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Fish: "The words both 'True Grit' films, & Portis's novel, share are these: 'You must pay for everything in this world. There is nothing free with the exception of God's grace.' But free can mean (1) distributed freely, given to anyone and everyone; OR (2) given only to those whom God chooses for reasons that remain mysterious. The novel says, 'You cannot earn that grace or deserve it." FS: Jesus' story of "The Prodigal/Lost Son" suggests a 3rd notion: grace is freely given to all humans, who may not recognize its presence. Human values differ from God's in judging which person or outcome is ultimately "good" or "bad." Grace is an unearned gift. But to believe it is dispensed capriciously is more a characteristic of Greco-Roman cosmology.

Kugel uses his encounter with death to investigate and report on a state of mind notoriously resistant to literary exploration: the state of mind in which you intuit something on the order of God. . . . To the religious - or at least to Kugel and his sources - religion is an experience more than a cosmology. "It is not God's sovereignty over the entire universe that is at issue so much as his sovereignty over the cubic centimeter of space that sits just in front of our own noses," he writes. "That is to say, religion is first of all about fitting into the world and fitting into one's borders. There may indeed be something 'mythic' about it, but it pales before the mythic quality of our own clumsy, modern selves."