GOD IS NOT ONE by Stephen Prothero and MAN SEEKS GOD by Eric Weiner

Last year when Matt, the adult religious ed director at St. Mike's Catholic Church, asked the Wednesday morning class what they'd like to study next, the response was nearly unanimous - other religions.

St. Mike's is in Wheaton, Illinois, and Wheaton used to be called the evangelical Vatican (it now vies with Colorado Springs for that title). Wheaton is in DuPage County, which is roughly two-thirds Catholic. But the heavily Christian western suburbs of Chicago are changing. Today DuPage County, though still the home of hundreds of Christian churches, also has four Muslim mosques, six Hindu temples, an Arya Samaj center, a Buddhist temple, a Buddhist meditation center, two synagogues, and the headquarters of the Theosophical Society. These people are our neighbors, our coworkers, our children's classmates. No wonder we want to learn more about them.

Thanks to the class, I've gotten acquainted with Stephen Prothero's outstanding survey, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (2010). Prothero's thesis runs counter to the prevailing wisdom, at least in the West. No, he argues, the world's major religions are not all essentially the same. They do not all lead to the same place. They do not "make up one big, happy family." "This is a lovely sentiment," Prothero writes, "but it is dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue." Intended to increase tolerance, such wishful thinking about other religions can actually lead to more terrorism, more war.

Prothero, who describes himself as "religiously confused," does not argue for the superiority of one religion over another. His aim is not to proselytize but to increase clarity and understanding. He does this by looking at how each religion answers the big questions: "Here we are in these human bodies. What now? What next? What are we to become?" "Each religion," he writes, articulates

a problem;

a solution to this problem, which also serves as the religious goal;

a technique (or techniques) for moving from this problem to this solution; and

an exemplar (or exemplars) who chart this path from problem to solution.

Choosing eight religions based on their numeric and historical importance, he then devotes separate chapters to each: Islam, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoruba religion, Judaism, and Daoism, with "a brief coda" on atheism. The chapters can be read in any order. Last night I delved into Confucianism, about which I know almost nothing. Oops--Prothero says it's been more influential than any other religion except Islam and Christianity. In 30 pages, he summarizes its history, its teachings, and its influence (especially in the West). He also made me laugh out loud more than once. Here is a teacher who can impart an amazing amount of information while holding my attention, not an easy task.

God Is Not One is a great introduction for people interested in other religions' history, teachings, and practices. If that's more than you want to know but you'd still like to find out how various religions might feel to a Western observer, try Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine (2011). It offers significantly less information, being almost entirely experience oriented; but it's fascinating and funny and might even inspire you to go on and read Prothero's book.

Eric Weiner (channeling Prothero?) describes himself as a "Confusionist" and does not accept "the politically correct belief that all religions are equally valid":

I find this extraordinary. Would we say that about anything else? Would we say that all forms of government, be it totalitarian or democracy, were equally true and good? Would we say that all corporations are equally true and good? Would we say that all toaster ovens are equally true and good? Yet when it comes to religion we jettison our powers of discernment. Saying all religions are equally true and good is like saying none are.

He does not argue in favor of the truer and better, however, because--as a health crisis dramatically showed him--he doesn't know who his God is. So he grabs a notebook and his passport and sets off to find God.

Interested mostly in religious experience, he spends time with touchy-feely subgroups of some of the world's major religions (and a few minor ones): Islam (Sufism) in Mendocino, CA, and Istanbul, Turkey; Buddhism in Kathmandu; Christianity (Franciscans) in the Bronx, NY; Raëlism (this would be the world's largest UFO-based religion) in Las Vegas, NV; Taoism in Wuhan, China; Wicca in Seattle, WA; Shamanism in Beltsville, MD; and--I'm guessing this is his personal favorite--Judaism (Kabbalah) in Tzfat, Israel.

The result is a crazy melange of personal memoir, travel writing, religion, and journalism--and it works. Weiner's previous book, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World (2008), made the New York Times bestseller list and collected a heap of awards. I wouldn't be surprised if Man Seeks God does the same.

Why Brits wish they could buy gas in Chicago

U.S. gas prices are soaring. The average for low grade unleaded is now $4.00/gallon, and the highest - $4.50/gallon - is right next door in Chicago (out here in the burbs, it's more like $4.39).

Let us briefly interrupt our hyperventilating to consider how our gas prices compare with, say, petrol prices in the UK.

To do this, we'll have to convert liters into US gallons, which, by the way, are different from UK gallons (1 liter = .2642 U.S. gallons) and US gallons into liters (1 US gallon = 3.7854 liters). We'll also have to convert British pounds sterling into US dollars (£1 = $1.6476 today) and US dollars into British pounds sterling ($1 = £0.6069). And then we do some math.

The result: If the UK had petrol for $4.00/gallon, they would be paying £0.64/liter. However, the UK average price for low grade unleaded on May 10 was more than twice that much: £1.37/liter.

Or, looked at another way, if we in the US had to pay UK prices for gas, we'd be paying $8.54 per gallon.

UK prices aren't exceptionally high, by the way: all over Europe, prices are similar.

How do Europeans cope? They drive smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. They invest in excellent public transit. They live closer to work. Many of them ride bikes or walk. (The extra exercise not only saves gas; it may also be one reason why Europeans tend to be healthier than Americans.) And, of course, they tighten their belts - their gas prices have been soaring too.

MOVING MILLIONS by Jeffrey Kaye

Last August I reviewed Moving Millions for Christian Century magazine and wrote a brief note about the book here. My full review was published in their January 11, 2011, issue and is available to subscribers here. CC would like us all to subscribe, of course. In case you want to try before you buy, however, here's the review as I submitted it to them. Please do not repost it: CC holds the copyright. Good news: the friends I mention in the first paragraph have been told their green cards are on the way.

The Strangers Within Our Gates
Moving Millions: How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration
by Jeffrey Kaye
Wiley, 310 pp., $27.95

When I hear the word immigration, I immediately think of friends, refugees from a war-torn country, who have spent more than 20 years and 30 thousand dollars trying to become legal U.S. residents, to no avail.

I then think of Arizona relatives, who—convinced that illegal immigration increases crime, taxes, and unemployment—strongly support their state’s recent efforts to ferret out undocumented immigrants and send them back home.

My refugee friends and Arizona relatives agree about one thing: America’s immigration system is broken. President Obama, whose “path to citizenship” plan would help my friends, has said so. So has Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who wants to “secure the borders” Arizona-style, even if it would mean sending people like my friends back into danger.

Everyone knows that the United States needs to fix immigration. Nobody knows how to do it.

Jeffrey Kaye doesn’t know how to do it either, but his fascinating study of the economic and political forces affecting immigration should be required reading for anyone likely to express an opinion on the topic.

A freelance journalist who reports for the PBS NewsHour, Kaye looks at immigration through stories about immigrants and those who hire them, interviews with political and business figures, interesting (and often ironic) historical parallels, and mountains of data. Though he clearly disagrees with many current attempts to regulate immigration, he never minimizes the complexity of the world-wide problem. Rather than advocating for a particular solution, he provides the context that is usually missing from news accounts, op-ed pieces, and political oratory.

Migration is not new, Kaye points out: “From the epic Exodus tale in the Bible to the story of Odysseus, our myths and legends attest to mobility as a central theme in the human saga.” Kaye’s own ancestors moved from Poland to England in the late 1800s, and in 1963 he moved with his family from London to Los Angeles.

Panic over immigration is not new either. A century ago, as boats full of Italians, Germans, Irish, and Eastern Europeans were docking at Ellis Island, newspapers accused the newly arrived of causing “wasteful administration of public funds,” increasing violence and crime, taking American’s jobs, and refusing to learn English—exactly what some of those immigrants’ descendants are saying about Mexican immigrants today.

What’s new, says Kaye, are “the globally interconnected business engines that promote and support” migration, not just in the United States, which has more immigrants than any other nation, but also in the more than 60 nations whose percentage of immigrants surpasses our own, and in the even greater number of nations whose citizens are heading out to greener pastures.

It’s easy to empathize with desperately poor people who cross seas and borders in order to provide for their families. According to Kaye, however, the poverty of individual families is only one factor in today’s immigration patterns. Business practices also play a major role in enticing people to leave their homelands.

In today’s global economy, businesses need a cheap, movable, disposable work force, and immigrants fill the bill. Despite low pay and, often, miserable working conditions, they grow, process, harvest, and serve most of the world’s food. They also build, repair, and maintain many of the world’s buildings. At the other end of the socio-economic scale, they provide a significant percentage of highly educated workers in the health-care and technology industries. Thanks to immigrants, businesses grow and consumers enjoy low prices. What would developed nations do without them?

For that matter, what would developing nations do without the money that immigrants send to their families back home—in 2008, $45 billion to India, $34.5 billion to China, $26.2 billion to Mexico, $18.3 billion to the Philippines? It is not surprising that “a business infrastructure trains, recruits, and markets Filipino workers the way that banana republics used to cultivate crops,” or that global recruitment enterprises ranging from publicly traded companies to illegal smugglers “comprise a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry.”

If business decisions entice immigrants to cross borders, government policies often drive them to leave their homes. Trade policies that look good for a developed country may devastate its poorer neighbors. NAFTA, for example, jointly signed by the United States, Canada, and Mexico, drove down the price of corn and ruined hundreds of thousands of Mexican peasants. And even efforts to help may have unintended consequences: a U.S. loan intended to stabilize the Mexican peso led to the “bankruptcy of hundreds of thousands of companies,... the disappearance of several million jobs,” and approximately six million additional immigrants to the United States.

So what are poverty-stricken families supposed to do when government agreements remove their source of income, an industry in another country offers wages several times higher than they could earn at home, and a business in their own country offers to ferry them to the promised land—legally in some cases, illegally in many others?

Obviously, they migrate. “Build walls, and people will go over, around, or under them,” Kaye writes. “Hire border guards, and smugglers will bribe them. Step up patrols, and migrants will find alternate routes. Provide better-paying jobs, and workers will get to them. Migration will not be stopped.”

And yet migration has a dark side. As Kaye notes, businesses that hire immigrants benefit from cheap labor, but native-born workers may then fear for their jobs. Countries that send immigrants benefit from huge cash inflows, but they may lose their best, brightest, and hardest-working citizens. Many immigrants—if they make it alive across the seas, mountains, and deserts separating them from their destinations—find better-paying jobs abroad, but they may spend years separated from their loved ones and are often ruthlessly exploited by their employers.

Wouldn’t it be better if everybody just stayed home?

Maybe, Kaye says, but only if massive income disparities between the world’s haves and have-nots were eliminated or reduced, and that’s not going to happen anytime soon. So long as businesses and governments think of immigrants as mobile resources, current migration patterns will continue. After all, immigration helps businesses prosper and lets governments ignore their thorniest problems:

Where sending nations should be addressing such urgent needs as developing their economies and finding ways to keep families and communities together, instead, outflows of migrants let them off the hook. By the same token, in destination countries, migration reduces the incentive to create sustainable economies that are able and willing to tap their own resources.

Given the global context of migration, can America fix—or at least improve—its broken system? Kaye is not optimistic. Our current approach is dysfunctional: though our economic health depends on our more than 12 million undocumented immigrants, we pay them poorly, deny them benefits, and force them to live in fear of deportation. Yet change is impeded by “a messed-up political standoff.”

If Kaye were a prophet, he might say that “the alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself” (Leviticus 19:34). Instead, he simply observes that, “in the final analysis, how we respond to migration and how we treat the strangers among us are reflections of our connections to humanity.”

WERE YOU BORN ON THE WRONG CONTINENT? by Thomas Geoghegan

Front

Back

Was I born on the wrong continent? Well, if you're talking bread, I'll definitely opt for the baguette. But Geoghegan (rhymes with "Reagan") says little about food, alas, in this comparison between American and Western European - mostly German - lifestyles. Instead, he looks at work, leisure, taxes, benefits, labor, management, social policy...

Don't let your eyes glaze over just yet. Geoghegan is a delightfully quirky writer who manages to convey a lot of information while making you think you're reading a chatty and often humorous travel book. Indeed, travel writing inspires him:

For years I read the front page [of the New York Times] about European unemployment, the collapse of social democracy, etc. But then I'd flip to the travel page and get the real news, the news that they don't dare put on page one, that every year in Europe, the whole place keeps getting nicer.

Geoghegan, a Chicago labor lawyer, made several extended trips to France, Switzerland, and Germany to study European socialism. He gives his conclusion in the preface:

The cover of the February 16, 2009, Newsweek announced: "WE ARE ALL SOCIALISTS NOW." The argument is that U.S. government spending is nearly as high as Europe's. A decade ago, the U.S. government was spending 34.3 percent of GDP, compared with 48.2 percent in the "euro-zone," which is Europe without the UK. Now, while the Continent is at 47 percent, we have gone up to 40.

And, in fact, I think the U.S. will close the gap. But in a sense, the more we spend, the less socialist we become. For whether it is health care or education, we use the private market to pay for the distribution of public goods. In other words, we pay socialist-type taxes so that the private insurance companies, drug companies, and, yes, doctors can profiteer.

That's the crisis of our time: we're paying for European-type socialism, without getting the equivalent payback.

Much of the rest of the book describes the European payback (and this will be counter-intuitive to a lot of American readers): Fewer poverty-stricken seniors and children. Six weeks' vacation time plus more paid holidays. Cheaper higher education, health care, day care, concerts. Paid maternity and paternity leave. Higher old-age pensions. Nursing-home benefits. Cleaner, faster, more readily available public transportation. More efficient land-use planning. Lower unemployment. More successful small businesses.

The only area in which the U.S. outshines its European counterparts is GDP - and Geoghegan offers fascinating observations as to why that actually may be making American lives more frantic and yes, even more expensive than the lives of European socialists.

Ironically, some of the structures that make German socialism work were developed by Americans during the occupation after World War II. Rather than the authoritarian, top-down socialism of the Nazis, the occupiers insisted on a bottom-up socialism where the workers themselves would have a big influence in organizational management. As a result, German businesses are much more democratically run than American businesses, who never adopted the practices themselves.

And some of the German bureaucratic regulation that Americans love to mock, says Geoghegan, has enabled Germany to become a major exporter of durable goods - really durable ones like Mercedes and BMWs - even as the U.S. has been ramping up its trade deficit. In fact, while the U.S. is increasing its debt by $1 trillion a year, Germany has no net external debt - and in fact vies with China for first place in world exports, an amazing feat for a country that has 82 million people compared with China's 1.3 billion. And yet "Americans still seem unaware that it's not just East Asia but the socialist Europeans who have outcompeted us in global markets as we sink deeper into debt."

So was Geoghegan born on the wrong continent? I don't think so. Like T.R. Reid, author of The Healing of America (a wonderfully enlightening book comparing health-care systems in various developed nations), Geoghehan wants us Americans to stop thinking we're best at everything, to start paying attention to how other countries handle vexing problems similar to our own, and to adapt their best solutions to our situation in ways that will give us happier, healthier lives. Our house is on fire, there's a fire station across the street, yet we're trying to fight the fire with buckets of water - or oil. "I know on the right and even in the center I am dismissed as a European-style liberal," he writes. "But my question for those on the right is as follows: do they care about the sovereignty of our country? Then they better start taking seriously what the Europeans do."

What vegetarians eat on vacation

It used to be really hard to eat vegetarian while traveling, especially if you were traveling from Washington to Illinois with vegetarian children who refused to eat any food that might have been cooked on a griddle that may also have been used for hamburgers (I speak from experience).

In the thirty years since that stressful trip, America's food tastes have changed. It's now almost easier to eat vegetarian in a restaurant than at home. Even in barbecue-loving Texas, where we just spent nine days.

The easiest way to do it? Eat ethnic.

We ate Italian at Hasta la Pasta and Vespaio Enoteca, Colombian at La Palma de Cera, Ethiopian at Blue Nile, Chinese (sort of) at Panda Express, Mexican at Los Cucos and El Chile, Thai at Thai Kitchen, Middle Eastern at Pita Pit, and Indian at Udipi Café. The winner: La Palma de Cera (Katy) - and if you go there, you must try the flan, which is the best we've ever tasted. Runners-up: El Chile (Austin) and Blue Nile (Houston).

In addition, we ate lentil soup, tamales, and an eggplant sandwich at the delightful Hyde Park Bar and Grill, which despite its name has a range of vegetarian options; strange but tasty concoctions at the vegan bar in Austin's gigantic mothership Whole Foods store, pancakes and sweet potato hash at the famed Kerbey Lane Café, sandwiches and fresh fruit at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center café, and tilapia and green beans at Pappadeaux in Houston's Hobby airport. One evening we bought stuffed portabella mushrooms, Greek potato salad, and green beans at Whole Foods and ate dinner in our apartment. Another evening we went to Central Market and brought home herbed risotto croquettes, cauliflower in truffled oil, and balsamic glazed yams.

We never went hungry. We never had trouble finding good, affordable food.

Eating while traveling would probably be more difficult if we were vegans. We cheerfully eat dairy products and eggs (though we do our best to buy them from organic farms, or at least from farms that give their cows and chickens pasture time). We also eat a little fish. The term for what we are seems to be pescetarian, though we prefer a friend's neologism: vegequarium (others might call us part-time vegetarians or pseudovegetarians: you can read a vegetarian taxonomy here). We had tilapia at the Colombian restaurant as well as at the airport, and David had fish tacos at Los Cucos. Most of our meals, however, were lacto-ovo-vegetarian.

Why eat vegetarian while traveling? Well, if you're a committed vegetarian, that's what you do. But even if you aren't, there are advantages to making some of your restaurant meals vegetarian. Take your pick:

• Reduce your fat intake, which always seems higher in restaurants.
• Lower your chances of encountering food-borne bacteria.
• Enjoy interesting new tastes, especially if you go ethnic.
• Feel better, thanks to all those fruits and veggies.
• Save money.
• Save the planet.

Also, the vegetarian selections are often very, very good.

ALMOST FRENCH by Sarah Turnbull - and other books by people who straddle two cultures

Sarah Turnbull's Almost French is neither new (copyright 2002) nor unique, but it's an excellent example of a genre that never fails to attract me.

The set-up: an English-speaking writer falls in love with a foreign place or person, usually non-English speaking. Often impulsively, the English-speaker leaves home and moves to a country whose customs are quite different from his or her own.

At first the writer is thrilled and dazzled. Then reality sets in, and he or she discovers how very different the two cultures are. Food usually plays a major role in the story, as - often - does home purchase and repair.

Inevitably, the displaced Anglophone writes a memoir.

Well, it worked for Peter Mayle, an English marketer whose steady stream of books beginning with A Year in Provence set high standards for the genre. It also works for Sarah Turnbull, an Australian journalist who, entranced by a Frenchman she met in Romania, goes to Paris to visit him for a month. That was in 1994, and, as far as I know, she is still there.

One reason these two authors succeed at this genre is that neither is a navel-gazer. They write about their experiences, to be sure, but their focus is on France - the rural south for Mayle, contemporary Paris for Turnbull. Her life as an ex-pat is often lonely. Because at first she does not understand the French language, social customs, dress codes, family traditions, bureaucracy, or ways of getting around red tape, she is frequently frustrated.

At the same time, she loves "the heart-stopping beauty of Paris," its "history and tradition, passion and beauty, art and inspiration - everything that makes France a measure of civilized life." More prosaically, she also loves her sixth-floor walk-up apartment, good coffee and croissants, and even the neighborhood drunks who show "the rich diversity of life within a small circumference." She has a love-hate relationship with France, she confesses, "but it's charged with so much mystery, longing and that French specialty - séduction - that we can't resist coming back for more."

Nor can I resist coming back for more books about people who follow their dreams and become ex-pats in countries they will never quite understand. This is probably because I've had a taste of the ex-pat experience myself: as a teenager, I studied for a year in France, and in middle age, I worked for a British company. My best friend in grade school moved to Florence nearly 40 years ago and has lived there ever since. One daughter has studied and lived in Bogotà and Taipei; the other daughter has studied in Munich and Salzberg. A granddaughter is hoping to study in China year after next. My husband and I occasionally talk about retiring, at least for a year or two, in a foreign country (aren't new experiences supposed to keep brain cells young?). Given the current high price of the Euro, however, it probably won't be France or Italy.

Meanwhile, I love to read about people who straddle two cultures. Here's a list of other bicultural memoirs I've enjoyed.

• Bryson, Bill. Notes from a Small Island. Bryson, an American, lived for 20 years in the U.K. with his British wife. Here he describes his farewell tour before moving back to the U.S.
• Child, Julia. My Life in France. Love, food, France, and the indomitable Julia Child. What could be better?
• De Blasi, Marlena. The Lady in the Palazzo and various other memoirs about an American woman in Italy. Lavish, sensual, self-absorbed.
• Gopnik, Adam. Paris to the Moon. New Yorker essayist takes family to live in Paris for five years. Excellent and often very funny reportage.
• Keenan, Brigid. Diplomatic Baggage. Hilarious tales by a diplomat's wife who has been an ex-pat on several continents.
• Lenard, Yvone. The Magic of Provence.  Lenard, a French ex-pat who spent most of her adult life in California, writes about moving back to France. Instead of struggling for years (like most authors in this genre) to restore an old house, she and her husband simply hire a contractor and go back to California. When they return, their house is all ready for them. Now that is magic.
• Mayes, Frances. Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany. Mayes is an American woman in Italy and Mayles is a British man in France, but otherwise their stories are similar.
• Robb, Peter. Midnight in Sicily. Robb, an Australian, lived in Sicily for 14 years. Here he looks at Sicilian food, history, politics, and organized crime. Among other things.
• Sanders, Michael S. From Here You Can't See Paris. An American spends a year writing about a village and its restaurant in rural southwestern France.
• Simeti, Mary Taylor. On Persephone's Island. American-born Simeti, now in her 70s, married an Italian professor in 1964 and still lives in Sicily. This now-classic ex-pat memoir was first published in 1986.

EAT PRAY LOVE, the movie

No, the Eat Pray Love DVD isn't out yet, but if attendance this afternoon at Cinemark Seven Bridges is any indication, it won't be in theaters too much longer.

Not that it's an unpleasant movie. I believe the nine of us middle-aged ladies in theater 7 all had a fine time. Some of us even talked back to the screen. Nobody snored, even though there was not a single chase scene.

It's just that there's nothing in the movie to warrant the adulation that has kept the book of almost the same name (commas extra) on the New York Times best-seller list for 184 weeks. Not even Julia Roberts, who at 42 is about 10 years too old to play Liz - though if you need a reason to see the movie, girls, Javier Bardem could provide it. My friend and I had been making mmmm, mmmm noises during the preview of the upcoming George Clooney film, but as soon as we saw Javier, we completely forgot about George.

Still, Bardem, 41, is about 7 years too young to play Felipe, the Brazilian to whom Liz eventually succumbs. This is delightful, actually, since so many movies pair nubile young things with actors past their prime and expect female viewers to suspend disbelief. It is not at all hard to believe that Roberts could fall for Bardem.

But their romance is only part of the movie, and not the longest part. Before we ever meet sexy Felipe, we have to get through Liz's marriage, her subsequent boyfriend, her trip to Italy, her trip to India, and the first part of her trip to Bali. In an NPR review titled "The 'Eat Pray Love' Problem: How Movie Liz Ruined the Story of Book Liz," Linda Holmes writes:

Two hours and 20 minutes is simply far too long for this story. By the time Elizabeth Gilbert — or, rather, the person I will call "Movie Liz," to distinguish her from both Book Liz and actual Elizabeth Gilbert in real life — finishes up in Italy, the thought that there are two entire countries left for her to visit is like realizing at the close of a one-hour doctor's appointment that the doctor has only looked in one ear.

Too many shots of pasta, Holmes suggests. Besides, I would add, the food was poorly chosen. Italy has a marvelously varied cuisine, but from this movie you might think it was one long chain of Pizza Huts.

The whole Italy portion, in fact, is a rapid succession of clichés : primitive living conditions, lecherous young men, Neapolitan clotheslines, rude gestures. The Asian portions are equally stereotypical. In India we see squalid cities and a Bollywood wedding, while in Bali we meet expats and native healers.

Of course Liz, not the countries or the other characters, is the center of attention. Befriending people everywhere she goes - natives and other tourists - she shows that she's not really a narcissist (even though the conversations are all about her). She come uncomfortably close to looking like a colonialist, though, when she gives one grateful woman a house.

In the end, Liz thinks she has learned something, but I had a hard time telling what it was. I will grant, however, that her third man is better looking, sexier, and much, much richer than the first two.

When Eat, Pray, Love was published four years ago, readers either loved it or hated it. The ones who hated it aren't going to go to this movie anyway. Unfortunately, many of the ones who loved it are likely to walk out of the theater saying, "I'm going to have to go back and reread that book. I thought there was a lot more to it than that."

If that's what you plan to do, I'd recommend taking a look at Gilbert's next book too. Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage got neither the rave reviews nor the astronomical sales of the first book, but it updates Liz's story and leaves her in a better place. My review of it is here.

Review of "Committed": Elizabeth Gilbert on family values

Elizabeth Gilbert's 2006 mega-best-seller Eat, Pray, Love is a rambling memoir-travelogue in which Gilbert leaves her husband, is dumped by her lover, travels to Italy, India, and Indonesia studying food and spirituality, and ends up in bed with a Brazilian she calls Felipe. In her current book, Committed, Elizabeth marries Felipe. This is not a spoiler: the cover gives away the ending. The interest lies in how she gets there--kicking and screaming, apparently, but also interviewing everyone she meets as she travels in Southeast Asia; reading up on the history, sociology, and maintenance of marriage; and interweaving her studies with her own adventures and roller-coaster emotions.

If you're looking for a linear account of marriage through the ages, you'd do better with Stephanie Coontz's Marriage, A History (I reviewed it here). For straight memoir about a marriage that not only began, but lasted, try the late Madeleine L'Engle's Two-Part Invention. Still, there are good reasons to read Committed, even if you haven't read--or didn't much like--Eat, Pray, Love. Though both books are memoirs, the newer one is a lot less self-absorbed. Gilbert, who is now 40, seems finally to have emerged from adolescence and can now look outward, beyond her navel. Fortunately for her fans, she has retained her slightly wacky writing style.

In Committed, Gilbert offers interesting information that could lead to wisdom, such as:

• Why it is inadvisable to be infatuated with one's beloved
• How best to guard against adultery
• What characteristics make a good marriage more likely
• Why friends and family should come to your wedding
• Why self-sacrifice is not necessarily a bad thing
• Why aunties are important
  
• How to improve a relationship by doing things independently
• Why marriage is ultimately a subversive act

It ain't necessarily so

She also challenges a lot of commonly held beliefs. None of the following statements, for example, is necessarily true:

• America welcomes immigrants
• The most enduring marriages are based on love
• High expectations bring success
• Happiness is increased by having lots of choices
• Historically, marriage has always been a bond between one man and one woman
• Marriage is a religious institution
• Marriage is better for women than for men
• Traditional Christianity is pro-family

Hold the horses! Isn't Christianity practically defined by family values? Au contraire, says Gilbert:

For approximately ten centuries, Christianity itself did not see marriage as being either holy or sanctified. Marriage was certainly not modeled as the ideal state of moral being. On the contrary, the early Christian fathers regarded the habit of marriage as a somewhat repugnant worldly affair that had everything to do with sex and females and taxes and property, and nothing whatsoever to do with higher concerns of divinity.... For the first thousand or so years of Christian history, the church regarded monogamous marriage as marginally less wicked than flat-out whoring--but only very marginally.

She exaggerates, of course. Quoting Jesus on the need to reject family (Luke 14.26) and Paul on avoiding marriage if possible (1 Corinthians 7.8-9), she neglects to mention Jesus' provision of fine wine for the wedding at Cana (John 2.1-11) or the apostolic church's condemnation of ascetics who forbade, among other things, marriage (1 Timothy 4:1-3). Nor does she mention that the church required its leaders to be not only monogamously married but also parents (1 Timothy 3, Titus 1). And she completely ignores Ephesians 5.21-33, where the love of husband and wife is likened to the love of Christ for the church.

Still, she's closer to the truth than a lot of present-day Christians realize. For a scholarly presentation of the early church's sorry attitudes about the body, sex, women, and procreation, read Peter Brown's The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (my Books and Culture review of Brown and two other books is here). The sad fact is, the early church quickly abandoned its sensible Jewish heritage with its strong sense of family. Instead, it adopted views owing more to Gnostic influences than to the Hebrew scriptures. As Gilbert points out, most early and medieval Christians (including priests, by the way) went ahead and married anyway, but celibacy became the ideal--and the requirement for high churchly office.

However, I disagree with her when she characterizes Paul's advice to the unmarried--"it is better to marry than to burn"--as "perhaps the most begrudging endorsement of matrimony in human history." My favorite begrudging endorsement is from Jerome, a fourth-century saint, Bible translator, and doctor of the church. In a letter to one of his female friends, he wrote: "I praise wedlock, I praise marriage, but it is because they give me virgins. I gather the rose from the thorns, the gold from the earth, the pearl from the shell."

The verdict

Committed is enjoyable, informational, thought-provoking, and occasionally wise. To learn more about it, read one of these fine reviews:

• "Talk, Research, Marry" by Cindy Crosby in Christianity Today magazine
• "Hitched" by Ariel Levy in the New Yorker
• "Eat, Pray, Marry" by Curtis Sittenfeld in the New York Times

Review: Travel as a Political Act

Rick Steves was a teenager when he first traveled overseas. Visiting a park in Norway with his parents, he had an epiphany:

Right there, my 14-year-old egocentric worldview took a huge hit. I thought, "Wow, those parents love their kids as much as my parents love me. This planet is home to billions of equally lovable children of God." I've carried that understanding with me in my travels ever since.

Now famous for his travelogues on public television, his guided tours of Europe, and his guidebook collections including the constantly updated Europe Through the Back Door, Steves is somewhat less well known for his devout Lutheran faith and his devotion to liberalizing America's drug laws. All of these interests coalesce in his new book, Travel as a Political Act.

Steves's message is simple: Go to other countries. Listen to the people who live there. Learn other ways of seeing and doing that you might not have considered before. Some of these ways are better than the ones we're used to. Some could help us make our country a better place.

America is a great and innovative nation that the world understandably looks to for leadership [he writes]. But other nations have some pretty good ideas, too. By learning from our travels and bringing these ideas home, we can make our nation even stronger. As a nation of immigrants whose very origin is based on the power of diversity ("out of many, one"), this should come naturally to us ... and be celebrated.

The book consists of eight essays drawing on his travels not only in Western Europe but also in the Balkans, Turkey, North Africa, Central America, and Iran (click here to watch his hour-long presentation on "the most fascinating and surprising land I've ever visited"). One thread unites the chapters: Steves's plea to us Americans to open our minds, ears, and hearts to people of other cultures and to learn to see things from their perspective. "Growing up in the U.S.," he writes, "I was told over and over how smart, generous, and free we were. Travel has taught me that the vast majority of humanity is raised with a different view of America."

I'm not a world traveler like Rick Steves but, beginning right after my sixteenth birthday, I've gone to school in France and worked in the U.K. and visited most of the Western European countries as well as Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Taiwan, and Thailand. I've never, ever been treated rudely because I'm an American, but I've been startled to catch glimpses of what some non-Americans think of the American way of life.

I've watched anti-American banners parading down the street at a Swiss May Day parade, seen British TV political adverts warning that the opposition party might instigate a health-care policy as dreadful as America's, listened to an entire sermon in an English country church lambasting American evangelical religion, and heard German conservative evangelical politicians express disbelief and fury at the actions of George W. Bush. To me, Rick Steves's observations about how people of other nations view us ring true.

Rather than dominating other nations, Steves believes, we should listen to them and learn from them. A self-avowed capitalist (he runs a business, after all), he nevertheless sees value in some of Europe's social programs and is horrified by what U.S. businesses have done to Central America. An unapologetic Christian, he is comfortable with secular Islamic--not Islamist--governments. Appalled by Iranian totalitarianism, he still finds common ground with people he meets and even explains why the omnipresent "Death to America" posters may not be quite as menacing as they seem. And he thinks Europe's ways of curbing drug use are much, much smarter than America's.

As the title indicates, Travel as a Political Act has a strong political slant, but it is also full of human interest stories and quirky factoids about other cultures (did you know that on October 24, less than three weeks from today, the average American will have worked as many hours as the average Western European works in an entire year?). Color photos on nearly every page add to the book's appeal. Steves hopes to appeal to people of all political persuasions, though I suspect he is preaching largely to the left-leaning, well-traveled choir.

One reviewer at amazon.com wrote Steves off as just another liberal from the Northwest who is clueless about how the rest of America thinks (she doesn't say if she has traveled outside the U.S.). It seems to me that Steves knows a lot about how Americans think--and he is terrified, because too many of our views are not based on reality or understanding. Only to the extent that we know how others think--those "billions of equally lovable children of God"--will we Americans be able to add to the world's peace, prosperity, and freedom.

Obama, Mohsin, and the importance of listening

This post was inspired by President Obama's Cairo speech, and specifically by a wonderful analysis of it by Richard Engel. I thought I'd tell you this up front, since I take a while to mention the speech.

Thursday evening I joined the public library’s contemporary book discussion group to talk about The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Pakistani novelist Hamid Mohsin’s brilliantly unsettling little book about a Pakistani Princeton grad who gives up a promising business career in the U.S. and returns to his family in Lahore. Easy to read in one evening, the book raises uncomfortable questions about East-West relations. Some participants in the book group hated it. They thought it was anti-American.

I didn't agree. Being from another country, the narrator sees things Americans take for granted, and some of the things he sees are not good. He has strong opinions about aspects of American politics and business, and he is critical of certain military decisions. At the same time, however, he loves New York, enjoys his American friends, and appreciates his Ivy League education. This is a book about conflict--not only between East and West, but also within the narrator's soul.

It is difficult to straddle two or more cultures. As the late Senator Paul Simon pointed out in his 1980 book The Tongue-Tied American, literal translations may have unintended hilarious meanings (e.g., it was hard to market the Chevy Nova in Spanish-speaking countries where no va means "it doesn't run"), and unless business people are fluent in their clients' language and at ease with their cultural expectations, they are always at a disadvantage in negotiations.

Isolated from the rest of the world on our big island, we Americans need repeated reminders that other people may have expectations, views, habits, standards, and hopes that differ markedly from our own--and that are perfectly reasonable from their point of view.

I thought I had learned that lesson at age 16, living in France during the Vietnam war when Americans were decidedly unpopular. But I had to relearn it at age 40, working for a successful British publisher that didn't edit or market books the way an American publisher would have done (more than once someone quoted to me George Bernard Shaw's famous wisecrack that "England and America are two countries separated by a common language"). At 60, I'm still learning, mostly through reading books like Mr Mohsin's.

The gap between East and West, of course, is much wider than that between the United States and France (hey, it's D-Day, and today the French adore us!). It is almost inconceivable to most Westerners that a woman might freely choose to wear the hijab, or that a nation might democratically elect a dictator, or that a culture might not want religious freedom. Most of us simply wouldn't know how to speak to people who differ that much from us. Unless, of course, we make an effort to find out what's important to them.

And that brings me, finally, to President Obama's speech Thursday in Cairo. With a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas, a stepfather from Indonesia, and grandparents in Hawaii, Obama has no illusions that the rest of the world either loves or envies Americans. He is painfully aware that much of the world--rightly or wrongly--sees Americans as arrogant, ignorant, irreligious, materialistic, and militaristic. Which is why, in Cairo, he spoke humbly, intelligently, and respectfully, focusing on our shared values and hope for peace.

"This is a huge break from the past," says Richard Engel, the NBC News chief foreign correspondent, who has lived in the Middle East for 12 years and speaks and reads Arabic fluently. In MSNBC's World Blog, he writes:

Former President George Bush was Al-Jazeera’s bête noire. Yesterday, one of the network’s guests remembered Bush as "a warmonger" who spoke "in a language of blood and killing." Another analyst compared the former president to Osama bin Laden.

"I don’t see much of a difference between Bush and Bin Laden," he said. "Both say, ‘You are either with us or against us.’"

In contrast, Al-Jazeera described Obama’s speech as "honest," "historic" and "deeply respectful."

I suspect a main reason Obama was so well received was that he – either by design or coincidence – successfully used the tools of Arabic rhetoric: flattery, history and religion. Simply put, Obama translated well into Arabic.

Engel notes Obama's knowledgeable use of Muslim religious terminology that communicates respect to a Muslim audience. He also mentions phrases Obama used--"the Holy Koran," "peace be upon them"--whose omission would have been perceived as socially incorrect or even blasphemy. His listeners, many of them, came skeptical but left singing his praises.

We Americans have plenty of catching up to do. More of us need to study the history and languages of non-Western countries. We need to encourage our young people to spend time living and working in other cultures. And indeed, we are making progress. Young-adult children of my friends are blogging from Vietnam, Uganda, and India; and I proudly report that my 14-year-old granddaughter just got a 90 in credit-by-exam for first-year high-school Chinese (her public school offers four years of Chinese language).

Americans don't have to be ugly. Most of us, in fact, aren't. The noisy, contentious ones draw a crowd--but the rest of us are quietly, respectfully observing and learning from our neighbors to the East. When we listen to them, we risk discovering that they don't like our country as much as we wish they would. But when enough of us really listen to them, some of them may begin to revise their opinion of us.

As a young Egyptian student said after the President's speech, "All we want as Muslims is for there to be a partnership. And he was seriously humble. Humility is important for us."

The Old but Green Parsonage

If you're interested in a vacation that combines scenic walks, good pubs, Arthurian legends, and theological chats over tea and biscuits--and is based on sound ecological principles--check out my friend Morag Reeve's new bed and breakfast, The Old Parsonage.

I met Morag when she was editorial director at Darton, Longman & Todd (London) and worked on projects with her after she moved to LionHudson (Oxford). She has inspired me with accounts of her walking holidays in Sicily and elsewhere, though I have yet to follow her example.

As a lifelong fan of Lerner and Loewe's Camelot (where winter exits March the second, on the dot!), I'm eager to spend time at her B&B. 2009, maybe? If you visit, give her my greetings!