The God Who Sleeps Over

What if God decided to stop by and have a sleepover?

Ten years ago, in a suburb of Rochester, New York, Peter Lovenheim was out walking his dog. He was surprised to see a TV news truck parked down the block.

What was going on?

As it turned out, a horrible tragedy. A neighbor three doors down had shot and killed his wife and then himself. Their two young children had escaped, running screaming into the night.

Lovenheim was shocked — not only by these violent deaths but by how little true community existed in his suburban neighborhood. He knew the family only slightly, not nearly well enough to sense that trouble was brewing. Soon a “For Sale” sign appeared in front of the house where the killings had occurred, but everything else remained the same. “A family had vanished, yet the impact on our neighborhood was slight,” writes Lovenheim in a new book called In the Neighborhood. He asked himself, “How could that be? Did I live in a community or just in a house on a street surrounded by people whose lives were entirely separate?”

Good...