September 11, 2002

When I told my family less than a year ago that I was going to move to Chicago to work for the Christian Century, one family member protested. She was concerned, in the aftermath of 9/11, about me working in a downtown location where, she feared, terrorists might strike next.

Besides being colleagues at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Susan R. Garrett and Amy Plantinga Pauw are friends and the mothers of young children.

Frederick Buechner, 76, is a Presbyterian, but he attends an Episcopal church. He’s ordained, but he’s never been a parish minister. His first book (A Long Day’s Dying) was not supposed to sell many copies, but it turned out to be the only best seller of the 32 books he’s published. In fact, this novel held such promise that some predicted he would become the next Henry James.

Missed opportunity

The complicated novel Possession  by A. S. Byatt is a double-tiered romance and a literary brainteaser. Like John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman or Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia, the two works it most resembles, the novel seesaws across two centuries. Roland Michell and Maud Bailey are late 20th-century British literary scholars.

Thoreau's line about "the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation" could be applied to Justine Last, the lead character in The Good Girl, a low-budget morality play by writer Mike White and director Miguel Arteta, the same team that produced the creepy but moving Chuck and Buck.