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The protagonist of "All God's Children Can Dance" is the son of a devout Christian woman. It is interesting to see how her faith is treated. She is in some ways a figure of absurdity, yet she and other volunteers from her church have gone to help the quake victims while the protagonist gets drunk. The mother's beliefs are presented in a caricature of popular Christianity (though you only have to turn on the tv or the radio to recall that such caricatures didn't grow out of thin air), and at first the reader may suppose that this is nothing more than another dismissal of the faith as not simply untrue but downright ridiculous.

And yet as the story twists and turns to a characteristically strange ending—the young man alone in the middle of the night, dancing on the pitching mound in an empty baseball stadium—the last words are a cry from the heart: " 'Oh God,' Yoshiya said aloud."

"Oh God." Is there a better response to Kobe, to Aum Shinrikyo, to 9/11?

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture and editor-at-large for Christianity Today.

Copyright © 2002 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Visit Books & Culture online at BooksandCulture.com or subscribe here.

Books & Culture Corner appears Mondays at ChristianityToday.com. Earlier Books & Culture Corners include:

How to Avoid the Coming Disaster | "Imitate Japan." "No, don't imitate Japan." Time out. (August 12, 2002)

"Mind Control" and the Christian Citizen | Historian Sean Wilentz's misguided attack on Justice Antonin Scalia. (August 5, 2002)

Speak What We Feel | Frederick Buechner's latest book is one of his best. (July 29, 2002)

The Great Inflatable Shark Hunt | A report from the Christian Booksellers Association convention in Anaheim. (July 22, 2002)

Why Evangelicals Can't Opt Out of Political Engagement | Remembering Jeremiah Evarts and Samuel Worcester. (July 19, 2002)

The Pledge Controversy | Asking the wrong questions? (July 8, 2002)

Reading Danny Pearl | How would the murdered journalist want to be remembered? (July 1, 2002)

A Cry for Help | Sudanese Christians gather in Houston and ask for U.S. support. (June 17, 2002)

Agrarians of the World, Unite! | Wendell Berry's vision, and how Christians should respond to it. (June 10, 2002)

Stop, Drop, and Cover … | Then hack your lungs out and die. (June 3, 2002)

Death of an Evolutionist | RIP Stephen Jay Gould. (May 31, 2002)

Closing The X-Files … | … with the sign of the Cross. (May 20, 2002)

And the Next Thing Is … | Marxism (or not). (May 13, 2002)

God Bless the Eliminator | Mother Jones magazine makes known a shocking discovery: evangelicals are sending missionaries to Muslim countries! (May 6, 2002)

'A Peculiar People' | The uniqueness of the Jews. (April 29, 2002)

'Nebuchadnezzar My Slave' | Was the Holocaust God's will? (April 15, 2002)

'In the Beginning Was the Holocaust'? | Blasphemy, rage, memory, and meaning of the Shoah. (April 8, 2002)

The Gospel According to Biff | A conversation with novelist Christopher Moore. (April 1, 2002)

Baseball 2002 Preview | Part 2: Saving the game? (March 25, 2002)

The State of the Game | After one of the best World Series ever, baseball faces a crisis. (March 18, 2002)

America's Homegrown Islam—and Its Prophet | The strange story of Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam and onetime mentor of Malcolm X. (Mar. 11, 2002)

'Must Be Superstition' | Rediscovering spiritual reality. (Mar. 4, 2002)

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August (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46