Anne Rice’s just-published Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana is #2 on Barnes and Noble’s best-seller list. Rice has been up there before, due to the success of Interview with the Vampire and other bestsellers of a decidedly non-Christian cast. Two decades ago, if anyone might have imagined that she’d now be writing novels about Jesus, the betting line would have been that she’d make Satan the hero. In 1998, though, Rice “began to be more and more concerned with my relationship with God.” She began attending church. She began reading theologians, including those who thought that “Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud.” She “expected to discover that their arguments would be frighteningly strong.” She came out concluding that the skeptics were perpetrators and victims of poor scholarship and reasoning.

How did that spiritual and theological change affect her writing? For a time she thought she’d never write about vampires again; now she says she may come back to vampire Lestat one final novel, but it will be from a different direction. Her main work, though, lies in writing about Jesus, whom she calls “the ultimate supernatural hero.”

She’s taken on a hard challenge and made it even greater because she is writing her series about Christ in the first person, a seemingly impossible task: How does a writer enter the mind of God? At least the first book of her new series, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, dealt largely with Jesus’s childhood in Egypt, about which almost nothing is known. This second one, though, and especially its second half, covers baptisms, temptations, and miracles described tersely in the gospels.

Some will hate what she does, but I think she largely pulls it off. An early scene of stoning those thought to be gay suffers from political correctness, but her depictions of Satan tempting Jesus and of the wedding at Cana are superb. She understands that the gospels are tight writing so there’s room to fill in details, with the test of faithfulness being: Does the author make more vivid the biblical account or substitute for it a nonbiblical fantasy? Overall, Rice aces the test.

After today’s vote in Mississippi, we’ll have to wait until the Pennsylvania primary on April 22 for our next political fix. This gives us the opportunity to stand back and ask some basic questions: What, if anything, is the 2008 campaign revealing about American culture, politics and media?

I’ve recently been teaching Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic from the 1830s, Democracy in America, so I’d suggest two R’s that arise from his analysis. De Tocqueville wrote that Americans tend to be restless and religious, and in the 21^st century that is still the case. I’d then add two more R’s: reality-based and journalistically rambunctious.

Let’s start with restless: De Tocqueville wrote that “In the United States, a man will carefully construct a home in which to spend his old age and sell it before the roof is on… He will settle in one place only to go off elsewhere…. If his private business gives him some time for leisure he will immediately plunge into the whirlwind of politics.”

This year, restlessness has started at the top. John McCain is from everywhere and nowhere: Born in the Canal Zone, he moved frequently with his military family and during his own military career. As analyst Michael Barone notes, McCain when elected to Congress to represent Arizona had spent far more time in a Hanoi prison than in his new state.

Obama and Clinton each have several states they could call home, but their unrootedness is far more than geographic, especially in Obama’s case where transcendence of roots is a campaign centerpiece: He says “the choice in this election is not between regions or religions or genders. It’s not about rich versus poor; young versus old; and it is not about black versus white. It’s about the past versus the future.”

This strikes a powerful chord in America, where we’re ready to cheer on Obama transcending racial divisions and Clinton breaking the glass ceiling for women. And the restlessness is deeper than that. Obama is the leading crier for “change” — he used the word 33 times in a speech last month after winning the Wisconsin primary — but all three candidates have turned the six-letter word into an applause line. That’s strange: Why, when America is the most affluent society in history, is “change” a plus – especially since one possible change in the next decade is a U.S. city destroyed by a terrorist’s nuclear weapon?

Beatles and Christians can answer that question by noting that money can’t buy you love. The “change” mantra taps into a sense of alienation, a recognition that we are wanderers. It suggests that politics, if we choose the right change agent, can do what only God can do.

After a half-century, books by Thomas Merton remain widely read; The Seven Storey Mountain is a spiritual masterpiece. The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton, published in 1959, has still-valid insights; for example, Merton writes that the Pharisees and Judas “had a system all worked out, and a lot of special prayers for every penny given away. It was a very efficient system, almost like a modern ‘charity’ with a huge filing-system and a big sucker list of names… The Pharisees knew how to take care of the poor in such a way that the poor would be always with them.”

Merton notes that Jesus said, “for such gifts, the poor would be always with them. There is a distinction between Charity, the theological virtue, and Charity a modern word meaning a mechanical and impersonal kind of alms giving, as, for example, when a millionaire leaves all his money to ‘Charity.’ The poor will always be there for this kind of alms giving, where the rich man, infinitely distant from the poverty of the poor, scratches with a pen on a paper and starts a long series of bookkeeping entries and abstract transactions which end up a long time later with a nervous social worker scolding a group of kids who are trying to play baseball in a crowded street somewhere in a slum.

Merton concludes wisely that “Without love, alms giving is no more important an activity than brushing your hair or washing your hands.” How much love does our current system of big welfare and big charity show? The good news, though, is that some churches and Christian groups do show love. (We try to tell some of those stories in World.)

Say your daddy is rich. Say you’re smart. How should you spend his money and your life? Bill Buckley, who died yesterday at age 82, answered that question well.

Born in 1925, he was the sixth of ten children fathered by a Catholic oil millionaire. In college he headed the Yale Daily News, then gained national attention by writing God and Man at Yale, which accused his alma mater of proselytizing for atheism and collectivism.

After a year in the CIA and other short stops, Buckley in 1955 used $100,000 from his father to start National Review, which was important in many ways. Its wit showed that conservatives weren’t hicks. It laid out reasonable alternatives to regnant liberalism. It gave a start to young conservative writers. It routed right-wing ranters like John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, who had called President Dwight Eisenhower a communist agent.

Buckley gained personal visibility largely through his television program Firing Line, on which he consulted his clipboard, used big words, arched his eyebrows, licked his lips, and flashed a wolfish grin just before cleverly eviscerating liberal opponents. He became so well-known that the Disney movie Aladdin has the genie transforming himself into the polysyllabic speaker, who leans back in a chair and explains the permutations of the “three wishes” rule.

Buckley also sailed across the Atlantic, took up playing the harpsichord, and wrote at least 55 books, including 11 action-adventure spy novels. He and his wife Patricia married in 1950 and stayed married until she died last April. They called each other “Ducky” and had one son, Christopher, a witty writer as well.

Last Wednesday Buckley, who had recently suffered from diabetes and emphysema, was found dead at his desk in his home. “He might have been working on a column,” his son said.

The Bible is not anti-sadness, since sadness can lead to spiritual breakthroughs. Look at what happened 2,000 years ago, when a disconsolate old man named Simeon was waiting in Jerusalem for “the consolation of Israel.” An 84-year-old woman, Anna, widowed for decades, had such an ineradicable longing that she “did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day.” Then came Jesus.

As the apostle Luke suggests to us in the second chapter of his gospel, Simeon and Anna longed for a better world. They longed for God. Their longing was not a symptom of disease but a pointer toward the cure. The restlessness within riches that is typical in western society today shows the truth of the Christian understanding that we all have ineradicable spiritual longings. As Christians, we do not want to be merely brighter and more articulate animals. As Christians, we want the courage to embrace reality with all its sharp edges.

Anxiety and misery are often at Scriptural center stage. The psalms are remarkable for their highs and lows. When Elijah, just one day after the great victory against the prophets of Baal and Asherah on Mount Carmel, ran away and asked to die, God didn’t tell him to be happy happy happy happy happy all the time. We should not press ourselves or our children to superficial smiling conformity, but to a deeper understanding of the Bible,

Biblically, we see that some emptiness comes from God and makes us realize that we need Him to fill the holes in our souls

Abraham Lincoln’s Feb. 12, 1809, birthday is now rolled into our generic Presidents Day, but some of the comments Lincoln made during the Civil war would creep out many secular reporters today. For example, when reports of fighting at Gettysburg hit Washington in 1863, “everyone seemed panic-stricken,” but Lincoln “got down on my knees before Almighty God and prayed…. Soon a sweet comfort crept into my soul that God Almighty had taken the whole business into his hands.”

Reporters today might not strenuously object to such talk if a president were to keep his religion personal and removed from public pronouncements or policy-making. Lincoln, though, did not compartmentalize. The faith he developed during the war led him to believe that “by Divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisement in the world.” (He called the Civil War “a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people.”)

Lincoln (HYPERBOLE ALERT) may or may not have walked thirty miles in a blizzard with two broken legs to return a three-penny overcharge to a customer, but his words were apt long ago and now when he spoke of Americans who had become “too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace.” His indictment stands then and now: “We have forgotten the gracious Hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.”

It would be hard now for a president to speak with the tragic sensibility of Lincoln. We have progressed so far that we’re not ready for him.

For more on Lincoln’s beliefs, see “Pilgrim politician” from the Feb. 9 issue of WORLD.

People used to say that idleness was an opportunity for the devil to make inroads. Today, whenever there’s less we must do during the day, anxiety increases: How will we fill our time? But recreating because there’s nothing else to do re-creates nothing. When we defeat necessity we embed with our choices. An arranged marriage, an arranged place of work – we can blame someone else if things go poorly. When we ourselves choose, we can’t blame someone else.

We have trouble dealing with our middle class status as human beings: a little higher than animals, a little lower than angels. We are neither all-body or all-mind, but both, caught in the middle. We think we can avoid death by paying proper attention to risk factors, but death still comes. We’re facing a future in which more middle-aged people have less of the joy of watching children blossom and more of the sorrow of watching the elderly fade. We know how to increase their number of days but not how to cut through the daze.

Reform programs for centuries have battled against human nature and lost. Now we’re trying to resurrect ourselves through technology, but so far that often seems to increase the sum of our fears. Biotechnology is a reform program that could work by changing human nature – but that’s why it’s dangerous. In man’s hands, biotechnology will give us clone wars and a new lower middle-class of half-people, half-animal creations.

We need to grasp Christ’s resurrection, without which nothing is new under the sun. God knows better than us who we should be and how we should live.

Good for Laura Ingraham. She’s a Romney supporter who has not gone nuts. Seeing a McCain nomination as likely, she says she’ll support him, given the alternative.

Other members of the conservatocracy are political suicide bombers. Ann Coulter said she would vote for Hillary Clinton over John McCain, and then went even when one step further: “I would vote for the devil over John McCain.” Puh-leaze.

What’s the basis for McCainophobia? McCain-Feingold was wrong. His Gang-of-14 work on judicial nominations was probably wrong, but it had some tactical justification. McCain gets zapped by talk show hosts – and Arizona voters – on immigration, but in an e pluribus unum country his position is defensible.

I wasn’t for McCain in 2000 and he wasn’t my initial choice this year, but he showed a lot of guts – and wisdom – in pushing hard for the Iraq surge when other GOP candidates were making political comments. He has a long conservative record on most issues, as opposed to recent conservative words.

Romney supporters are the most faith-based this year: While McCain year after year during the 1990s was voting conservative, Romney was running as a liberal. Besides, McCain is an honorable man. He doesn’t deserve the invective that Rush Limbaugh and others are dumping on him.

Here’s where being primarily a Christian rather than a conservative is important. “Put not your hope in princes,” so Christians are not to get carried away with enthusiasm for an Obama or a Romney. But we’re also to use the judgment of charity, which means not seeing the worst in a McCain or a Hillary Clinton.

Only one thing is clear in the returns so far: People who expect utopia around the corner will be disappointed. Those who expect disaster around the corner will probably be wrong as well.

Many schools try to keep students moving on conveyor belts to good careers. Sure, kids fight in the corridors at some places, terrorizing teachers and each other, but most affluent suburban schools function without regular incidents of this sort. They generally give students the tools to get ahead, and fill their heads with all kinds of information and propaganda.

And yet, much of what happens in school could be summarized in the title of a book by the late Neal Postman about education and other aspects of popular culture: Amusing Ourselves to Death. Many “good” schools typically get kids thinking about everything except what is truly important: our relationship to God. They try to turn kids into happy chimpanzees, capable and desirous of following the rules, grinning and gobbling down the bananas offered as rewards.

Christian schools that are up against top-flight public schools are likely to lose, because they typically don’t have as many bananas to offer. Christian schools rarely have expensive but well-oiled bureaucracies. They often don’t have the clubs and activities that keep kids busy after school. But they can compete because, apart from learning about God in the context of learning about His creation, all of the bells and whistles are worthless. They may seem pleasant rather than destructive physically, but in the end they are destructive morally and theologically.

Christian schools should teach children to resist superficial happiness, the kind that comes too easily. They should want their graduates to be restless selves rather than diverted selves – to be, as Walker Percy says, dislocated humans rather than happy chimps. They should recognize that a lack of self-esteem can hurt, but unearned self-esteem can hurt even more. They should help students to locate themselves spiritually.

One other thing: Christian schools should teach children that it is good to give and fine to receive. The left wants a world where no one serves anyone else, where people are not dependent on others because they have entitlements from government. But that deprives us of part of our humanity. We begin our lives completely dependent on people. We maintain them with partial dependence. We are always completely dependent on God. Charity and service to others makes us less brutish, more giving. They help us to locate ourselves throughout our lives.

Over 100,000 people marched in Washington Tuesday in the annual remembrance of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Two of the participants were Elizabeth Prizzi and her 17-month-old son Luke, who is alive because Prizzi did not obey the new abortionist call for “compassion.”

According to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, doctors recommended to Prizzi that “she abort the baby she’d been carrying for 18 weeks. It was for the best, they said. A sonogram showed her son suffered from gastrocesis, a condition in which intestines form outside the body.” Prizzi said no to abortion, and this story has a happy ending: A later sonogram revealed that Luke was fine.

The Prizzi story is one of many. Many bioethicists argue that abortion of babies who may be genetically defective is an act of love. Not genetically testing unborn babies seems irresponsible. And, as we move toward the ability to improve unborn babies through genetic therapy, the pressure will be on to require genetic testing and even genetic enhancements.

The next step will be “designer babies” – and that will be hard to resist. Even those who want God to be in charge, rather than parents or governments playing god, will be hit with statements that God created creative people, so frowning on their innovations is disparaging God’s providence. As Ronald Dworkin writes in his book Sovereign Virtue, “The principle of bodily integrity may… be one of those artifacts of conventional morality that seemed well justified before the possibilities suggested by modern genetic medicine were plausibly imagined, but not after.”

Now that human nature has defeated the plans of numerous social engineers, the goal of those seeking radical liberation will increasingly be the transformation of human nature through the creation of super-humans. But Christians say our basic problem is that we’re fallen humans living in a fallen world: Our sense of displacement points to the truth that our real home is elsewhere. Genetic engineering can’t eliminate fallenness.

Besides, that dark cloud has a silver lining, as novelist Walker Percy understood: “Knowing why we are not fully at home, we are free to experience the good things of the world for what they are.”