No matter how thick a book is or how well you might like it, isn't it true that you only remember a few scenes? Why that scene and not some other? Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry brushed off the village atheist one day. That book was written in 1927. I wondered if people even use that term any more. Village atheist, town drunk, slut, gossip, or do-gooder -- how do they matter to an America that doesn't live in villages anymore? America is a hollowed-out country, a coast-to-coast archipelago of monstrous conurbations. People sat out on porches and kept an eye on each other on Lewis's Main Street. Today we experience our neighbor in the 'burbs only in seeing his garage door open up, a car with tinted windows emerges, it heads off to work or to a fast food drive-through, and then the garage door closes. The Village Atheist used to be portrayed unsympathetically. If he was jolly enough, he might have been tolerated as the licensed lunatic, but usually he was seen as sou
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