By Dennis Drabelle

Here's why bookstores will always be important to me.

Last week, on a visit to Philadelphia, I stopped in at the Book Trader, a roomy secondhand store on Second Street, looking for something to read, wanting to be surprised. While browsing the fiction shelves, I noticed "Chad Hanna" (1940), by Walter D. Edmonds, and a bell rang in my head: The book was made into a movie (also 1940) with Henry Fonda. Not a movie I'd seen, but one of whose existence I was aware.

I picked up the volume, an old Bantam Pathfinder paperback, saw that the eponymous Chad is a circus roustabout circa 1836, and that was all I needed to know -- I made the purchase.

"Chad Hanna" may not be an incandescent masterpiece, but it's nicely paced and evocative, not to mention intelligent, informative, diverting, frank (but not lewd) about sex. Its author, Walter D. Edmonds (1903-98) wrote it in a period when he could hardly make a wrong move. Both "Chad Hanna" and an earlier novel by him, "Drums Along the Mohawk," were bestsellers (according to the Wikipedia article on Edmonds, "Drums" placed second to "Gone with the Wind" on the fiction list for a while); and along with a third novel, they were made into Hollywood films, with "Drums" being directed by John Ford, no less.

But it took a bookstore to bring the two of us together. It took that dreamy process of roaming though the aisles, considering and rejecting other candidates, and finally meeting the book you didn't realize was the very one you wanted -- an experience that seems unlikely, and perhaps impossible, to have on the Internet.

In an ideal world, "Chad Hanna" would be in print, but in today's publishing climate it's hard to imagine anyone founding a line of worthy but forgotten bestsellers from decades past. So libraries (also browsable, of course) and secondhand stores are the only places where these books can be approached. Patronize your local used bookstore (if you are lucky to have one: It can perform the valuable function of taking you down offbeat literary paths.

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So you've sinned. Now what? Gary A. Anderson, a professor in the Department of Theology at Notre Dame, may have an answer for you. In his book "Sin: A History," published by Yale University Press in September, Anderson explores the roots of sin and atonement. Hint: help the poor. But what if the state moves in, as it has in the past 500 years, and takes on a large responsibility for aiding the disadvantaged? How, then, does the average sinner pay off his debt?

GUEST BLOGGER: Gary A. Anderson

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama gave a landmark speech on race relations. He remarked that the "original sin of slavery" had left a "stain" on our nation. The usage of the biblical metaphor of sin as a stain allowed President Obama to say something quite profound.

In the Bible, sin is not just a vague mental notion that something has gone wrong. Rather, sin has a certain "thingness" to it that cannot be lightly dismissed. Its indelible mark is not easily washed away. Horrible human sins, the Bible teaches, have lasting consequences.

Yet one should not despair. Though sins can linger, there are ways to bring their baneful consequences to closure. But everything depends on what we imagine a sin to be.

One of the most common ways of describing sins in the Bible is as a form of debt. Consider the fifth petition of the Our Father: "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." Behind this metaphor is the idea that God records our misdeeds as debts and awaits their repayment. But how are they repaid?

The answer is as simple as it is striking - by transferring funds to heaven through direct service to the poor. Already in the Jewish Bible we learn that he who is generous to the poor makes a loan to God (Proverbs 19:17). Jesus is even more graphic: charity toward the poor funds a treasury in heaven.

According to these images, the hand of the poor person is like a full service ATM - the money it receives is instantly deposited in a heavenly treasury. For this reason, Jewish beggars in antiquity would approach potential donors and say: "make a deposit in heaven through me."

The influence of this sort of thinking on Western culture was profound. Both synagogue and church spent a great of effort distributing goods to the poor. Building on a Jewish foundation, Jesus declared that those who had fed the hungry and clothed the naked would enter his heavenly kingdom. The stakes were certainly high when it came to showing charity.

In the 15th and 16th centuries the position of the church as a purveyor of goods to the poor changed dramatically. In country after country across the face of Europe, the burgeoning power of the state absorbed more and more of these responsibilities.

This transformation was troubling to many. If the state became the primary distributor of charity, how could spiritual debts be paid off?

In our own day, it is clear that the state is, and must remain, the primary social service agency.

But the importance of faith-based giving is still an issue of considerable debate. Because God's grace does not simply float down from the heavens but is mediated by human hands, there may be some social utility in putting those charitable impulses to work in ameliorating some of the social ills that plague our country.

For the religious believer, however, giving to poor does more than fill a social need, it is the most effective way of channeling the love of God into a fallen world.

A memorial to the victims of the Fort Hood shooting stands on the grounds of Casa Del Norte, the apartment complex where the gunman Maj. Nadil Malik Hasan lived in Killeen, Texas. (Eli Meir Kaplan/Getty Images)

The Fort Hood shootings have re-ignited conversation about the place of Arab and Muslim Americans in U.S. culture. Syrian-American civil rights attorney Alia Malek has probed the question deeply in her book "A Country Called Amreeka: Arab Roots, American Stories," published by Free Press in October. The book tells the individual tales of Arab Americans working the assembly line, holding public office and serving in the armed forces. Malek has discovered that despite their contributions Arab Americans remain mostly sidelined in the story of America. Here she reflects on Arab-American invisibility which tends to vanish only in moments of national tension.

GUEST BLOGGER: Alia Malek

Arabs - both Christian and Muslim - began emigrating to the United States in appreciable numbers from the Arabic speaking world in the late 1800s. But too often their lives here are invisible, absent from national conversation, except in moments like the one we are living through right now in the wake of the tragedy at Ft. Hood. We tend to check in with this diverse community only when something goes "BOOM" in America or when someone of Arab or Muslim descent does something criminal.

It's a shame because the Arab-American contribution stretches across the landscape and, significantly, into the U.S. armed forces. Consider Navy SEAL Mike Monsoor who threw himself on a grenade in Iraq on September 29, 2006. The device had landed among SEALs and Iraqi soldiers, and Monsoor absorbed the blast with his body, saving everyone's life but his own. For his act of self sacrifice, he was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor last year.

Then there's Lance Corporal Abraham al-Thaibani of New York who enlisted with the Marines after his city was attacked on 9/11. On the day the World Trade Center towers fell, al-Thaibani ran through the streets of Brooklyn looking for his veiled wife to protect her from any potential backlash. He went to war in Iraq, a battleground chosen by American leaders for reasons that were unclear to him. He focused his efforts on seeing that every Marine he knew came home alive and tried to help Iraqi civilians where he could.

Abe's brother followed in his footsteps, enlisting and serving in Fallujah. He won the Purple Heart for his service.

These men are just a few of the thousands of Arab Americans who are in the armed services or have served in U.S. forces over the years. Like other Americans in the service, their experiences have run the gamut from ordinary to valiant to the ultimate sacrifice.

Arab-American history is long and deep in the United States but Arab and Muslim Americans are not part of how we imagine who we are as Americans or how we perceive what makes up the American experience. Now, in the national discussion among commentators, politicians, and others in the aftermath of Ft. Hood, we can see the dangerous effects of Arab-American invisibility; in that vacuum, acts of a single individual, Major Hasan, cast a shadow of collective guilt on millions of Americans.

Timothy McVeigh warped the interpretations of the Constitution but we easily dismissed that without pondering whether there was inherent evil in the Constitution. The same cannot be said of how we view the relationship between the Koran and violent behavior - we unfairly blame individuals' horrific acts on the teachings of the Koran. We ignore needed discussion of evident mental health issues, which were the focus when other service people have cracked and murdered their colleagues, and instead engage in lazy analysis about ethnic predilection of violence.

How can we move the conversation forward? If we knew more about the soldiers mentioned above and other Arab Americans, if their stories were familiar to us, if the origins of their names recognizable to us, how would the conversation be different?

While the murders at Ft. Hood and the resulting discussions show that the visibility of Arab Americans has yet to come into sharp focus, it also is a turning point that indicates that we have grown as a nation since 9/11. Eight years after the attacks, many Americans who are non Arab or Muslim - in the media, law enforcement and on the street - were immediately sensitive to potential backlash and spoke out. That says to me that we have begun to see Arab and Muslim Americans as a part of us, and that we realize that "us" is many things, from the murderous to the heroic to the ordinary.