Revelation, by Dennis Covington

Dennis Covington is famous for seeking faith in extreme places. Twenty years ago it was the snake-handling, poison-drinking Christians of southern Appa­lachia. Now it’s the drug trade in Juárez, Mexico; the increasingly chaotic violence in Syria; a senseless kidnapping in Alabama; and the legacy of his older brother’s mental illness. Covington’s travels into violent places are sometimes reckless. But it’s precisely in the danger that faith seems to emerge most clearly. “The substance of things hoped for” is a supply container transformed into a mobile health clinic at a Lebanese refugee camp. “The evidence of things unseen” appears fleetingly in a burned-out mosque in Aleppo. Where there is deep suffering and foolhardy generosity, there is faith.