Leadership Journal

One of the more "fascinating emanations on the social landscape of millennial America," writes Kathleen Hirsch in the Chicago Tribune, "is the emerging generation of what might be called latter-day Christians. White, middle-class adults, 35 to 50 years old and reasonably well-educated, are returning to the fold of traditional church congregations after years of proud exile."

Kathleen Norris is one of these latter-day Christians. She spent her early years in New York, working among secular literati as a writer and poet. Then she and her husband decided to move to South Dakota, into the former home of her grandmother. Norris began attending the nearby Presbyterian church and was also drawn to visit a Benedictine monastery to meditate and pray. This led, ever so slowly, to a conversion to Christ.

She explores her spiritual journey in three books, all of which have become best sellers. In Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Houghton Mifflin, 1993) and The Cloister Walk (Riverhead, 1996) we watch her making her way to faith. In Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (Riverhead, 1998), we see she has arrived.

Harvard's Robert Coles calls Norris "a person of modern sensibility who dares leap across time and space to make the interests and concerns of any number of reflective thinkers her own."

Those "reflective thinkers" happen to be mostly Christians—monks, theologians, writers, and poets. And as Norris interacts with them, she rediscovers the treasures of the church: prayer, Scripture, and biblical community.

Leadership editors Mark Galli and David Goetz visited Norris in her Lemmon, South Dakota, home to ask what drew her back to Christ and how that experience has shaped her understanding of biblical community.

What made you start going back to church and, especially, start visiting a monastery?

I vaguely knew why I was going back to church, which is about four doors from my house. I knew the congregation. I went to Sunday school there when, as a kid, I visited my grandmother every summer. I liked to sing hymns, and Presbyterians have wonderful hymns.

I couldn't, however, understand why I was so attracted to the monastery. But I "remembered" once I had learned. The Psalms were key because of their poetry. They're so powerful, and every day you're immersed in the Psalms and other Scripture. So it was really the liturgy, especially the immersion in the Bible, that was at the heart of it.

At some point, I learned that the daily praying of the Psalms went back to the Jews, even beyond the 1,700 years of Christian monasticism. One day, standing in western North Dakota, it hit me: My God, we are connecting here. Reading the Psalms, we were connecting with the tap root of Christianity. That was immensely appealing to me and prompted me to immerse myself in Christian faith even more.

Yet you note in Amazing Grace that many Protestant services tend to shortchange Bible reading.

What's happened has been a funny reversal. You can go to some Protestant services and not hear ...