, long before I got to work, by an African American service worker—and point out the social sin that shaped Timothy Kavanaugh's childhood home in the Jim Crow South. It is quite another for me to scrutinize my own home in the New South, and try, however incompletely, to reckon with the still-persistent social sin that shapes my own life. It is to that scrutiny and reckoning that Jan Karon's new novel, perhaps willy-nilly, bids us.

Lauren F. Winner, assistant professor of Christian Spirituality at Duke Divinity School.

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Home to Holly Springs is available from ChristianBook.com and other retailers.

Books & Culture published an interview with Winner about Jan Karon's fiction.

Jan Karon's website includes first chapters from many of her books, including Home to Holly Springs.

Previous coverage of Jan Karon's novels includes:

Concluding Mitford | Jan Karon gives readers what they're hoping for in the series' final volume. (February 1, 2006)

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December 2007, Vol. 51, No. 12