Conversion: A Spiritual Novel About The Sacred & The Profane

Robert Eaton, like most of us, is a flawed human being. He is sixty-seven years old. He is at the zenith of his career in academic psychiatry. He has practiced psychiatry for forty years. He has over two hundred publications in highly esteemed, peer-reviewed, scientific journals. He is a professor of psychiatry at one of the world’s leading medical centers. He is also the medical director of a neuropsychiatric research center.

Dr. Eaton should be happy. But he isn’t. He is going through his midlife crisis at the age of sixty-seven, when many colleagues are starting to consider retirement. Eaton’s world is academic psychiatry. He has no other world and no other life. His friends are his scientific journals. He is a man who eschews religious faith. He is starting to question whether his life has any meaning. His only solace is from walks along the East River and from his friend Chivas Regal.

Into Eaton’s life came Fred Leidendorfer, a seriously and persistently mentally ill person, who Eaton has been trying to stabilize for many years. While living in New York City, Fred is taken under the wings of a local parish priest. This begins a redemptive journey for Fred, much to the dismay of Dr. Eaton.

To this individual conflict is added a very unsettling and chaotic time in world history. There are rumors of a New World Order, of a powerful new military weapon, of a loss in individual freedoms, and the emergence of an evil as never before experienced by humanity.

The question that arises and needs to be settled is how Dr. Eaton weathers his emotional and spiritual storms. Through encounters with some very special people, Eaton is about to find the light of God at the end of a very long and very dark tunnel.