Features
Idea-dropping
Most of Richard Linklater's previous films, such as Dazed and Confused, Slacker and Before Sunrise, have enjoyed great success by holding up the mirror to 20-somethings' intermingling of curiosity and apathy. Judging by the almost universally positive response he's received for his latest film, Waking Life, the formula is anything but tired. In addition to praising its meandering dialogue, critics are calling the colorful visual landscapes in which these ideas are presented a breakthrough in film animation.
Books
Down to earth
The New Agarianism: Land, Culture, and the Community of Life. Edited by Eric T. Freyfogle. Island Press, 256 pp., $40.00; paperback, $18.00....
In short
The Gospel According to the Simpsons: The Spiritual Life of the World's Most Animated Family.By Mark Pinsky. Westminster John Knox, 164 pp., $12.95 paperback....
Thorn in the side
With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology. By Stanley Hauerwas. Brazos Press, 250 pp., $22.99....
Scary scenarios
GERMS: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War. By Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad. Simon & Shuster, 367 pp., $27.00....
Frodo lives
J.R.R Tolkien: Author of the Century. By Tom Shippey. Houghton Mifflin, 328 pp., $26.00....
Touring Pentecostalism
Heaven Below: Earthly Pentecostals and American Culture. By Grant Wacker. Harvard University Press, 364 pp., $35.00....
Families disrupted
Tolstoy's dictum that "each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" is played out in each of these fine novels....
Falwell and followers
The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics. By Susan Friend Harding. Princeton University Press, 352 pp., $50.00; paperback, $18.95....
The power of one God
One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism. By Rodney Stark. Princeton University, 338 pp., $24.95....
Nonconforming
On the Background to Heaven: Old Order Hutterites, Mennonites, Amish and Brethren. By Donald B. Kraybill and Carl F. Bowman. Johns Hopkins University Press, 362 pp., $29.95....
Departments
Getting religion: New connotations
As the Associated Press story had it, a Greyhound passenger lost it when the bus driver and several others on the bus asked him to douse his cigarette....
Reading religiously: The witness of a community of readers
The alarm has been sounded over the future of reading. We are rapidly becoming a culture of the image, not the word, we are told....
In a foreign place: Enemy love and realism
It’s a cliché to observe that since September 11 we are living in a different world, that everything seems different now. But it is true. I heard Harvard’s Peter Gomes say recently that things sound different now....
Grace-full gestures: Opportunities for reconciliation
In his wonderful memoir Open Secrets, Richard Lischer describes a personal conflict that developed between Lischer and Leonard, a lay leader in the congregation....
Revenge or justice? Revenge won't work in Afghanistan: Revenge won't work in Afghanistan
It was much easier to oppose the gulf war. The situation that evoked the U.S. military response ten years ago was not personal, unless you count the loss of a plentiful oil supply as personal....