“I’m fed up with the old boys club!” Dot pounded a fist on the table. “We need a woman minister this time!”There’s a lot to love about the women of Saint Lydia’s in San Francisco. Head Beacon Beka and her sidekick Dot turned out to be very good at getting rid of a predatory male pastor. Female church leaders were rare in 1976, but they found an ordained woman to shepherd their flock. The five Beacons, their prickly minister and a young Mexican prostitute all took risks, made mistakes and followed their hearts to set a wild new course for their historic interracial, interdenominational congregation in “The City.”“Judith Favor’s novel lives next door to Armistead Maupin’s San Francisco of the Seventies. In The Beacons we glimpse a radical Christianity—radical because women took over leadership of an interracial church. Favor gives an insider’s look at what happened in a place few of us have imagined.” —John Brantingham, author of Let Us All Now Pray to Our Own Strange Gods“Judith Favor offers us a delicious, saucy slice of mid-70s San Francisco. The Beacons provides generous servings of the beautiful city plus a kaleidoscope of characters, lifestyles and spiritual practices. Deeply textured and finely tuned, this novel crackles with lively energy.” —Mary Atwood, Episcopal priest