[The Runner Stumbles] seems at first to worry about the role of the church in relation to its parishioners and about the struggle between the two ways of approaching God that Charles Williams called the Ways of the Affirmation and the Negation of Images, but the doctrinal differences are revealed as a vehicle for suppressed sexuality…. The Runner Stumbles is about a tiny Catholic community, isolated from the alien and hostile Protestant town near which it is situated, the town itself cut off from the larger world by geography, weather, prejudice and platitudes. (p. 464)

The community consists, for dramatic purposes, of Father Rivard, Sister Rita and Mrs. Shandig, the priest's housekeeper. We do meet a couple of parishioners and a visiting cliché from the bishop's office, a fastidious bureaucrat of a monsignor, but the center of the play lies with the theological and sexual triangle of priest, nun...