A PASSIONATE PILGRIM

A careful depiction of the haunted energy of a radical Episcopalian bishop.

James A. Pike wore his cloth at the vanguard of his time, the 1950s and ’60s. Not that his sentiments were original—“My notions are all derived from other people,” he once admitted. “I just get behind the ones I like”—but he spoke them before substantial audiences, first as dean of St. John the Divine in New York City and then as bishop of the San Francisco diocese, with enough fervency to have him brought up on heresy charges by his fellow bishops. Yet, writes Robertson (Denmark Vesey, 1999, etc.), Pike wouldn’t have attained those posts without a high degree of intellect and influence. He could raise money (always a big plus), and he brought his brand of “smells and bells,” High Church, Catholic Anglicanism into the limelight. He also brought forward social activism against racism and the war in Vietnam, a cheerful friendliness to nonbelievers, a nonjudgmental welcome to homosexuals, and receptiveness to the idea of ordaining women. These stances vexed many in the church hierarchy, but it wasn’t until he denied the virgin birth that they decided he was a candidate for the stake. The rumpus room of Pike’s personal life followed him like an evil shadow, his biographer explains; a civil-court divorce judgment without ecclesiastical validity, alcoholism, fiddling with the evidence of a lover’s suicide, all gave ammunition to his enemies, along with his belief in parapsychology and speaking in tongues. Yet Pike was also the man who brought the Niebuhrs and Paul Tillich to Columbia University, who fought for birth control and against Joseph McCarthy, who practically defined apologetics. A complex man, in other words: reckless, restless, a force urging an examination of limits, faith, and forgiveness.

Crisp, interpretive biography, taking intelligent measure of its controversial subject. (8 pp. photos, not seen)