One of my favorite Mormon books this year has been BYU historian Craig Harline’s funny and wise memoir Way Below the Angels: The Pretty Clearly Troubled but Not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Live Mormon Missionary.
Here’s the endorsement I gave the book, and a Q&A with the author:
Craig Harline’s experiences as a Mormon missionary in Belgium in the mid-1970s are ingeniously funny, but they also point to important issues: how religious people deal with apparent failure and navigate grown-up faith after childish certainties have proven inadequate.
RNS: When you left for your mission, you had sky-high expectations about what you’d accomplish in Belgium. What were you hoping for?
Craig Harline: It was to make a lot of converts.