“Search” — A Book Review

“A Unitarian Universalist can believe anything.” — Michelle Huneven interviewed by Scott Simon for NPR (April 23, 2022)

When a dear and trusted friend of mine recently reached out to me and excitedly told me that I needed to read the book Search by Michelle Huneven, I winced at first and informed her that like many people in the Unitarian Universalist (UU) orbit, I had heard about the book but not read it…yet. Truth be told, I was actually engaged in a silent personal boycott of the piece for all of last year. Knowing that it was a thinly veiled retelling of an actual situation surrounding a ministerial search and the committee carrying out that search in one of our churches, I didn’t want to support the author or its success in any way. My feeling was that buying a copy was an endorsement of trading on personal relationships for profit. I literally study ethics for a living so that’s just not cool.

But as I currently spend up to 6 hours a week on the road between Charlottesville, VA and Laurel, MD, I was looking for something to put into my audiobook rotation after listening to Vine Deloria’s God is Red and Prince Harry’s Spare, so out of curiosity and knowing I had kind of already paid for it, I used my monthly Audible credit and downloaded it.

At the outset it felt like the perfect road warrior listening. It was a subject I knew well so I didn’t…