Press, 168 pages

Here is a well-researched biography of Ross Randall Calvin, an Episcopal minister who also studied and wrote about New Mexico’s landscape and people. Born in 1889, Calvin grew up on the family farm in Illinois and was fascinated by wild animals and plants. He went on to earn a master’s degree in English and a Ph.D. in English philology at Harvard University. In 1920 he entered a New York City seminary and subsequently served as curate at St. Agnes’ Chapel. At the beginning of 1927, he assumed a post as rector of Church of the Good Shepherd in Silver City — the Southwest relocation was sought to relieve his chronic throat problems, which it soon did. In 1934, Macmillan published his first book,

The central theme, in line with Calvin’s dedication to the philosophy of determinism, is that everything in this part of the world is a result of the sky and its heat and water.

is a wonderfully detailed book, especially in his favorite field of botany, but the minister was not thoroughly open-minded. During the Great Depression years, Calvin admired the hundreds of Civilian Conservation Corps workers active on tree-thinning and erosion-control projects around Silver City, but he had little patience with welfare recipients, whom he called “shovel-leaners.” He admired the Spanish explorers, but not their descendants. Likewise he denigrated cowmen, but he held in high esteem what he perceived as the racially pure Apache, the “falcons of the desert.”

Calvin was a properly dedicated pastor — at one point, he counters his bishop’s uneasiness about time spent on literary pursuits by reminding him that he has only missed two Sundays in the pulpit in 10 years — but some church women thought he spent too much time at his typewriter, and ministering to prisoners, and not enough with his flock. After 15 years in Silver City, he was assigned to a new post at Clovis. In a 1947 paper, “The People of New Mexico,” Calvin contrasts the two sides of the state, and his biases are clear. The Clovis folks’ world appears barren when put up against Silver City’s Spanish influence, its saloons full of miners and soldiers, and its health-seekers, who added a “sophisticated gaiety.”

However, he dove into his new life in Curry County, a major accomplishment being the building of a wonderful church designed by John Gaw Meem. The new St. James Episcopal Church (consecrated in 1950) was built “for the exaltation of religion and the delight of those who love beauty.”

Calvin’s reputation as a prolific and discerning writer and a dedicated clergyman were offset by decades of insomniac miseries, persistent dark thoughts, and private bitterness with God, including about his second wife’s descent into madness. His grandson, John Randall Calvin, said Calvin’s sermons were “almost like music,” but added that the man was “extremely demanding and egocentric” and “only a poor parson that had difficulty with everyone he loved.”

Ross Calvin retired to Albuquerque, where he enjoyed nurturing his garden until his uneasy death at eighty. — Paul Weideman