A Spectacular Inheritance: What I Kept and What I Left Behind

Growing up in a community determined to remake the world

On the eve of her thirty-fifth birthday, Margaret Eastman Smith left the only life she had ever known. Raised within an insular community, she had few friends beyond it, no college degree, no job experience, and could count on one hand the times she had gone out alone with a man.

A Spectacular Inheritance is a penetrating account of coming of age in Moral Re-Armament (previously the Oxford Group, now Initiatives of Change). The religiously-based conflict resolution organization spawned Alcoholics Anonymous and Up With People. The movement is credited with contributing to postwar Franco-German reconciliation but has also been berated by some, including actress Glenn Close.  Amid memories of her unusual life in the community and her evolving view of it, she winds her own story of finding values that she can rely on and finding a path as a college professor of international peacemaking. 

Margaret Eastman Smith, the daughter of a Scottish father and American mother who devoted their lives to the work of the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament, grew up on three continents in a series of communal living arrangements with other families in the movement. She then worked for the movement herself in the UK, India, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Richmond, Virginia and Washington, DC, before going to university in her mid-thirties. She earned her doctorate in International Relations in 1999, taught in the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC for eighteen years.

Praise for A Spectacular Inheritance

A compelling read, particularly for anyone who’s grown up in and then left a religious movement.

—Kirkus Reviews