Early ReviewersElizabeth Cunningham

In this intriguing spiritual memoir, The Maeve Chronicles author Elizabeth Cunningham traces her dynamic faith journey and its relationship to her writing.

As the daughter of an Episcopal priest, author Elizabeth Cunningham was born into community, sacred story, and the mysteries of prayer. For her, "If a writer is one who writes, then a 'prayer' is one who prays." As such, her praying is dynamic, a dance between many opposites—active vs. contemplative, community vs. individual, human vs. wild—and Cunningham sees the divine as both incarnate and transcendent, an intimate beloved and a vast mystery. When she prays, Cunningham is both audacious and reverent, asking tough questions of God—raging, listening intently, and dancing and singing ecstatically. Her storyteller's imagination opens a path from the known to the unknowable, from despair to wonder. 

In this nonfiction debut, Cunningham recounts both her lifelong spiritual quest and her ongoing spiritual questions. Her journey takes her from her childhood church, with its ornate liturgy, to the silence of Quaker meeting; from her ordination as an interfaith minister to an eclectic, earth-centered community where she served as priestess before becoming a hermit, of sorts, making a church of her own backyard.

Candid and passionate, Cunningham's memoir invites readers of all faiths—and doubts!—to explore what it means to live life as a prayer in the beautiful, imperiled world we share.

"One of the most engaging memoirs I've read in ages. The wise and feisty voice I've come to know and love in Elizabeth Cunningham's Maeve Chronicles fills these pages and carried me away. Anyone who has forged an independent path through the luminous moments and deepest shadows of a soul-filled life will recognize their own spiritual adventures reflected here." —Mirabai Starr, God of Love

Required reading for fans The Maeve Chronicles, and accessible to those new to the series, Bright Dark Madonna takes the reader on a breathtaking journey from the temple porticoes of Jerusalem, to the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, to the south of France, and, as always, to the treacherous, beautiful terrain of the human heart. After playing an intimate role in the mystery of the Resurrection, what is left for Maeve, the Celtic Mary Magdalen? Never a follower, will she emerge as a leader of the early church? Will she retire quietly to mother a sacred bloodline? Will she set sail for France to proselytize and go spelunking? The answer: all and none of the above. No sooner does Maeve open her mouth to preach the gospel her way than a fierce debate begins about what to do with the child she is carrying. Maeve has her own ideas about where best to raise the savior’s scion. When she returns to Temple Magdalen, the holy whorehouse she founded, a custody battle of biblical proportions ensues. Maeve, her infant daughter Sara, and Jesus’ mother flee to the remote Taurus Mountains where they live in hiding among the Galatians until a mysterious man is dumped on their doorstep more dead than alive. When Maeve discovers the identity of the man she has healed, she is appalled and determined to keep her family’s secret. But Maeve has reckoned without the will of her brilliant, angry adolescent daughter who resolves to find out the truth about her father—for herself. Originally published in Spring 2009, Bright Dark Madonna is available for the first time in paperback via Monkfish Book Publishing Company.