Holy Envy: A Review

When I grow up, I want to be like Barbara Brown Taylor. I long ago realized that Taylor is one of the finest Christian writers of our time but reading Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others reminded me of the humility and inquisitiveness that makes her work engaging.

This book recounts not only Taylor’s experience of teaching world religions to undergraduate students in a liberal arts college, but her own growing understanding of what it means to learn from other faiths, embrace truths that enrich one’s own spiritual journey, and wonder how far “holy envy” can be indulged without becoming covetous! Simply put, holy envy is discovering that another’s faith tradition may provide something that is missing in one’s own.

Early in the book, Taylor quotes the late Krister Stendahl’s three rules of religious engagement:

When trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.
Don’t compare your best to their worst.
Leave room for holy envy.

Taylor attempted to adhere to these rules in her teaching of world religions—exposing her students to practitioners of various faiths, give other traditions an unbiased reading, and being open to learn something that might strengthen one’s own faith. Her accounts of the first action are engaging and sometimes amusing. The second and third steps had as much impact on Taylor as on her students.

As she pursued her own journey in relationship to other traditions, she began asking these questions:

What does it mean to be a person of faith in a world of many faiths?
If God is revealed in many ways, why follow the Christian way?
Is Christian faith primarily about being Christian or becoming more fully human?
How does loving Jesus equip me to love those who do not love him the way I do?
What do religious strangers reveal to me about God?

In the Epilogue, Taylor recounts that she eventually gave up teaching world religions as a course. She became aware of the impossibility of really engaging other religions in a fifteen-week course. The best she could do was “desiccate them, reducing each to its skeletal outline with enough names and dates to anchor a ten-point quiz.” She became convicted that religion as such could only be understand by engaging with religious persons who incarnate a faith tradition.

Holy Envy is a gift and an invitation. The gift is walking with Taylor through her own journey of discovery. The invitation is to embark on our own journey.

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