Patrick Coleman

A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of Summer A haunting debut literary noir about a former pastor’s search to find a missing woman in the toxic, contradictory underbelly of southern California. “He was finished with church, with God, with all of it. But to find the girl, he has to go back.” In Mark Haines’s former life, he was an evangelical youth pastor, a role model, and a family man—until he abandoned his wife, his daughter, and his beliefs. Now he’s marking time between sunny days surfing and dark nights working security at an industrial complex. His isolation is broken when Cindy, a charming twenty-two-year old drifter he sees hitchhiking on the Pacific Coast Highway, hustles him for a breakfast and a place to crash—two cynical kindred spirits. Then his co-worker is murdered in a robbery gone wrong and Cindy disappears on the same night. Haines knows he should let it go and return to his safe life of solitude. Instead, he’s driven to find out where Cindy went, under stranger and stranger circumstances. Soon Mark is chasing leads, each one taking him back into a world where his old life came crashing down—into the seedier side of southern California’s drug trade and ultimately into the secrets of an Evangelical megachurch where his past and his future are about to converge. What begins as an investigation becomes a haunting mystery and a psychological journey both for Mark, and for the elusive young stranger he won’t let get away. Set in the early 2000s, The Churchgoer is a gripping noir, a quiet subversion of the genre, and a powerful meditation on belief, morality, and the nature of evil in contemporary life.

A Novel

The Churchgoer

Massimo Ciavolella

Professor of French Patrick Coleman

Culture and Authority in the Baroque explores the baroque across a wide range of disciplines, from poetics to politics, to the rituals of musical, dramatic, and religious performance.

Culture and Authority in the Baroque

A literary exploration of Gabrielle Roy and his first novel The Tin Flute. Canadian Fiction Studies are an answer to every librarian's, student's, and teacher's wishes. Each book contains clear information on a major Canadian novel. These studies are carefully designed readings of the novels; they are not substitutes for reading them. Each book is attractively produced and includes a chronology of the author's life, information on the importance of the book and its critical reception, an analysis of the text, and a selected list of works cited.

Gabrielle Roy's The Tin Flute

The Limits of Sympathy

David Wallace Carrithers

Montesquieu and the Spirit of Modernity

Crucial to an understanding of Montesquieu's work is the contrast he drew between ancient and modern mentalités. 'Les politiques grecs,' he wrote in his classic work De l'esprit des lois (1748), 'qui vivaient dans le gouvernement populaire, ne reconnaissaient d'autre force qui pût les soutenir que celle de la vertu. Ceux d'aujourd'hui ne nous parlent que de manufactures, de commerce, de finances, de richesses et de luxe meme.' Ancient philosophers had conceptualised model regimes where human beings would flourish in accordance with their natural purposes and potentialities shaped by good laws well obeyed. Such moderns as Montesquieu, on the other hand, ceased to regard the state as a school for morality. No longer concerned with improving man's soul, politics focused instead on the achievement of liberty, security and material prosperity. Clearly something novel and distinctive, something recognisably 'modern', arose during the period from Machiavelli to Montesquieu. A teleological universe suffused with transcendent meaning and purposeful ends was supplanted by a more secular, 'disenchanted' world-view. Both the Christian conception of a life lived in humble devotion to the moral commandments of revealed religion and the classical conception of a virtuous life devoted to ethical perfection were challenged by a new political realism stressing the dominance of the passions over reason and the constructive potential of self-interest. The authors of the eleven essays comprising this volume explore the complex relations between Montesquieu and modernity and between Montesquieu and antiquity. Assessing the content of his three major works, they conclude that whereas the label 'modern' suits Montesquieu, he nonetheless retained certain philosophical approaches characteristic of antiquity as well as a high regard for the primacy accorded to politics and philosophy in the classical era.

Rule and Representation in the Lettre À D'Alembert

Rousseau's Political Imagination

Jayne Lewis

Jill Kowalik

This edited collection of essays examines the history of autobiography from 1600 to 1800.

Patrick Coleman

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