Recommended Reading

Today's column by Peter Steinfels is, of course, worth reading in full (here). Here's an excerpt:

New York Times
November 10, 2007

Beliefs

Q. Do You Believe in God? A. Yes, No and Well ...

By PETER STEINFELS

Do you believe in God? What will happen to you at death? Do you pray? Do you think religious believers are deluded?

Many people would hesitate to raise these questions at dinner. Antonio Monda, on the other hand, has been posing them for several years to cultural eminences like Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Daniel Libeskind, Derek Walcott, Spike Lee, Jonathan Franzen, David Lynch and Martin Scorsese.

When Mr. Monda interviewed Grace Paley two years before her death in August, she wondered why he wanted to talk about religion and her views on it. “I think it’s the most important subject of our time,” he said. “Rather, the most important of all times.”

She parried, “Are you serious?” Their exchange opens one of the most moving of the 18 interviews in “Do You Believe? Conversations on God and Religion,” just published by Vintage as a paperback original.

. . .

[Monda] asked Ms. Paley, “Do you think that life after death exists?”

She replied, “Obviously no,” adding, “And an 83-year-old is telling you this, aware that she doesn’t have much time to live.”

And then, turning the tables on Mr. Monda, she asked, “And what is there for you after death?”

He replied, “The true life.”

“And what,” she came back, “is the life that we’re living at this moment?”

He answered, “A passage and a gift.” 

“Now, you see,” she concluded, “this is an idea that interests me, because it’s very different from what I believe in.”