“Anger has always been my adversary, crouching just outside the door.” One might not expect to hear such a confession from a figure like David Gregory, the NBC newsman who moderated “Meet the Press” and served as the White House correspondent during the second Bush administration. But in How’s Your Faith?: An Unlikely Spiritual Journey, a kind of measured honesty keeps Gregory revealing unexpected sides.
The book is classified as a religious memoir, and indeed a spiritual story forms its core: how Gregory grew from a nominally Jewish childhood, married a Christian woman, navigated the spiritual upbringing of his children and ultimately decided to explore his own faith more deeply—both through introspection and, unsurprisingly given his profession, interviewing experts. So How’s Your Faith? is as much about Gregory’s search for the spiritual answers of others as it is about stressing answers of his own. He listens to evangelical preacher Joel Osteen and to Cardinal Timothy Dolan. He listens to Mohamed Magid at a mosque in Virginia, and he listens to rabbis in his own tradition.
Gregory’s vulnerability in sharing the lessons he learned, as well as the details of his tumultuous departure from NBC in 2014, distinguish this book in the crowded lineup of spiritual-seeking memoirs. Not only does Gregory concede his shortcomings, he also relates how faith and religious practice have enabled him to address them. “We cannot make our adversaries disappear,” he says after acknowledging his struggles with anger. “All we can do is refuse to let them in.”
This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
