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 a close community, she had few friends beyond it, no college degree, no job experience, and little aptitude for dealing with the world outside that community.

A Spectacular Inheritance is a penetrating account of coming of age in Moral Re-Armament (previously the Oxford Group, now Initiatives of Change). The religious-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 criticized by some, including actor Glenn Close. 

Margaret shares vivid memories of life within the community and her evolving view of it. As she steps away, it becomes the story of finding herself and values that she could rely on. In Margaret’s telling, the memoir is a reflection on the search for self, on forgiveness and the meaning of love.

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