When Amelia graduated last December, she told her father she was thinking of going to L’Abri, the Christian study center and commune in the Swiss Alps founded by celebrity apologist Francis Schaeffer. "When I brought up the idea, Dad said, ‘That’s great, I love Schaeffer,’" she said.
If her father remembers L’Abri as it was when Schaeffer was alive—a place where thoughtful young Christians went to breathe the fortifying Alpine air and to sit at the feet of their goateed guru—Amelia embodies what L’Abri has become: a community ambivalent about Schaeffer’s legacy and ill at ease with mainstream evangelical culture.