In a series of meditative essays, the award-winning writer Richard Rodriguez turns his perceptive gaze to the desert—in both the physical and spiritual sense—in a quest to understand his relationship to the "desert God" and to terrorists who kill in the name of that same God. He delves into what it means to be a gay, devout, Roman Catholic in his 60s—attempting to make sense of a world and a religion that have both rejected him at times. His peregrinations take him beyond the Middle East—to San Francisco, Paris, Las Vegas and Malibu. He writes about the rise of atheism in America after 9/11, the modern evasion of place, and the uses of doubt for religious believers.