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Article: Close encounters.(Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death)(Book review)
- Article from:
- The Christian Century
- Article date:
- February 20, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 The Christian Century Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death. By Deborah Blum. Penguin, 368 pp., $25.95.
TO COUNTER the pervasive influence of religion in our mountain hometown, my father once loaned me his copy of Mark Twain's satirical Letters from the Earth. A decade later I encountered Twain's barbed commentary on a famous line from the Sermon on the Mount. To a character who claims that God would care for a poor kitten because "not a sparrow falls to the ground without His seeing it," Twain has his skeptic respond, "But it falls, just the same. What good is seeing it fall?" America's greatest humorist has always been its greatest ...