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How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent of meaning. Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they touch. She illustrates how Ginsberg's chant-infused 1960s poetry echoes the tongue-speaking of Charismatic Christians, how DeLillo reimagines the novel and the Latin Mass, why McCarthy's prose imitates the Bible, and why Morrison's fiction needs the supernatural. Uncovering how literature and religion conceive of a world where religious belief can escape confrontations with other worldviews, Hungerford corrects recent efforts to discard the importance of belief in understanding religious life, and argues that belief in belief itself can transform secular reading and writing into a religious act. Honoring the ways in which people talk about and practice religion, Postmodern Belief highlights the claims of the religious imagination in twentieth-century American culture.

  Fun with [Dick] and [Jane Fonda] (**) has occasional moments of amusement, but mostly it's a poor use of talented lead actors Tea Leoni and Jim Carrey. Carrey plays a cheerful guy who gets a promotion to director of communications for a huge corporation, but his dream job turns sour when he finds out the company is going under, thanks to the thievery of its CEO (a wan Alec Baldwin). With hit-you-over-the-head echoes of Enron and other corporate meltdowns, employees are left without severance pay and retirement funds. Everything goes in the fat pockets of the CEO.

MOVIE REVIEW FUN WITH DICK AND JANE DIRECTED BY: DEAN PARISOT WRITTEN BY: JUDD APATOW AND NICHOLAS STOLLER\\ STARRING: JIM CARREY, TEA LEONI, RICHARD JENKINS, ALEC BALDWIN AT: BOSTON COMMON, FENWAY, SUBURBS RUNNING TIME: 90 MINUTES RATED: PG-13 (BRIEF LANGUAGE, SEXUAL HUMOR, DRUG REFERENCES) ***1/2 Dick and Jane are dismayed to discover that Dick's former co- workers have become just as desperate in their joblessness cockfighting rings and pot harvesting! Plus, Dick is facing indictment. So he aims his rebellion at the riches of his old boss, played by Alec Baldwin with a Colonel Sanders accent. I only wished the movie slowed down to appreciate the good actors who turn up in microscopic parts, including Stacey Travis, Laurie Metcalf, and John Michael Higgins. (Ralph Nader has a cameo, too, and there's a fine lampoon of Lou Dobbs.) The underappreciated Richard Jenkins does find time to pocket a few scenes. He plays a senior corporate crook who's now the spineless drunk helping Dick and Jane get revenge on Baldwin.

[Dick Van Dyke] ([Jim Carrey], who also produced) and [Jane Fonda] (Tea Leoni) Harper are a one-kid, two-career family who are doing well enough to afford a new lawn and a Hispanic housekeeper, Blanca (Gloria Garayua). One running joke is, their son spends so much more time with her than with them, he mostly speaks Spanish. Two hours later, while Dick is on television defending the company, Globodyne goes belly up and Dick is suddenly unemployed. So is Jane, who quit her unpleasant job as soon as she heard about the promotion. The next thing you know, the lawn is being repo'd, and they're paying Blanca in household appliances. CAPTION: Columbia Pictures Dick (Jim Carrey) and Jane (Tea Leoni) Harper take unorthodox steps to reclaim their lifestyle.

Released by Columbia Pictures. Director [Dean Parisot]. Producers Brian Grazer, [Jim Carrey]. Executive producers Peter Bart, Max Palevsky, Jane Bartelme. Screenplay [Judd Apatow] & Nicholas Stoller, based on a story by Gerald Gaiser and Judd Apatow & Nicholas Stoller. Cinematographer Jerzy Zielinski. Editor Don Zimmerman. Costumes Julie Weiss. Music Theodore Shapiro. Production design Barry Robison. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes. Much of \"Dick & Jane\" is concerned with how the family copes as [Dick] finds it close to impossible to get a new job. The film takes jabs at Wal-Mart (thinly disguised as Kostmart) and offers some clever moments like the family showering in a neighbor's sprinklers. All this is pleasant enough, but never anything more, a series of moments that should be heading toward something but never are. The same goes for Dick and Jane's initial desperate forays into armed robbery. But this material is better than what comes next, a harebrained revenge plot that is equal parts uninteresting and hard to follow.

[Jim Carrey] and Tea Leoni as a couple who hit rock bottom and turn to robbery to pay the bills in \"Fun With Dick and Jane,\" a remake of the 1977 film. Don't blame Tea Leoni and Jim Carrey for the bland plot of \"Fun With Dick and Jane.\"

While some may believe [Dick] and [Jane] taught them phonics -- the widely accepted instruction method that helps children deconstruct words with repetitive \"rat sat on a mat\" practice -- it's more likely that kids learned phonics in spite of Dick and Jane. Anyone who learned to read in the last century got at least a taste of phonics, but the Dick and Jane stories actually were a calculated attack on phonics: The authors believed children learned to read best by memorizing a small handful of \"sight words\" and repeating them over and over -- the \"look/say\" method. Many teachers who used Dick and Jane also gave students phonics practice on the side. With few phonics programs available in the 1950s and 1960s, [Grace Vyduna-Haskins] says, many teachers built their own, borrowing pieces from several books.

  He contacted publishing giant Pearson, which agreed to reprint the books after a 30-year exile. The first Dick and [Jane] reissues hit Wal-Mart shelves in November 2002 under a one-year exclusive agreement; they appeared in bookstores last fall. Pearson plans to reconfigure [Dick] and Jane into board books, coloring books and other merchandise. Soon they may grace children's bedsheets, lunch boxes and clothing. Calendars and notecards are in stores; there has even been talk of a movie.

[Jim Carrey] in [Dean Parisot]'s comedy ''Fun With Dick and Jane.'' (Photo by Ralph Nelson)(pg. E1); [Tea Leoni] and Jim Carrey as a couple struggling with poverty, comically, in ''Fun With Dick and Jane.'' (Photo by Ralph Nelson)(pg. E6) The fun in the film's title initially comes from watching comfortably middle-class people do without the usual buffers and privileges. This tacky, comic Schadenfreude works as long as the family's woes make for quirky gags, as when the three, soaped up and wearing bathing suits, shower under their neighbor's lawn sprinklers. But as the Harpers' fortunes continue to decline, the light tone darkens precipitously. By the time Jane mentions rising early to eat at the local soup kitchen, a pall has settled over the film. Mr. Carrey's and Ms. Leoni's sprightly performances can't obscure that the adversity endured by their characters mirrors some very real suffering. But before there's time to feel too bad, [Dick Harper] and Jane pick up a couple of guns and start making like Bonnie and Clyde, ushering the proceedings into full-blown absurdism.

Meanwhile, Jane has decided to quit her job as a travel agent, so by the close of business on [Dick]'s first day as VP, they're both unemployed. It takes a few months -- of Dick looking for work alongside other desperate white-collar refugees and finally becoming a greeter at a Wal-Mart-type superstore, of Jane trying to be an exercise instructor and then a cosmetics test subject, of their lawn being repossessed -- before Dick hits on the idea of stealing. While he's trying on sunglasses and explaining his plan to Jane, she makes a suggestion through disastrously over-Botoxed lips: \"Maybe you should steal some Prozac.\" From its trailer and marketing campaign, \"Fun With Dick and Jane\" looks like one of those instant forgettables that a studio plops into theaters in the middle of the busy season, with hopes that they will disappear quietly. But it turns out to be better than that, especially during the run-up to Dick and Jane's crime spree, when the movie clicks along with giddy, contagious good humor. (There's a particularly hilarious running gag involving Dick and Jane's son Billy, who speaks with a Spanish accent courtesy of his ever- present nanny and screams \"Don't take my Telemundo!\" when his parents sell the TV.)