An Immovable Feast: How I Gave Up Spirituality for a Life of Religious Abundance.  By Tyler Blanski, Ignatius Press, 2018.

An Immovable Feastis a religious conversion memoir.  Tyler Blanski powerfully and honestly describes his coming of age story, as he charts his personal development as well as the slow development and metamorphosis of his religious beliefs.

There is something deeply powerful about Blanski’s frank and detailed account of his personal growth.  He opens the story with his fundamentalist Baptist youth, and charts his adolescent path that took him away from organized religion but still kept him interested in what he termed spirituality.  Eventually, he would pursue a career as an Anglican cleric in the Midwest, and recounts his friendships, misadventures, and mental and spiritual gymnastics as he was constantly challenged.  Over time, all of his presuppositions were shattered, and Blanski and his wife took a different path, entering the Catholic Church.

This is a story about searching for love.  The twin hearts of the memoir are the love stories between Blanski and God, and Blanski and his wife.  An Immovable Feastis notable for its unflinching honesty.  Blanski never shies away from describing the time he spent wandering aimlessly, binge-watching television instead of sleeping, and working jobs that left him mentally and spiritually unfulfilled.  After Blanski finds what he thought was his vocation in Anglicanism, he dreamt of building the perfect church.  The more Blanski studied Catholicism, the more he came to believe that an even better church already existed.  We see clashes with his other Anglican seminarians and teachers, dealing with the illness of a child, and a slow, steady climb towards maturity.

There are countless conversion stories, each one unique despite the similar endings.  Gorgeously and powerfully written, An Immovable Feastis an intellectual and spiritual tour de force that is not to be missed.

–Chris Chan