Do You Believe?: Conversations on God and Religion

Some of the most well-known and well-respected cultural figures of our time enter into intimate and illuminating conversation about their personal beliefs, about belief itself, about religion, and about God.

Antonio Monda is a disarming, rigorous interviewer, asking the most difficult questions (he often begins an interview point blank: “Do you believe in God?”) that lead to the most wide-ranging conversations. An ardent believer himself, Monda talks both with atheists (asked what she feels when she meets a believer, Grace Paley replies: “I respect his thinking and his beliefs, but at the same time I think he’s deluded”) and other believers, their discussion ranging from personal images of God (Michael Cunningham sees God as a black woman, Derek Walcott as a wise old white man with a beard) to religion’s place in American culture, from the afterlife to the concepts of good and evil, from fundamentalism to the Bible. And almost without fail, the conversations turn to questions of art and literature. Toni Morrison discusses Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, Richard Ford invokes Wallace Stevens, and David Lynch draws attention to the religious aspects of Bu–uel, Fellini...and Harold Ramis's Groundhog Day.

Informal, revealing, unexpected, Do You Believe? is a captivating and thought-provoking meditation how faith, in all its facets, remains profoundly relevant for and in our culture.

Reflecting a broad array of religious perspectives, a thought-provoking series of candid discussions on God, religion, and faith examines the role of religion in the modern world, in an anthology featuring the thoughts of Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, Derek Walcott, Jonathan Franzen, Grace Paley, and Elie Wiesel. Original. 50,000 first printing.

\Antonio Monda teaches in the Film and Television Department of New York University. An award winning filmmaker, he is author of A Journey into American Cinema, and editor/author of The Hidden God.

Introduction: the evidence of things unseen — Paul Auster: A mocking and unfathomable mystery — Saul Bellow: I believe in God but I don't bug him — Michael Cunningham: We are all God's children — Nathan Englander: Whoever wrote the Bible is God — Jane Fonda: Christ was the first feminist — Richard ford: I believe in the redemptiveness of art — Paula Fox: God is the name of something I don't understand — Jonathan Franzen: Reality is an illusion — Spike Lee: I no longer felt anything in church — Daniel Libeskind: We believe the moment we see — David Lynch: Good and evil are within us — Toni Morrison: The search is more important than the conclusion — Grace Paley: Death is the end of everything — Salman Rushdie: I believe in a mortal soul — Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: I am an agnostic — Martin Scorsese: God is not a torturer — Derek Walcott: I believe that I believe — Elie Wiesel: I have a wounded faith.