Wrestling with Religion

In a previous episode, Hitch Grimes unknowingly killed his father and married his mother, who ran a hotel in Bessemer, Alabama. Learning the truth, he fled in horror to become an itinerant gambler. Eighty-one years later, his son finishes the story. Hitch Grimes, Jr., 2001 Growing up, Daddy’s curse was confined to the grinning photograph of a young man I never met in a gold frame by Mama’s bed. Everything else was fine. The Bessemer steel plants staggered through the Depression, and the Manila House had regular tenants even as residential hotels went out of style. When I moved out, Uncle Sam bought my ticket.      After VE Day, I married the wrong woman, left her, failed in business, burned out on the blast furnaces, and returned like a prodigal to Mama’s hotel, where I kept the desk after her health failed. An old mama’s boy in an inn that barely made costs on a peeling street by the tracks. So there I was in 1959, driving away from her funeral to a real estate office ...

  Gustave Dore's illustration for Milton's Paradise Lost The most recent Gallop Poll on the subject (2016) finds that 61% of American adults believe in the devil, with 12% "not sure." It's unnerving to suppose that some three out of four people on the street live under the threat of a malevolent angel.             Some of them may have answered yes with something less concrete in mind. I recall years ago when an Eastern Orthodox layman explained universal salvation, Satan's soul being the last to go to Heaven. I asked him if he believed in Satan. His answer was that, when a coven of Satan worshippers invoke him in a cemetery, evil is certainly present. I took this as a no in yes 's clothing. Maybe some respondents to the Gallop Poll answered yes in this same equivocal sense. My own fascination with the devil goes back to when I read Faust stories as a teenager--Goethe's and Marlowe's plays--and listened to Gounod's opera, but I always und...

  Sodomy, a term from the medieval Latin, refers to anal (and, in American law, oral) sexual intercourse. It derives from the city of Sodom in Genesis. Sodom's exact location is disputed, but it was one several Cities of the Plain, ruins that in Biblical times dotted a plain near the Dead Sea. In his Jewish Antiquities (c. 94), Josephus reports visiting the site and seeing a rock formation shaped like a woman, presumably related to Lot's wife who turned into a pillar of salt.             In his monumental How to Read the Bible (2007), Hebraist James L. Kugel characterizes the Sodom story as etiological, its purpose to explain how things came to be as they are (pp. 129-130). More recently, archeologists have found geological evidence of a meteor burst c. 1700 BCE that leveled then-thriving cities and poisoned the land, presumably leaving legends of a once prosperous plain ( https://phys.org/news/2018-12-meteor-air-years-obliterating-dead.html )....

  Abraham's tent. Day. Sarah sees Abraham and Isaac enter. Abraham puts down his staff. SARAH. Where have you boys been? ABRAHAM. Um. Out worshipping. SARAH. For six days? You shouldn't sneak out like that, Abe. You know I worry. So what did you sacrifice, the donkey? ABRAHAM. It's a long story. ISAAC. We saw a ram caught in a thicket, which was a good thing because-- ABRAHAM. Shouldn't you be watering the camels, son? ISAAC. What's a camel, Dad?* ABRAHAM. Just go! Isaac exits. Sorry, Sarah, I didn't mean to worry you, sweetheart, but I was in a rush to demonstrate my absolute, unconditional, brainless, unquestioning, doglike, robotic submission to those voices I hear in the night. You don't screw around with voices! SARAH. Not your "God-voices" again! She makes air quotes. The same ones that made us leave that nice flat in Haram and live in a tent. You think it's fun being homeless? A day's journey from the nearest shop?...

  Except for a few who are very old, chronically ill, depressed, or a combination, everybody hopes to wake up tomorrow morning. Most of us expect it. Montaigne generalized that no man is "so old and decrepit, who . . . does not think he has yet twenty good years to come." Twenty years would put me close to the century mark, when everybody's disabled. So far, I'm still doing most things I've always done, if more slowly. Mowing my lawn became a personal benchmark when a colleague praised my father for doing it around 1980. He was younger than I am now, and I keep pushing my mower, pedaling my bike, and bedding to my wife. Life goes on one day at a time. Unlike Montaigne's everyman, I don't expect twenty good years, but I keep on believing that healthy habits and good medical care will extend my life indefinitely, if finitely.         There is a limit. Life extension may contribute to the American habit of denying death and the decline in religions that pro...