When I was in my early forties, I began writing a regular column for the newspaper sent to Episcopalians in the diocese of Chicago. In Faithwalk, I tried to describe my struggles as a believing Christian set against my background as a lawyer, single parent, son of aging parents, and sinner. This venture in self-analysis continued a process of trying to square my life with God's call to a Christian begun many years earlier, but the writing was, I believe, an insight into how God works in all lives. Though written from a Christian perspective, these essays should appeal to anyone struggling with his or her faith in a world that seems spinning out of control. And I believe that God uses nonbelievers as a fulcrum to test our own belief.

Now in my early sixties, after the columns collected dust, I reread them, and I think they stand the test of time. So, I have decided to publish them in a book, adding a bit of commentary to provide the context. They have been arranged, not in the order they were written, but rather according to topic, topics suggested by the biblical narrative by which the Creator of the universe loved us so much that he sent his only Son to die for us. I hope you enjoy them.

The history of the Palestine War does not only concern military history. It also involves social, humanitarian and religious history, as in the case of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Jerusalem. A Liminal Church offers a complex narrative of the Latin patriarchal diocese, commonly portrayed as monolithically aligned with anti-Zionist and anti-Muslim positions during the "long" year of 1948. Making use of largely unpublished archives in the Middle East, Europe and the United States, including the recently released Pius XII papers, Maria Chiara Rioli depicts a church engaged in multiple and sometimes contradictory pastoral initiatives, amid harsh battles, relief missions for Palestinian refugees, theological reflections on Jewish converts to Catholicism, political relations with the Israeli and Jordanian authorities, and liturgical responses to a fluid and uncertain scenario. The pieces of this history include the Jerusalem grand mufti's appeal to Pius XII to support the Arab cause, the Catholic liturgies for peace and international mobilization during the Palestine War and Suez crisis, refugees petitioning the patriarch for aid, and Jewish converts establishing Christian kibbutzim. New archival collections and records reveal hidden aspects of the lives of women, children and other silenced actors, faith communities and religious institutions during and after 1948, connecting narratives that have been marginalized by a dominant historiography more focused on military campaigns or confessional conflicts. A Liminal Church weaves diocesan history with global history. In the momentous decade from 1946 to 1956, the study of the transnational Jerusalem Latin diocese, as split between Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Cyprus, with ties to diaspora and religious international networks and comprising clergy from all over the world, attests to the possibilities of contrapuntal narratives, reintroducing complexity to a deeply and painfully polarized debate, exposing false assumptions and situating changes and ruptures in a long-term perspective.