Earning Innocence

Think of the most memorable week of your life. Was it tragic? Joyous? Heartbreaking? Inspiring? A combination of emotions swirled together and splattered across your heart, soul, and mind?

Reverend James Wheeler writes and reflects on such a monumental week. In the pages of his journal, he searches for peace in the shadows of the past and struggles with his current challenges. A man of tested faith, he hopes in the unseen and wrestles with paradox. As a Moravian pastor, husband, and father, Wheeler strives to embrace his loved ones, even as his anxieties threaten to push them away. Will he glimpse wholeness and harmony? Will he come to know healing?

Earning Innocence invites readers to wrestle with such questions and view their lives through the lens of friends, family, and faith. James Wheeler's aha!-moment is our revelation: certain stories are like candlewicks--common, ordinary, and seemingly of little value. Yet the candlewick carries the light.


""Stunningly intimate, Earning Innocence makes poetry of the undramatic life of ministry, fatherhood, and marriage. It doesn't simply reveal life; it allows it to sing, no more so than in its notes of loss and grief. Rendered simply and without ostentation, Taylor-Troutman's words captivated me. I read them all in one sitting. And afterward, after I had cried and laughed, I felt a bit like the boy in the book who falls before the cross and wails--and wakes to feel cleansed.""
--Patrick David Heery, editor of Presbyterians Today

""This book is a quiet wonder, a memoir of the soul. As bespeaks its title, it lures you in and earns your respect. Taylor-Troutman builds no case. Rather, he honors, to cite him, the mystery that 'it is the story that carries the light.' Characters are narrative worlds orbiting the arc of Taylor-Troutman's universe, promising us that in their gift of being alive we will be invited to recognize our own gift of life. Taylor-Troutman keeps that promise. Take. Read. Savor.
--E. Carson Brisson, Associate Professor of Biblical Languages, Union Presbyterian Seminary; Associate Editor, Between Text and Sermon; Essayist, FOCUS Magazine,

""Lean and taut but also somehow immense in mercy and attentiveness and humility; the sort of lovely book that you hate to finish, and slow down near the end, and ponder the people in the pages long after you have finished reading. A remarkable and moving and haunting work.""
--Brian Doyle, author of Mink River


Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of Take My Hand: A Theological Memoir and Parables of Parenthood: Interpreting the Gospels with Family. He is the pastor of New Dublin Presbyterian Church in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. Earning Innocence is his first work of fiction and he plans to revisit the same characters in future books.