In this memoir the author examines international religious violence, growing public atheism in the West, and his religious rejection for his homosexuality, moving from Jerusalem to Silicon Valley, from Moses to Liberace, from Lance Armstrong to Mother Teresa. He considers his relationship to the God of the desert, and to terrorists who kill in the name of God. He is a homosexual who writes with love of the religions of the desert that exclude him. He is a passionate, unorthodox Roman Catholic who is always mindful of his relationship to Judaism and Islam because of a shared belief in the God who revealed himself within an ecology of emptiness. And at the center of this book is a consideration of women, their importance to his spiritual formation and their centrality to the future of the desert religions. Here he binds these threads together into this wonderfully complex tapestry. -- From book jacket.