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Mar. 6--In the United States, celebrities are much more willing to talk about their love lives than their faith lives. Undaunted, columnist Cathleen Falsani has pursued and cornered more than 30 of them in her book, The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.
Falsani's book, published last month, explores the relationship between well-known figures and their respective higher powers. Included are personalities as disparate as Ghostbusters star Harold Ramis, politician Barack Obama and basketball star Hakeem Olajuwon.
"A lot if it was serendipitous," she says. "Some I approached because I knew about the faith activity in their life. The vast majority were people I just found interesting. They all had to have a certain quality of introspection and openness. [They were] incredibly open, surprisingly so. Very candid and often quite vulnerable. I didn't have to push at all."
The book, she explains, began in December of 2002, when a story she was working on for the Chicago Sun-Times got her onto U2's tour bus and plunged her -- unexpectedly -- into a deep discussion with the group's lead singer, Bono.
"The idea that there's a force of love and logic behind the universe is overwhelming to start with, if you believe it," Bono told Falsani.
Other subjects remained elusive.
"I was often turned down," says Falsani, 35. "Most of Hollywood turned me down, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why that was. There was a real reticence among actors to do this. They have more gatekeepers."
A graduate of Wheaton College, an evangelical bastion and alma mater of both Billy Graham and horror-film director Wes Craven, Falsani prefers the term "public people" for her subjects.
" 'Celebrities' seemed a more frivolous title than what some of the people in the book deserve," she says, citing such intellectual heavyweights as Nobel laureates Elie Wiesel and Irish playwright Seamus Heaney, as well as novelists Sandra Cisneros and Laura Esquivel.
Highbrow or low-, Falsani says, she has garnered "glimpses of grace" from each interview.
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Copyright (c) 2006, The Orlando Sentinel, Fla.
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