What Is Due the Other (Kindle Single)

From the acclaimed author of I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son comes a memoir of a young man’s reckoning with his mother—and the spiritual universe—during a two-week pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

When journalist Kent Russell agreed to accompany his mother on a “momgrimage” to Israel and Palestine, he put down his phone and returned to his dissolute life as a self-promoting writer on a book tour. He forgets the exchange ever took place—until he is reminded two weeks before their scheduled departure and resolves to take the trip seriously by fasting, meditating, and reconsidering the bend of his moral arc.

For seventeen days, Russell walks in the footsteps of Jesus Christ through Bethlehem and Nazareth, shoulder to shoulder with his detached mother; his sister, the novelist Karen Russell; and a gaggle of elderly pilgrims. He sails across the Sea of Galilee and shuffles down the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. Along the way, he must confront the idea of faith: what he believes in, what he doesn’t, and why. One of the funniest, most erudite, and most inventive journalists of a generation charts a new path toward reconciliation with God, his Catholic upbringing, and perhaps most mysteriously, his mother.