June 13, 2006

That a mosh pit of reviewers would fall over each other to pan the The Da Vinci Code is puzzling. It’s not a great film, but then it isn’t a great book. If you want car chases, go see Mission: Impossible III. If you want a whodunit, don’t turn to a novel so widely discussed that even those who haven’t read it know who the bad guy is (and where the “sacred feminine” is buried). If you want a profound, subtle meditation on faith, then a story with a self-flagellating, murderous albino monk is probably not your bag.

In 1994, things began to look up for Milan, Missouri, a remote, rural community of 2,000 that had been struggling for years with a declining farm economy and weak job market. Premium Standard Farms (PSF), the second-largest pork production company in the U.S., opened a state-of-the-art packing plant in Milan’s rural enterprise zone. Today the company raises 2 million hogs annually on 38,000 acres of rolling northwest Missouri hills, then brings them to Milan for processing.

"The trouble with the church in Finland,” a Finnish Lutheran pastor told me, “is that everybody loves it and nobody goes there.” Some 85 percent of the 5.2 million Finns are disengaged from the church except for brief pit stops for baptism, confirmation, marriage and burial.

It’s been a good season for scandal. Bribery sent a California congressman to prison. Fraud charges provided courtroom drama in Houston. Everybody everywhere talked about baseball stars on steroids. Along the way, there was the usual quota of exploitation, infidelity and larceny among the clergy.

The Jews of Jesus’ time, the preacher intoned, were slavishly devoted to the practices of their ancestors. They studied scripture but did not apply it. Their temple was “rotten to the core.” Ancient Judaism was a religion whose rituals were “impressive, inspiring and empty.” It was a faith preoccupied with the superficial and lacking in substance. “As long as people talked about love,” the speaker thundered, “they did not have to practice it.”

He introduces each poet with a brief biography or an overview of the poet’s work. Hirsch draws on his own lifetime of poetry reading and writing in assembling an engrossing collection that will serve those who appreciate poetry but are glad for a guide. The international collection of poems and poets testifies to the power of poetry around the globe. An index is included.

According to ancient Hindu texts, when a man dies, his wife has three choices. She can throw herself on his funeral pyre in the sacrificial act of suttee; she can marry her husband’s younger brother (if his family is willing); or she can spend her remaining days in isolation in an ashram designed for widows, where she shaves her head, wears mourning clothes and seeks to “atone” for her husband’s death.