I stole this image of Tom Wolfe from Thunderstruck http://www.thunderstruck.org/. More about that later.

Tom Wolfe is an old friend of mine: a soul brother not an intimate. I consider him to be brilliant, but I wrote him a letter one day about his cowardice in A Man in Full. You may remember that this novel was after a hiatus of eleven years. I had loved Bonfire of the Vanities, since I had inhabited part of the world he described. TW also has a Ph.D. in American Studies. My Ph.D. in North American Cultural Geography is a close kin to his program, I'm sure. But, I'm sidetracked. Wolfe tried to write about a character rom Georgia whose spiritual growth and integrity overrode his environment, but in doing so, he made the guy a Stoic! What a jump! I think that the eleven years was to try to come up with some accomodation with Christianity, and he failed so he bailed. My letter to him, undelivered, just called him a weenie for doing so. I still love the guy. See what he has to say about religion here:

Tom Wolfe: Anyone who thinks that religion is bad for society is out of his
mind. We are now beginning to see what happens when you don’t have it. People
get depressed when they don’t have something to believe. I think the
contemporary conception of the human mind has become more and more depressing.
This is my problem with the atheists, people like Richard Dawkins and Sam
Harris. They’re saying that there is no ghost in the machine, that it’s all
physical. And if it’s all physical, it’s going to obey certain laws. And the
endpoint of the argument is that there is no free will, that you and I are
machines that have had a certain genetic foundation, and as soon as we know
enough about that, we’ll be able to predict what’ll happen when you meet me. We
just need the information. That’s a very depressing thought.