Marion Singer, an up-for-tenure associate professor of anthropology at a major university, is nominally a Christian. Her overall world-view, however, is decidedly secular, firmly grounded in fact-based evidence rather than faith. Marion's area of expertise is evangelical Christianity, and her just published text, "The Book of Revelation," focuses on evangelicals' views of science in general and evolution in particular.
When Marion's teen-age daughter Allie is struck by a car, Marion's world is thrown into turmoil, especially when she is confronted with Allie's grim prognosis. Allie's physicians predict that --even if she survives -- she will be left in a persistent vegetative state, completely unresponsive to those around her. Marion and her physicist husband Paul react to this news in different ways: Paul despondently accepts the information as presented, while Marion, after some initial equivocation, winds up praying for Allie's recovery with Sister Ivy, an evangelical Christian she met while researching her book.
When Allie's condition abruptly improves, her doctors and nurses are delighted but at a loss to medically explain her dramatic turn-around. In a subsequent radio interview with Sister Ivy that soon goes viral, Marion opines that "science doesn't have all the answers" and entertains the possibility that Allie's recovery may indeed have been a miracle facilitated by prayer and heavenly intervention.
Marion's words come back to haunt her, especially when the Tenure Committee questions her commitment to rigorous, data-driven scholarship, citing her interview-voiced implication that supernatural forces might impact the natural world. Marion finds herself trying to bridge two camps that often eye each other as opposing adversaries across a battlefield, the fact-based world of scientists and the faith-based world of much of the rest of the population, In the culture wars of modern-day America, is it even possible to reconcile serious science with serious faith?