Last week, some 2,000 pilgrims converged at Calvin College for the every-other-year gathering known as the Festival of Faith & Writing. By Saturday night, when Walter Wangerin (who is fighting what looks like terminal cancer but whose passion for the word—and the Word—is undiminished) concluded his exhortation to writers—Tell the truth! Give voice to the voiceless!—and then pronounced a heartfelt benediction, all of those travelers had enjoyed a three-day literary feast, with more courses than a medieval banquet.

You couldn't take it all in, of course, and plenty of regulars come as much for the talk with fellow readers and writers as for the official program. But many of the sessions were full to bursting, and the lineup of keynoters drew big crowds. On Thursday night, alas, I had to miss Alice McDermott (I was at Eyekons—the gallery opened recently by Phil Schaafsma to create a space for Christian art—to hear the artist Makoto Fujimura talk about some of his work), but I heard good reports from others who caught her lecture (including my wife Wendy), and I intend to order the recording of it.

I won't be ordering a copy of Salman Rushdie's talk from Friday night. For the first five minutes or so, he was witty, but he rambled for the rest of the hour, showing only flashes of brilliance, above all in an exuberant riff on the depiction of himself in an Islamist film where he figured as the villain. His conclusion sounded very much like Richard Rorty; as Susan Van Zanten Gallagher observed in a summing up of the festival, who would have guessed that at heart Rushdie is an American liberal democrat? Lautreamont must have been rolling over in his grave. Rushdie gave a better impression Saturday morning ...