The Story of My Mind; Or, How I Became a Rationalist

What happens when a father raised to preach the gospel realizes he can no longer believe it? This is the question at the heart of Mangasarian's unflinching memoir, written not as academic treatise but as a letter to his children, a desperate hope that they might find their own truths rather than inherit his doubts. The book follows Mangasarian from his strict Calvinist upbringing and early training for the ministry through the shattering moment in Asia Minor where, relying on divine intervention during a perilous journey, he found only silence. That crisis became the crack through which rational light flooded in. But this is no angry screed against religion. It is a careful, often painful autopsy of faith, each layer of belief examined, questioned, and gently (or not so gently) laid to rest. Mangasarian writes with the specificity of someone who actually lived inside these questions, not someone who discovered them in a library. The result is a document that captures a particular kind of 20th-century intellectual awakening: the slow, agonizing process of trading inherited Certainty for the terrifying freedom of reason.