Cities of Refuge by Michael Helm

their chairs into a sort of parliament, he came to think of Father André as the most valuable participant, the one among them who coaxed them from their turfs, translated the terms now and then, and kept things peaceable even as he challenged arguments and core beliefs. By the end of the semester, Harold had had to admit to himself his own academic hubris.
    One night they’d walked together out of the college and across the campus with the city lights holding above them in low winter clouds. They’d been trading views of the evening’s lecture, a sociologist’s work-in-progress on the local adaptations of conservative Islam in European cities. Harold wanted them to get past the subject so that the conversation might move at random. The impulse was familiar to him from his relations with certain especially smart women, a need to be close to the power and authority of a truly other mind. On most days he believed that over his life of observation and thought he’d come to know how to see things. Yet every now and then, it seemed he’d collected nothing but prejudices and a few disguises for them. As they moved single file in the snow onto the packed path that cut across the field, the priest had kept finding new implications in the sociologist’s work, kept asking Harold for an historian’s assessment and then using it to open other levels of inquiry. Finally Harold stepped into apause and asked him how a man who spent his day with the unfortunate had the energy or even the inclination to spend his evenings with people whose devotions must seem so removed from the front lines. “I like most academics,” said Father André. “They commit to their enthusiasms, as we all should, with mind, body, and spirit.” Harold said he wasn’t sure that described many of his colleagues, or himself. “It describes you. I know it when I see it.” The comment surprised Harold into speechlessness. He had come to value it out of proportion.
    They’d had little contact in the past two years. Before he’d called him yesterday to arrange a meeting, Harold had hunted up the online course calendar and found Father André there on Tuesday nights teaching Time and Ritual in Christian Doctrine. The posted reading list would look pretty daunting to an undergraduate, Harold knew, but he’d have better students because of it. They arranged to meet at noon in a café near campus. The view from their table was of southbound streetcars emerging from the underground, and northbound ones disappearing into the station.
    “I read your book on Central American Protestantism.” The man’s faded white short-sleeved shirt was tucked in too far in the back. It gave the impression he was straining at the collar.
    “So there’s two of us.”
    “I’m not in a position to evaluate the scholarship, but it has an authority. It seems rigorous and well argued.”
    “Thank you. But I’m guessing you don’t think it addresses the whole picture.”
    Father André smiled. His boyish yellow hair clashed with the thick parchment on his arms and face. He looked worn and hardened.
    “Your book reads like a smart market analysis. Event X leads to event Y. I don’t see why the force of living faith has to be put aside in such studies, or discussed exclusively in terms of material needs and politics and American business models used to sell Pentecostalism to the poor.”
    “Well. There’s the whole chapter on the migration of the spirit, conversion as the movements of people from the country to the city.”
    “Yes, but that’s only a metaphor. There should be room for testaments. It isn’t that I don’t acknowledge the power of need and politics to shape history. It’s that I do, I know it very well, and so I know how people endure their hungers and sufferings and despair.”
    “You’re talking about a kind of social history, or simply documentary history, that I don’t do. It’s not my particular thing.”
    “I think it should be part of the