Dana is a restaurant critic and food writer, and a member of a fairly progressive Unitarian Universalist church in California. At one point in her life she attended seminary and had thoughts of becoming a minister, but that was when her writing career took off. But for her, the ministry has always been the path not taken.
Lately, however, she’s been less enamored of attending church, despite a friendship with the minister. When he announces his retirement, Dana is asked to join the committee that will identify his replacement.
In order to represent both the church’s past and its future, the committee is fairly diverse in experience, age, and tenure. Even at the outset, Dana wonders how this disparate group will ever reach a consensus, but she also realizes that this process is a tremendously rich subject for her next book.
Search is told as if it were a memoir, and Dana faithfully records the tensions, enjoyable moments, and all of her concerns, about her fellow committee members, some of the candidates, even her decision not to complete her ministerial studies. The more Dana gets involved in the search, the more passionate she becomes about the church’s future and its new leader.
I absolutely loved this. It’s gorgeously written, and it’s a fantastic study of human dynamics. I’m Jewish (although not observant at all), and I found the conversations about theology and philosophy to be fascinating and never heavy-handed.
And with all of the talk about amazing food and cocktails, the recipes are an excellent addition.
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