EXTRAORDINARY TGF REVIEW: CHICAGO TRIBUNE

From Barack Obama to Hugh Hefner, public figures discuss their spirituality

By Beth Kephart
Published March 19, 2006

The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People

By Cathleen Falsani

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pages, $24

I crave few things like I crave an honest conversation. The mutual exploration of a possibility. The pauses between knowing. The freedom to slide off on a tangent, then circle back. The way ideas emerge from stories, and stories consecrate ideas.

Cathleen Falsani, the religion writer for the Chicago Sun-Times and the author of the wonderful new book “The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People,” is, above all else, an exemplary conversationalist. She wants to know what people think–not to judge and not to label, but to better understand. She wants to know how others define words like “faith” and “spirit” and “love,” and why. She seeks, in her words, to “discover God in the places some people say God isn’t supposed to be. To look for the truly sacred in the supposedly profane.” She is enthusiastic, well-read, articulate and open-minded. She sweeps us right along.

The dialogues she conducts over the course of “The God Factor” are with those “public people,” as she calls them, who may or may not seem like obvious choices for a book about religion and faith. Singer-activist Bono is here, as are U.S. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, conservative speechwriter and policy adviser Michael Gerson, Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel and novelist Anne Rice. So are self-proclaimed atheist Mark Morris, the very openly doubting Jonathan Safran Foer, king of the Playboy empire Hugh Hefner and singer-songwriter Annie Lennox, who describes herself as a seeker. Clearly Falsani has not chosen her interview subjects to confirm or deny any of her own theories. She has chosen them because they are willing to think out loud, because they do not, by and large, proclaim themselves to have an exclusive lock on the sole abiding truth.

There’s so much texture to this book, so many generous gestures toward questing minds–and that’s a credit to the subjects and to Falsani, who has done a remarkable job of converting conversations into narrative and ideas into storylines.

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