That’s what you might call the redemptive qualities some young women are evidently finding in faith, according to Peter Steinfels’ latest column in New York Times:

Dear Jillian,

Please forgive the first-name greeting, but it seems the proper way to reply to your “Hi Peter” e-mail message of June 4.

What was surprising was not the informality of your note — everyone knows that for public relations folks, journalists are on an automatic first-name basis — but that it came from Marie Claire magazine. Fashion writing has not loomed large in this column.

“Today’s hard economic times,” you helpfully explained, “have a profound effect not only on our bank accounts but on our sense of hope and psychological well-being,” an insight, you must admit, that has not escaped millions of Americans, to count only those who still have bank accounts.

Still, you announced that it had inspired an article in the current issue of Marie Claire featuring accounts by “five modern career gals” of “how their belief in faith helped them through the hardest of struggles.”

The article is titled “Cheaper Than Therapy.”

The idea of faith as therapy, you probably know, is not exactly new. Fifty years ago, Norman Vincent Peale preached the power of positive thinking, and Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen insisted that the Roman Catholic confessional was more effective than the psychoanalyst’s couch. And the language of healing, both physical and psychological, is prominent in many religious traditions.

Still, you should anticipate the objection that promoting religion as bargain-basement therapy is something of a category mistake, like publishing someone’s account of voting under the banner “More Engrossing Than Sudoku” or trumpeting romance as “Juicier Than Fish Sticks” or describing the joys of cooking as “Faster Than Gardening.”

Then there’s the word “cheap.” It doesn’t appear a lot elsewhere in these pages. This is not to complain about the items surrounding your article about the effect of today’s hard economic times on our sense of hope — the $4,100 skirt or the $4,995 dress or the $1,250 clutch or the $315 diamond-dust-based body treatment at one spa or the $250 head-to-toe feng shui scrub-down and massage at another.

After all, Marie Claire also features what it calls “steals” and “best buys,” although nothing that is “cheaper,” except of course faith. Be warned, however. Some grump will probably write you about the best-known religious use of “cheap” in recent times. It occurs in the opening sentence of “The Cost of Discipleship,” by the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed for his role in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

“Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church,” Bonhoeffer wrote. “We are fighting today for costly grace.” Perhaps your “five modern career gals” are too young to have heard of Bonhoeffer; otherwise they might have felt nervous about their tendency to treat religious faith like comfort food or a fashion accessory. Tell them not to worry. Bonhoeffer was the kind of guy who wouldn’t know a Manolo Blahnik from a Vera Wang.

What remains puzzling, though, is exactly what their belief had to do with “today’s hard economic times” or how it “helped them through the hardest of struggles.”

Check the link to read the rest.