By Colleen Carroll Campbell
Spiritual perfectionism-- an obsession with flawlessness rooted in the belief that we can earn God's love-- is the most dangerous form of perfectionism. It was only after she became a mother that Campbell started to see how insidiously perfectionism had infected her spiritual life, how lethal it could be to her happiness and her family, and how disproportionately it afflicts the people working hardest to serve God. Here she weaves stories of her own struggles against comparison and impossible expectations with those of seven ex-perfectionist saints (and one heretic) who show us how to pursue a new kind of perfection: freedom in Christ. She shows the solution to perfectionism is not to squelch our hard-wired desires for excellence but to allow God to purify and redirect them.