In the penultimate episode of The Sopranos, the most congenial member of the TV crime family, Bobby Baccalieri, is gunned down by New York mobsters in a New Jersey model railroading shop. Although a very loyal mobster and brother–in–law of Tony Soprano, Bobby's real passion was model railroading. At the moment he was killed, he was waxing eloquent about his most recent vintage train acquisition, using the miniature train car as a metaphor for a better world.

Of course many of us who feel true passion for toy trains or knitting or baseball or skydiving will come to see that activity as a metaphor for all that is good in the world. Sometimes, these metaphors can be useful, beautiful, and inspiring. Some are informative. Most often—like Bobby's last riff—they fail, except in the mind of their creator.

One reason for the failure is that we who see the world through the eyes of an enthusiast have to explain so much of the history and mechanics of our passion to our auditors that we lose their attention. In his book Tour de Faith: A Cyclist's Lessons for Living, Robert F. Molsberry uses an annual seven–day ride across the state of Iowa as a metaphor for Progressive Christianity and for how to live life well. But Molsberry spends so much of the book explaining the details of each of the seven days of the ride that we lose sight of the subject he's trying to illuminate.

I ought to be the perfect person to write this review. Like Molsberry, I'm an active member of my church and also an avid cyclist. (Last year, I rode over 10,000 miles.) And the similarities go deeper. A bicycle accident on a lovely day in May of 1997 left Molsberry paraplegic (he now rides a hand cycle). For my part, ten days before I received this book for review, I was in a serious bicycling accident and broke my neck in three places, so I'm writing this during what will be a long recovery. But for all the similarities, there are many ways in which Molsberry and I disagree—about theology, and about bicycling. The church I attend is part of the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA); I like creeds and dogma. The organized races I regularly enter separate people by ability for reasons of both safety and competition; I loathe the free–for–all melee in all–comer rides of the kind that Molsberry favors. In short, I'm not a completely sympathetic reader.

That said, I want to do justice to Molsberry's project. At the heart of it is an event known as RAGBRAI (The Des Moines Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa). Maybe not the catchiest acronym on the block, but each year this event—dreamed up in the 1970s—attracts more than ten thousand cyclists, who ride across Iowa during the last week in July. The parallel with Progressive Christianity isn't immediately transparent, but once you understand where Molsberry is coming from, it begins to make sense. A good place to start is the website of The Center for Progressive Christianity (www.tcpc.org), where you'll find that the sixth of eight points defining their beliefs is this: [We] "Find more grace in the search for understanding than we do in dogmatic certainty—more value in questioning than in absolutes."

What does this have to do with cycling, and with RAGBRAI in particular? To get the connection, you have to see how an event such as RAGBRAI fits in the larger world of cycling. Viewed globally, the vast majority of bicyclists use their vehicles for transportation. I rode the perimeter road of Beijing seven years ago and saw an endless river of bicycles, four wide, rolling at a very efficient nine miles per hour on every single meter of that 60–kilometer road (as they no doubt were on most every other road in that bustling city). In every inhabited continent, bicycles are basic transportation. Millions of kids ride bikes just for fun, as do tens of thousands of adults. Some of these recreational riders become tourists and ride to see scenery and hang out with other bicyclists. At the other end of the spectrum are licensed amateur and professional bicycle racers. Racers ride seriously, train year–round, and want to win every event they enter, even when wins are few and far between. (At best, I win just one of the 30 to 40 races I enter each year.)

Workers ride to get to their jobs. Kids ride for fun. Racers ride to win. But just as Progressive Christians find more value in questions than in answers, preferring a state of congenial indecision, so many RAGBRAI riders fall into a gray area in cycling between touring and racing. They are riders who occasionally like to ride fast but don't want to commit to the training necessary to race. And in a different mood they are against competition altogether. Early in the book Molsberry talks about the time he entered and won a bicycle race, and about the time he was one of the first to finish a day's ride on the RAGBRAI. But later in the book he chides Lance Armstrong for missing all the scenery around France simply to finish first in Paris. This does not represent a change in Molsberry's thinking over time. He makes clear that he was conflicted about the imperatives of speed and competition versus the claims of scenery and community from his first RAGBRAI in 1974.