The Left Hand of God: A Biography of the Holy Spirit

As Jack Miles is to God, Adolf Holl is to the Holy Spirit. Like Miles's God: A Biography, Holls's The Left Hand of God: A Biography of the Holy Spirit deftly weaves scholarly reflections on religion, myth, and culture into a compelling story about the life of a divinity. Holls casts his net wide, trolling history to discern the similarities and differences among Christian, Jewish, and Islamic relationships with the Spirit. He also has a keen eye for wildly unusual expressions of the Spirit, which inspire him to ask some questions you've always been curious about, and others that may seem, at first glance, almost absurd: Why does the story of Jesus' baptism render the Spirit as a dove? Has the Holy Spirit ever been a member of the Communist party? How did James Joyce and Rainer Maria Rilke receive the Spirit--or did they? This is a witty, brilliant, readable, enlivening story. Its brief chapters are easy on the attention span without being soft on the brain. Best of all, The Left Hand of God never quite makes up its mind as to whether its subject is a figment of our imagination or the Real Thing. After all, that's your job. --Michael Joseph Gross