Political and religious conflict centering around human-alien relations.
Soupy Callidardin was a young woman enjoying school vacation when she discovered a diamond lying in the bed of a stream on the planet Paradise. She felt lucky, especially when it turned out that the diamond had been part of a religious relic many centuries ago. However, when the modern practitioners of that religion, Resumptionism, demanded she hand it over to them, and she declined, she found herself in the middle of planetwide struggles not only between Resumptionism and its rivals, but between the various factions of the Resumptionist Council. Then the gladifers, the aliens who had gifted Paradise to humans, and whose philosophy Resumptionists claimed to be teaching humanity, took an interest in her, and her life took a turn she'd never expected.
