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Caille Millner is our guest blogger during the week of February 18th. If you have any questions for Caille Millner, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about The Golden Road: Notes on My Gentrification:

Caille Millner is a rising star on the literary scene. A graduate of Harvard University, she was first published at age sixteen and was recently named one of Columbia Journalism Review’s Ten Young Writers on the Rise. The Golden Road is Millner’s clear-eyed and transfixing memoir. From her childhood in a Latino neighborhood in San Jose, California, and coming of age in a more affluent yet quietly hostile Silicon Valley suburb to a succession of imagined promised lands—Harvard, London, post-apartheid South Africa, New York City—this is the story of Millner’s search for a place where she can define herself on her own terms and live a life that matters.

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I came back to religion - to taking it seriously in my own life, and finally to spending my days thinking and speaking with others about it - after a decade as a non-religious person. I spent most of my 20s, in the 1980s, in divided Berlin. It was fun for me to recall and make new sense of that in the process of writing the book. I found myself in amazing circumstances at a young age, living and working with people who were literally running the world and driving the most important issues of the age: the division of the world into Communism and Capitalism, the Wall in Berlin, the nuclear arms race.

But ultimately I saw that if you drill down to the heart of the grandest geopolitical crises, you are left with that same conundrum we grapple with in the most basic aspects of our daily lives - the complexity, frailty and promise of the human condition. I turned away from politics, and towards immersion in religious and spiritual traditions, because they analyze that. They are rich repositories for enduring questions and wisdom and practices to engage it. I love Reinhold Niebuhr's succinct, perfect line: "Man is his own most vexing problem." And more recently I discovered mystical, intriguing counterpart to it in the writing of Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue: "It's strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you."