Reading Between the Lines

Rethinking Religion: Recent Women's Novels and American Identity

A series that explores four novels by women that involve the quest for meaningful religious experience in contemporary American society. Each session centers on book selected by Elizabeth Toohey, a graduate student at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

	The series opens with a discussion Paradise Park by Allegra Goodman, which follows the comic aventures of her heroine, Sharon, as she searches for spirituality everywhere from an academic religion department to a community of Hasidic Jews.
	This session focuses on Ceremony by Leslie Maromon Silko, which explores American Indian spiritual vision and reverence for nature through a young Indian war veteran's trauma and healing.
	A discussion of Toni Morrison's novel Paradise, which treats the role of the church in the African American community since the time of slavery.
	The series concludes with a conversation about Final Payments, Mary Gordon's examination of a New York Irish-Catholic community, which the New York Times called a "remarkable" first novel.