In this memoir, Mercadante tells of her quest for religious identity, a real home, good work, and a one-faith family. Born just after World War II to a mixed-religion family, she tries Catholicism, a WASP sorority, atheism, Eastern mysticism, and vegetarianism. She works as an airline stewardess and as a journalist. She earns a doctorate and becomes a seminary professor. Her story holds key lessons for people from mixed backgrounds, those who long for the ideal family, and those who shun religion as a dead-end.

In recent decades economic dislocation, immigration, new architecture, and other forces have transformed the physical, social, and even religious landscape of large cities. There gleaming skyscrapers tower over struggling ghettos, abandoned businesses mar upscale shopping areas, and tall-steeple churches sometimes languish where storefront mosques thrive. Exploring the religious significance of this new urban landscape, a group of theologians, members of the Workgroup on Constructive Christian Theology, traveled to select cities and found an exciting, vibrant, and multivoiced religious spirit at work. In these essays five leading American theologians delve deeply into the contemporary spiritual geographies of five cities, capturing, through a mix of personal and historical narrative, political analysis, and theological rumination, a sense of this new sacred space and the spirit aborning there.