Stalking God: My Unorthodox Search for Something to Believe In

In 2010, Anjali Kumar, corporate lawyer and new mom, started looking for God, a search she documents with candor and humor in her memoir, Stalking God. Self-described as a "first-generation Indian girl raised outside Chicago, part Indian, part American, part Catholic, part Hindu, part Jain, and wholly confused," Kumar began seeking answers to the fundamental mysteries of life (and death) when she realized that one day her daughter would ask her questions she wouldn't be able to answer: "Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? What happens when we die? Is there a God?"

Kumar's quest took several years. She traveled to California and Brazil, Tokyo and upstate New York. She Skyped with a medium, spent five days in silent meditation, sweated out toxins in a hut in Mexico, texted a healer in India, watched the fires at Burning Man and even participated in online laughter yoga. Along the way, she grappled with an innate contradiction within herself: a yearning to believe in something and an inherent skepticism surrounding religious promises.

In the end, Kumar doesn't find a practice or religion that works for her, or even answers to her original questions. But Stalking God, it turns out, isn't about answers. At the risk of sounding like a cliché, it is much more about the journey--one that offers insight into "our collective spiritual nature." And in Kumar's probing, capable, irreverent hands, that journey is a delight to share in, from start to answer-less finish. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

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