But as I mentioned earlier, what makes a novel worth reading is not its immediate subject but its deeper themes. For my money, Only Begotten Daughter is only secondarily about "the dogma and the foibles of organized Christianity." The heart of the book is the responsibility theme. It's a novel about a deity who finds that she can do the world some real good only by shedding her supernatural powers. It's about a woman who gains her divinity by giving it up.

And Towing Jehovah goes after lots of worldviews, not just the outlook sponsored by organized Christianity. The Corpus Dei is like the pachyderm in the old Hindu fable, "The Blind Men and the Elephant." Feminists, atheists, Catholics, Protestant evangelicals, secular Jews -- everybody has a different perception of the Big Dead Deity.

As for Blameless in Abaddon, it's essentially about the mystery of unmerited suffering, a problem that goes back to the Book of Job -- to its Sumerian antecedent, really -- long before anybody heard of Christianity.

That said, I think I may indeed be getting into a rut. For a while I thought I'd call the new story collection Sermons By Satan, but now I think it would a mistake to evoke Christian supernaturalism in the title. You can rest assured that there won't be very many deities running around in James Morrow's forthcoming projects.

In the years to come, I don't expect I'll produce more than one or two additional such "conscious rewritings," partly because there aren't that many other Bible stories that lend themselves to my larger satiric agenda, and partly because -- as we've been saying -- I don't want to settle for targets that many people might legitimately regard as superficial or obvious. I don't want to beat straw fish.

The rest of the stories in my collection were never keyed explicitly to Scripture. They just happened to end up in a book called Bible Stories For Adults.

Of course, my Julie Katz isn't the most activist goddess the world has ever seen. I thought it would be artistically interesting to maroon her in the late 20th century, a time when the Christian consensus has, for better or worse, been lost. It seemed to me that if you dropped Jesus in the middle of contemporary Western society, he wouldn't know what the hell he was doing there. Even the original Jesus sometimes seemed confused in his heart: "Who do men say that I am?"

As I began researching Only Begotten Daughter, I learned that in recent years certain respected religious thinkers -- Thomas Sheehan at Loyola University, for example, and Uta Ranke-Heinemann at the University of Essen -- have called into question the whole institutional foundation of Christianity. What are we to make of the fact that Jesus never talked about starting a Church (with the exception of one uninteresting remark to Peter) but was instead obsessed with this ambiguous notion of "the Kingdom"? What are we to make of the fact that, at its core, the Christian narrative is an ugly story about a father (God) who deliberately kills his son (Jesus) in the name of a greater good that never comes to pass? What does it mean to predicate a religion on a murder?

For me the astonishing thing was that these critiques were coming more-or-less from within the Church. So fairly early in its gestation, I realized that Only Begotten Daughter wouldn't be targeted solely against fundamentalism. I'd be going after the whole eschatological enchilada.

Of course, being a full-time writer, I also asked other sorts of questions. How much money can my agent get for this thing? How can she convince a publisher that there's an audience out there who won't dismiss the whole idea as embarrassing, depressing, or both?

Only in the course of writing a novel does the central theme emerge for me. Eventually I realized that Towing Jehovah would be a baroque retelling of "The Blind Men and the Elephant," that Blameless in Abaddon would be the Book of Job reconceived as a courtroom drama, and that The Eternal Footman would be a kind of double-homage to Dante's Paradiso and Camus's The Plague.

But initially all I had was that Cinemascope shot.

Some readers say that, given all the woolly speculation in my fiction, I must be an agnostic. But I don't like that word either. I find it evasive. It lacks sinew. An agnostic is an atheist who has lost his nerve.

Am I any sort of believer? Well, I believe in the universe, and all the mind-boggling mysteries the word "universe" entails. Science has given us some authentic insights into that universe, but much of reality is still pretty cryptic. The philosopher Thomas Nagel says that, when we speak of God, we're using the word as a placeholder for the insights we don't yet have. So maybe I'm a placeholderist. But I'm not happy with that stance either, because "God" is so easily confused with the answers whose place he's holding.

That said, I won't deny that, though written by an atheist, The Godhead Trilogy is parasitic upon the theistic worldview. For better or worse, I founded the project on a variety of supernaturalism. I was stuck with it. My original instinct was to soft-pedal the supernaturalism in these three novels, but ultimately I decided to run with it. The Godhead Trilogy is not out to "disprove" theism so much as to call the theists' bluff: look at what you're really saying.

So by the time we get to The Eternal Footman, yes, there's a dramatic, on-stage divine intervention -- the arrival of the existential pestilence. This catastrophe is identified as the work of a malign deity, but it's still supernatural, and it still suggests that we're ultimately in thrall to a Creator-God. There's no getting around that.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, this concession to theism troubles me, and I think perhaps I should start a novel that argues from page 1 that the Creator-God doesn't exist. But during the rest of the week, I'm pretty happy with my decision, because I think the really important question is not "Does God exist?" but rather "What is God like?"

In other words, I think you get a better grade of blasphemy from theistically-grounded fiction than from its opposite. When the starving sailors start munching on God's flab in Towing Jehovah, when Jesus reveals himself as Satan at the end of Blameless in Abaddon, and when God's large intestine lets slip that he doesn't give a shit about humanity in The Eternal Footman -- well, there's not much going on there to comfort the average churchgoer. But I'm still playing my game in the churchgoers' backyard, which is why I should maybe write that atheist novel one day.

When Pembroke and Flume come on stage, I think the novel is asking, "What are the differences, if any, between our illusions about a Creator-God and our illusions about history?" Most of the other special-interest groups in the novel define themselves in relation to the Big Dead Deity, but the reenactors have keyed their lives to a demented, rhapsodic vision of World War II. They think this fantasy can have no real-world consequences, but they're tragically mistaken. One of them gets his hands burned off.

As for The Epic of Gilgamesh, I brought it into The Eternal Footman by way of venting my dissatisfaction with the sort of scorched-earth relativism that used to call itself post-modernism and now calls itself cultural studies. According to the post-modern catechism, there is no such thing as a universal human spirit; there are only local cultural narratives. I think The Epic of Gilgamesh flies in the face of that assertion.

Also, if you look at the plot of Gilgamesh, you find roughly the same structure as in The Eternal Footman, even though I outlined the novel long before I looked into ancient Sumerian literature. Footman certainly isn't a retelling of Gilgamesh, but the two tales periodically intersect each other in ways I find interesting.

I'm not sure that Anthony Van Horne survives "quite cheerfully," but he's certainly supposed to be a sympathetic character. Once again I would evoke the responsibility theme: Anthony, for all his flaws, is a grown-up. He never pretends that the oil spill didn't happen, or that he didn't cause it. In a sense he shoulders too much guilt, because the accident was something of a fluke, and he left the supertanker's bridge only because his migraine headache had become intolerable.

I would contrast Anthony's guilt feelings with the pose inevitably struck by our political leaders -- Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, say, who so cheerfully orchestrated the Vietnam debacle even when it made them complicitous in what I have to call war crimes. I agree with Robert Bly that, after Vietnam, America's leaders should have brought their constituents together and had them weep openly over the tragedy of it all -- not because America lost, not because of the numerous blunders, but simply because that much pointless suffering should not go unacknowledged. That would've been the grown-up thing to do.

Why do Martin and Nora die? While Blameless in Abaddon and The Eternal Footman are dark comedies on one level, on another level they're flat-out tragedies. I'll always respect the tragic worldview, though it seems to have largely vanished from our culture. It's 180 degrees from the Christian-salvationistic worldview, and also 180 degrees from the New Age ethos, whereby you can solve all your problems by tuning into the cosmos. To honor the tragic sensibility, I had to destroy my heroes physically even as they enjoyed a kind of metaphysical triumph.