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The Ten Suggestions

J.A. Gray

When Moses came down from the mountain and cloudbearing the Ten Commandments in handand saw the calf adored by the crowdand smashed the tablets of God’s commandone of the...

Beauty Is as Beauty Does

J.A. Gray

On Beauty by zadie smith penguin, 464 pages, $15 (paperback) In On Beauty, British writer Zadie Smith has turned her attention to the post-September 11 United States and has been...

Ordinary Idols

J.A. Gray

Death of an Ordinary Man: A Novel by Glen Duncan Grove. 320 pp. $13 paper. “As soon as the soul is set free from the body it is either...

Christ and Casserole

J.A. Gray

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 247 pp. $23. Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, published in 1981, is an extraordinary work of art, and many readers have waited impatiently...

Extended Conversation

J.A. Gray

Artistic License: Three Centuries of Good Writing and Bad Behavior by brooke allen ivan r. dee, 244 pages, $26 I’ll write because I’ll give You, critics, means to live;...

Jesus in America

J.A. Gray

The America of the title is the United States, from colonial times to the present. The Jesus of the title is all the things the subtitle says and more....