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Sylvia also imparts methods to protect yourself from a psychic attack and determine whether your loved ones are sending you messages from the Other Side. Then, using a healing meditation, she shows you how you can unite with your angels and spirit guides whenever you choose to do so. In closing, Sylvia uses her abilities to answer audience questions and shed light on what really happens when we leave this plane of existence.

Three years and more than 30 letters later, Letters from a Skeptic was published and Edward Boyd came to accept Christ. During his journey, he and his son hash through such topics as why the world is so full of suffering; why an all-powerful God needs prayer; how you can believe in someone who rose from the dead; and how another man's death can pardon others. Despite their brutal honesty, both men exhibit respect and love toward one another as they address these volatile subjects. In Edward's second response to Greg, he boldly says, "Well, your distinction between the 'Christian Church' and 'Christians' is interesting and novel, but frankly, I don't buy it." Greg responds, saying, "I've got to admit that you are raising some extremely good points in your letters. You are raising the most difficult questions a theist can face." --Jill Heatherly

As with much of Buechner's work, there is a movement in this narrative from suffering to grace, a grace that comes in unexpected ways and places. Here it comes through the preacher George Buttrick on a Sunday sermon: Jesus refused Satan's crown, Buttrick said, but "he is crowned in the heart of the people who believe in him. And that inward coronation takes place ... 'among confession, and tears, and great laughter.'" It was when he heard this final statement, Buechner writes, that something turned over for him, and led him to speak to Buttrick and ultimately led him--driven literally by Buttrick--to Union Theological Seminary. Here in this beautiful book this soul-changing journey across Manhattan stands for "the sacred journey" of a life--and of all of our lives. Whether it ends in truth or dream we cannot know, but Buechner sides with King Rinkitink of Oz who says, "Never question the truth of what you fail to understand, for the world is filled with wonders." --Doug Thorpe