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Does the business of daily living distance us from life's mysteries? Do most Americans value spiritual thinking more as a hobby than as an all-encompassing approach to life? Will the concept of the soul be defunct after the next few generations? Child psychiatrist and best-selling author Robert Coles offers a profound meditation on how secular culture has settled into the hearts and minds of Americans. This book is a sweeping essay on the shift from religious control over Western society to the scientific dominance of the mind. Interwoven into the story is Coles's personal quest for understanding how the sense of the sacred has stood firm in the lives of individuals — both the famous and everyday people whom he has known — even as they have struggled with doubt.

No writer or public intellectual of our era has been as sensitive to the role of faith in the lives of ordinary Americans as Robert Coles. Though not religious in the conventional sense, Coles is unparalleled in his astute understanding and respect for the relationship between secular life and sacredness, which cuts across his large body of work. Drawing inspiration from figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, and Simone Weil, Coles's extensive writings explore the tug of war between faith and doubt. As Coles himself admits, the \"back-and-forthness between faith and doubt is the story of my life.\" These thirty-one thought-provoking essays are drawn from Coles's weekly column in the Catholic publicationAmerica. In them, he turns his inquisitive lens on a range of subjects and issues, from writers and painters to his recent reading and film viewing, contemporary events and lingering controversies, recollections of past and present mentors, events of his own daily life, and ordinary encounters with students, patients, neighbors, and friends. Addressing moral questions openly and honestly with a rare combination of rectitude and authorial modesty, these essays position Coles as a preeminent, durable, and trusted voice in the continuing national conversation over religion, civic life, and moral purpose.

I am also told: ''This comes from lots of trouble we have. We have been spending, and we have to stop, or we will be owned by foreigners, and that is bad.'' I asked for a bit of clarification, and am stunned to hear this: ''We are being conquered. The ones we beat in the war'' - meaning the Second World War - ''are now taking over. The President is fighting Iran, but that is not the country taking us over.'' The boy has heard his father grapple with that irony, and made it his own. Her father, a neurosurgeon, explains to her that he has never seen ''it'' either and, furthermore, he has never put a penny into ''it.'' All his money is in their ''regular home,'' the girl proudly announces, and in their ''summer home.'' The only ''crash'' that could hurt such an investment, she drolly tells the boy, and three other children, and me, would be ''a hurricane, if it hurt our property.''

This collection of thirteen doctor stories, six poems on medical matters, and a selection from The Autobiography \"can help many others take a knowing look at the medical profession.\"

What we read, of course, is [Georges Bernanos] at his most brilliant, daring to assert in this century of agnostic, materialistic skepticism a fervent plea for religious faith and also for a humane social ethics that is worthy of the lives Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos lived, the life that Jesus lived. ''H OW little we know what a human life really is - even our own,'' the cure writes. Then he makes this declaration: ''To judge us by what we call our actions is probably as futile as to judge us by our dreams. God's justice chooses from this dark conglomeration of thought and act, and that which is raised toward the Father shines with a sudden burst of light, displayed in glory like the sun.'' A little farther on, the cure notes that ''the wish to pray is a prayer in itself,'' and he even dares to remark that ''God can ask no more than that of us.'' Later the temptation to prideful self-righteousness is acknowledged: ''He who condemns sin becomes part of it, espouses it.'' Then, toward the end, the disillusioned Georges Bernanos (who would wander through Brazil and Paraguay in the late 30's and, after fighting Hitler as a friend of de Gaulle's, would leave for North Africa and die at the age of 60 as much a loner as ever) merges with the cure in this fashion: ''The Pagan State: the state which knows no law but that of its own well-being - the merciless countries full of greed and pride!'' It was at this point that [Simone Weil] addressed her famous letter to him. In 1938 Bernanos published ''Les Grandes Cimetieres Sous la Lune,'' and the Vatican itself was shaken by his searing, powerfully rendered account of the terror [Franco]'s legions were inflicting on innocent men, women and children, all in the name of Catholic nationalism. ''I recognized the smell of civil war, the smell of blood and terror, which exhales from your book; I have breathed it, too,'' Weil wrote. But she recognized that in Bernanos's literary hands a new clarity, honesty and decency had been reached, an exceptionally edifying and inspiring level of political writing: ''I must admit that I neither saw nor heard of anything which quite equalled the ignominy of certain facts you relate, such as the murders of elderly peasants or the Ballillas [ an Italian Fascist cadre ] chasing old people and beating them with truncheons.'' IN that same letter Weil praised ''Journal d'un Cure de Campagne,'' which had been published in 1936. Bernanos wrote that book too in Majorca, and it would turn out to be his most celebrated one, justly so - a masterpiece, really, whose wisdom will never become outdated. ''The Diary,'' as many have learned to call this singularly affecting novel, is the simple story of an obscure, rural French priest who seems virtually overwhelmed by what he judges to be his own inadequacies, not to mention the isolated, woebegone nature of his parish, which he describes in one of his entries as ''bored stiff.'' This humble cure tries hard against such odds to minister unto his obscure, lowly flock.

Mr. [Walker Percy]'s fiction affected a number of those young men and women in important ways - to the point that some of them kept telling me that Binx had become a part of their everyday consciousness: ''I smile at some of the hustle-talk I hear and wonder what in hell a lot of this push, push, push is about. I'm going to be in there competing with everyone else, but I don't think I have to trip everyone in sight. It's Percy's humor you can't forget. It's his message to you - and it stays with you, his tough look at a lot of our frantic materialism.'' Another student, more tersely, told me: ''Sometimes Binx's sardonic smile crosses my face, and I have to work hard to look serious, no matter what I'm thinking.'' Not that Binx was undermining these future executives. Again and again the students insisted that Binx's bemused, if not critical relationship to our culture was not going to undo or unnerve them. What, then, would be the consequence of a reading of ''The Moviegoer''? ''I think of Binx,'' a student told me, ''when things get wild and absurd; and so I'll hope not to lose my common sense and the kind of larger perspective Percy has - I guess you'd call it a moral perspective.'' Self-deception is also at the heart of Flannery O'[Connor]'s cleverly narrated ''The Displaced Person'' - an account of what happens to a Southern landowner as she tries to run a tighter business operation. In hiring Mr. Guizac, the ''displaced person'' (a post-World War II refugee from Eastern Europe), Mrs. McIntyre in turn displaces a family that has hitherto worked loyally for her, thereby setting in motion a chain of events that causes her to become ''displaced,'' that is, morally confused. O'Connor's story is not [William Carlos Williams]'s immigrant chronicle, though in each the same observations are made with respect to covetousness: it can entail loss as well as gain - and diminished self-respect that seeks expression in a person's daily life. Mrs. McIntyre takes to her bed the way some of [John Cheever]'s characters take to booze and Binx Bolling to the movies: a manner of dodging the ethical implications of one's life. When a huge sum of money ($30 million) was given to the Harvard Business School - by a former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, no less - for the express purpose of encouraging the teaching of ethics, we had extended discussions on what Harvard should do with the money. The suggestions were fascinating: the money should be given outright to ''the needy''; some practical, service-oriented relationship with poor youth should be established whereby business students would teach in high schools and encourage students to aim for business careers; the entire curriculum should be shaped differently, so that the fierce competitiveness would be lessened and an end put to the ''forced curve'' (a provision that in most classes a certain number of students must be designated as the poorest academically). Many students were actually quite cynical about the gift - interpreted it, in the words of one student, as an ''expression of guilty hand-washing.'' He elaborated: ''A big-deal financier gives a big-deal gift to a big-deal university on a temporarily big-deal subject, ethics - so we're supposed to relax, because everything goes well, after all!'' In a wonderful tribute to Walker Percy and John Cheever, another student came to see me and suggested that Harvard buy thousands of copies of their books and distribute them not only to every Business School student, but to corporate officials across the land. We did agree, however, that the then famous (and maybe, puzzling) $30 million would not thereby be much dented. FOR me those two years of teaching ''across the river,'' as it is often put on the occasionally self-important Cambridge side, were both edifying and gratifying. I was not only impressed with, but surprised by the idealism and decency of many of the students I met, with the yearning they had to join with Binx in his moral search, to link arms with [Johnny Hake] as he shook his world upside down in such a dramatic and unsettling way. I had acquired over the years all sorts of stereotypes about those students - quite wrong-headed notions, I slowly realized. Once, sitting and listening to a wonderfully alert, sensitive discussion of Cheever's stories, I remembered - perhaps to let my patronizing self off the hook - a comment of the cranky Dr. Williams, expressed through a rhetorical question: ''Who the hell is without some kind of prejudice, I ask you?''

Soon enough newspapers across the country, radio announcers and television reporters were telling Americans Perry's story - his brief, successful life and his quick, violent death. One of those who learned of the tragedy was [Robert Sam Anson], a freelance magazine writer and the author of ''McGovern: A Biography'' and other books, whose son also attended Exeter and knew the Harlem youth. Mr. Anson's son spoke for many when he doubted the policeman's assertion that he had reacted to an attempted mugging and severe beating -that he feared for his life: ''Couldn't be true. Eddie was too smart for that. The cop musta' just killed him.'' ''Kids would always be asking me about my hair. 'How do you keep it up? What happens when it gets wet? Can I touch it?' It never dawned on them that I found these questions offensive. Why would it? If you are a kid born with a silver spoon in your mouth and grew up on a big estate with servants, then no one has ever said no to you in your life. That's the problem with the white wealthy in this country: they don't know any limits. If you are black, you are there for their pleasure. To provide them with 'an experience.' Sometimes I think that's how these scholarships are sold to white parents. By God, their kids are going to be well-rounded. They're going to have Rossignol skis and Lange boots and a black roommate for 'an experience.' '' There was much more said, a good deal of it harsh, unforgiving, heatedly rhetorical. [Edmund Perry] is described at one point as becoming ''schizophrenic,'' as going ''crazy.'' ''That's what they had taught him,'' the film maker asks, ''wasn't it?'' But no one, not Perry's family, not his friends or Exeter teachers, had any reason to believe he had lost his mind; quite the contrary, he was a tough, disciplined person who seemed more solidly grounded than many other students - white, from well-to-do and prominent families - some of whom might well have been on their way to schizophrenia, a mental illness that by no means spares white youths of the haute bourgeoisie.