The morning she was told by doctors that her year-and-one-month old son Mark would need a lung biopsy, Dr. Elaine Pagels, a historian of religion, went to church. A few years earlier, as a researcher had Barnard College, Pagels had analyzed early Christian documents in order to write The Gnostic Gospels, a book that exploded the myth that early Christianity was a unified movement. Here was a place "to weep without imposing tears on a child." Pagels looked at the families in church one after the other, and resting her eyes on a woman in gold on the stage she thought, "Here is someone who knows how to face death."

As Pagels began attending a support group in addition to her regular church attendance, she marveled that people would say things to her like, "Your faith must be of great help to you." "What is faith," she asked herself? In these sessions she dropped all her defenses, exposing grief and faithlessness as often as an expression of what would categorically be labeled as faith. Certainly the recitation of the same rote prayer each week cannot be the source of people's so-called faith, Pagels thought.

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