Carmen Ariza

In the sweltering colonial shadows of Cartagena, a young priest is losing his soul. Josè de Rincón was ordained to serve God, but the Church's doctrines feel less like sanctuary and more like a cage. Despair has hollowed him out. His bishops demand obedience; his conscience demands honesty. He cannot give both. What begins as private questioning becomes a fracturing of everything he thought he knew about faith, duty, and the man he was supposed to become. Heritage presses upon him, tradition binds him, but somewhere beneath the incense and Latin masses, something more true is trying to break through. This is a novel about what happens when a man of God stops believing in the God his Church has made and must find out if he can still believe in the God he might discover within himself. Stocking writes with fierce compassion for a soul in freefall, rendering a spiritual crisis with the intensity of a thriller. For readers who crave fiction that doesn't flinch from the dark night of the rathe.