October 9, 2002

Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life. By Lauren F. Winner. Algonquin Books, 305 pp., $23.95.

The Lovely Bones. By Alice Sebold. Little, Brown, 288 pp., $21.95.

As I have listened to the discussions about Saddam Hussein and Iraq, some disturbing questions have arisen. As an ordinary citizen with no special expertise in foreign policy, I am unable to get to the bottom of them. As a skeptic, however, who remembers how the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964 was made the pretext for the horrific escalation of military action in Vietnam, I think they are worth posing.

Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation. By John Witte Jr. Cambridge University Press, 337 pp., $65.00; paperback, $23.00.

When Religion Becomes Evil. By Charles Kimball. HarperSanFrancisco, 240 pp., $21.95.

The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. By Mark C. Taylor. University of Chicago Press, 340 pp., $32.00.

The Company of Preachers: Wisdom on Preaching, Augustine to the Present. Edited by Richard Lischer. Eerdmans, 496 pp., $29.00.

What is preaching? Who is a preacher? How do we interpret both the Bible and our theology for preaching? What does preaching have to do with persuasion? Where in homiletics is the Holy Spirit and the church? What role has the hearer?

How Christian Faith Can Sustain the Life of the Mind. By Richard T. Hughes. Eerdmans, 172 pp., $18.00.

Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. By Kevin Phillips. Broadway, 473 pp., $29.95.

The argument of Kevin Phillips’s provocative and disturbing new book could almost be rendered as a cliché: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. According to Phillips, the very rich in the U.S. have gotten much richer over the past two decades while virtually everyone else has gotten a good deal poorer, despite the widely publicized financial gains of the 1980s and ’90s.

Introducing Theologies of Religions.  By Paul F. Knitter. Orbis, 256 pp., $25.00 paperback.

Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age. By Quentin Schultze. Baker Academic, 256 pp., $24.99.

Pastor: The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry. By William H. Willimon. Abingdon, 386 pp., $25.00 paperback.

Seek My Face: A Novel. By John Updike. Knopf, 274 pp., $23.00.

In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension. By Jay P. Dolan. Oxford University Press, 336 pp., $28.00.

Let me begin by saying that, yes, I had a big, fat Greek wedding. It was performed in the shadow of the dome of the church where my grandfather had once been priest. Our reception took place in the church basement, where I was surrounded by my extremely large and loving Greek family. So I bring a certain amount of expertise when I echo the words of my (non-Greek) wife, who said upon viewing My Big Fat Greek Wedding: "I don't know any Greeks like this."

The world Hayao Miyazaki conjures up in the Japanese animated feature Spirited Away is so exotic and in a state of such constant metamorphosis that you may have the impression, as you stagger out of the theater, that you've watched the entire movie with your mouth open. Spirited Away runs close to two hours, and there isn't a banal image in it.