that cast us adrift, set us to wander the deserts, wrestle with angels. And for Argyle, as for all fellow pilgrims, the tensions between community and marginalization, orthodoxy and apostasy, authority and autonomy, belonging and disbelief, keep him forever second-guessing where he stands with God. In this state of flux we are not alone.

The sin-eater is both appalled by his culture’s religiosity and beholding to it. The accountancy of sin and punishment at once offends him and feeds him. He is caught in the struggle between views of damnation and salvation and the God he imagines as the loving parents he never knew—pure forgiveness, constant understanding, permanent love. He lives in constant hope and fear, despair and faith, gratitude and God hunger. In the end he isn’t certainthan 40 years ago, the house my great-great-grandfather was given as a wedding gift in the decade after the worst of the famines in the middle of the 19th century.

When I first went to Ireland—a young man with a high number in the Nixon draft lottery and, therefore, a future stretched out before me—I thought I’d see the 40 shades of green. And though I arrived in the off-season, with a one-way ticket, no money or prospects, in a poor county of a poor country, as disappointing a Yank as ever there was, I was welcomed by cousins who could connect me to the photo that hung on their wall of their cousin, a priest, who had died years before.

They took me in, put me by the fire,