When pastor Tom Buckford arrives Naughton, he has lost his 'believing hope". He prays to love again, and then falls passionately in love with a married woman; crisis. Once he surrenders to love, he is smitten by a mystical Revelation of God, leading inexorably to his heresy trial. Set in the South in the late 1950's, this is a complex book with multiples subplots, brilliant characters and the first stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement.