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to be rich. God wants you to be well dressed, and He wants you to spend your leisure hours fishing, horseback riding, or strolling through the park with your family on a sunny day. God wants you to live in a gated community McMansion, drive a Mercedes, fly first class.
    All this can be yours.
All
you
have to do is sow that seed of faith by making a vow, and then start sending your money to the Tim Trinity Word of God Ministries.
    And prosperity shall rain upon you like magic fairy dust.
    Daniel knew the whole grift by heart. Knew every inch of it, snout to tail. After all, he was raised in it.
    Uncle Tim was the twin brother of Daniel’s mother. He had been Daniel’s closest relative since the day Daniel was born. The day Daniel’s mother died giving birth to him. The day his grieving father threw himself off the Greater New Orleans Bridge and into the Mississippi River, taking his own life and leaving Daniel orphaned.
    There was a bio page on Trinity’s website, and Daniel clicked through to read it. The biography waxed nostalgic about Trinity’s years traveling the Southland in a Winnebago, town to town, tent to tent, healing the sick and saving souls. Alongside the text, there was a photograph of Trinity standing beside the rusty RV, taken when Daniel was seven. Daniel was not in the photo, but he recognized his shiny new bicycle leaning against the front bumper. Trinity had given him the bike for his seventh birthday.
    He scrolled further down the page, moving past the photo, moving through the years, moving to where Trinity’s life and his life were no longer intertwined. He stopped scrolling after Trinity quit the tent circuit and built a permanent church in the Mid-City neighborhood of New Orleans.
    Trinity’s church quickly grew prosperous, and he established the largest soup kitchen (the website called it a “nutritional center”) in New Orleans, nourishing body and soul in the deeply impoverished Lower Ninth Ward. He still took his show on the road regularly, but the road was a series of airports and he rentedarenas instead of pitching tents. A few years later, the
Tim Trinity Prosperity-Power Miracle Hour
premiered on late-night television across Louisiana, and pretty soon Trinity was buying time on cable networks with national reach.
    In addition to running the soup kitchen, the Tim Trinity Word of God Ministries built fifty schools and dug five hundred clean-water wells in Africa and built a medical clinic in Haiti. A tiny fraction of the haul, Daniel figured, but just enough to make Trinity look legit and protect his tax-exempt status with Uncle Sam.
    The bio said that God spoke to Reverend Tim after Trinity’s church was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and instructed him to relocate to Atlanta. Trinity obeyed.
    At the bottom of the page was a quote:
    “The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.” Isaiah 53:11
    It was a strange choice, because it was a passage from the Old Testament. Or, as Trinity had always jokingly called it (behind closed doors), “the Jew book.” But what was really strange, the thing that stopped Daniel cold, was that Isaiah 53 was held by Christians to be a prophecy of the life of Jesus, and placing it in this context, at the end of Tim Trinity’s biography, seemed like an attempt to apply it to Trinity himself.

A lmighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan: Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
    —P RAYER FOR L ENT

Rome, Italy…
    A s he told the taxi driver to take him to Piazza del Popolo, Father Giuseppe Sorvino was careful to speak in broken Italian with a heavy German accent. He barked the destination as an order, waving a tourist map in the air between the