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"What do you do about sin?" I asked, meaning, hey, this sure doesn't feel like a new heaven and new earth.

Ed seemed like a nice guy—albeit one who doesn't understand the genre of the apocalyptic—but in his answer, and in the conversation that followed, we were pretty much talking past each other. So I moved on, without asking about that half a thesis, and made one last attempt to locate the elusive inflatable shark.

I finally found the shark booth just before I had to leave, only to learn that they were all out. I turned away disappointed and, for some reason, a passage from W.B. Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium" came to mind as I was heading out the door:

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is;

Maybe not. But it knows what it wants.

Jeremy Lott is the 2002 Burton C. Gray Memorial Intern for Reason magazine.

Copyright © 2002 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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

Earlier Books & Culture Corners on CBA include:

Looking for the Soul of CBA | Nearly anything that can be said about Christian publishing is true to some extent, thanks to the industry's ever-enlarging territory. (July 16, 2001)

Books & Culture Corner: The Culture of Euphemism | A dispatch from the Christian Booksellers Association convention. (July 17, 2000)

Other Christianity Today articles that have addressed the state of the Christian book industry include:

No Secrets about Agents, Man | Did an author's business arrangement blind him to important questions about Christian publishing? (June 10, 2002)

No Longer Left Behind | An insider's look at how Christian books are agented, acquired, packaged, branded, and sold in today's marketplace. (April 12, 2002)

Dead Authors Society | We're no longer interested in tasting death but only little morsels of cheer. (Mar. 28, 2001)

Behold the Power of Cheese | A dispatch from the Christian Booksellers Association (July 12, 2000)

Don't Blame the Publishers! | Publishers are not forcing shallow books on an unwilling community. (Feb. 9, 1998)

World magazine criticized "how bumper stickers, stuffed animals, and retail kitsch are squeezing the books out of Christian bookstores" in its July 1, 2000 issue. But it's not as harsh as its July 12, 1997 cover story, "Whatever Happened to Christian Publishing?" (which was itself scrutinized in Books & Culture [print only]).

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

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)

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July (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46