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Review by Judith Shulevitz (author of "The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time"): Wade asserts "the God gene" & its evolutionary function - "to bind human beings into cooperative groups," making altruism, group (over self-) interest & solidarity a matter of conscience (with the gods as enforcers). Shulevitz's criticism is "that he has under-ambitiously portrayed religion as less encompassing and consequential than it is."

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."