Sunday Will Never Be the Same: A Rock and Roll Journalist Opens Her Ears to God (Digital)

Love and beauty.

From when she was a little girl, Dawn Eden Goldstein knew she wanted those things—that in them, somehow, she would find God.

But her life’s search led her away from the temples of her childhood Judaism to the music clubs of Greenwich Village, where she became an acolyte of a new religion: rock & roll. Over the years she earned renown as a rock critic and historian, moving among some of popular music’s biggest names, all the while straining to capture that transcendent love and beauty in their every note and lyric.

Yet her longing only deepened; the hole in her heart only grew. God’s voice was calling her, but first she needed ears to hear.

In Sunday Will Never Be the Same, Goldstein (The Thrill of the Chaste) recounts her spiritual journey in beautifully wrought detail, mixing powerful accounts of trauma, healing, and epiphany with funny and poignant anecdotes from inside the music scene. It is the rare “conversion story” that delights as it inspires, amuses as it edifies—and ultimately lays before the reader a lived testimony to the transforming grace of Christ.

“This is the story of a young woman’s journey through the dark minefield of modernity, of a lost soul who searched in vain for joy before finding it in the place where it had awaited her all along. It is a conversion story, written with equal measures of frankness and delicacy. It is also a vivid snapshot of the world of American pop music at century’s end. Whatever your faith—or lack of it—you will put down Sunday Will Never Be the Same filled with gratitude for having been given the opportunity to accompany Dawn Eden Goldstein on her pilgrimage from confusion to certainty.”-Terry Teachout, drama critic, The Wall Street Journal.