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Hedges believes that for many people, one commandment-or its violation- will dominate their life. He writes of Beth Senturia, the "Phish head" who so idolized the band that she wasted a decade following it around; Bishop George Packard, the retired army chaplain whose soldiering began with hundreds of killings in Vietnam; H. R. Vargas, the angry ex-gang member who was abandoned at birth by an adulterous father; Karen Adey, caught in the covetous web of a self-help guru.

What all these stories manage to show, and show well, is that "no one … violated the commandments without tremendous anguish and no one suffered violations without great pain."

Readers may struggle with just how "uncluttered with piety" these stories are. In some cases, we probably should struggle. Hedges's Sabbath story is about a Jewish family that keeps Shabbat even though they are agnostic. While their secularized practice might fight materialism and self-indulgence, as Hedges asserts, it is a far cry from remembering God's creation of the world (Ex. 20:8-11) and redemption of Israel (Deut. 5:12-15).

More importantly, Hedges's morality is not rooted in Scripture or God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ, but in his intuition that love is the highest value. Intuition is his only recourse, since he believes that "the God of the Bible is ineffable, unknowable, hidden." The author obviously does not recognize that this same God is fully revealed in Jesus Christ, which leads to the book's greatest fault. Recognizing that we will all fail to keep the commandments perfectly, its advice appears to be that we repent of our sin and make our own atonement.

Thus Hedges is right that the covenant has been broken, but he is not able to proclaim the Good News that in Jesus Christ it has been repaired and fulfilled. Knowing that it has, we can read this un-pious book as a window on the human soul, as an indictment of U.S. society, and as an invitation to the work of evangelism.

D. Brent Laytham is associate professor of theology and ethics at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago.

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Losing Moses on the Freeway is available from Amazon.com and other book retailers.

More information is available from the publisher.

Yesterday, weblog commented on the Supreme Court's Ten Commandment's decisions, which allowed a monument in Texas, but not in Kentucky.

A collection of all of our Ten Commandments articles is available on our site.

For book lovers, our 2005 CT book awards are available online, along with our book awards for 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, and 1997, as well as our Books of the Twentieth Century. For other coverage or reviews, see our Books archive and the weekly Books & Culture Corner.

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July 2005, Vol. 49, No. 7