John Updyke has a new book, The Terrorist. Well, in truth it was released last year but I only became aware of it recently.

I've not yet gotten a copy, but intend to. Updyke writes with immense power, including spiritual power. Perhaps no one has been better at portraying the moral wasteland of middle age when divorced from religious truth.

In his new novel, according to the review I read, Updyke writes of a young man, of mixed Irish-American and Egyptian origin: a young man estranged from his American surroundings, who longs for something deeper. This hunger drives him to a local mosque where he comes under the tutelage of an imam who shapes his longing into a desire for purity. Meeting jihadis, their vision of purification through violence begins to make sense to him.

It sounds like this novel provides a needed corrective to the notions, given by our secular society, that "root causes" of terrorism are always to be found in material circumstances such as poverty and politics. Humanity's deepest needs are religious.