"This is a bad land for gods," said Shadow. As an opening statement it wasn't 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen...', but it would do. "You've probably all learned that. The old gods are ignored. The new gods are as quickly taken up as they are abandoned, cast aside for the next big thing."

In Neil Gaiman's excellent "American Gods,' Jung's assertion regarding the presence of (G)gods, irrespective to the desires of their ersatz adherents, is given fresh life. Ostensibly a darkly humerous travelogue of a recently-freed con named Shadow, the book reveals itself to be about the travels both mortals and gods alike make through life, through time, through eternity.

Read this book, and talk to your group about it. As a non-native, Gaiman's uniquely equipped to analyze the interaction between America's sprawling landscape, diverse people, and the gods they bring and then abandon to wander the windy plains and lonely byways, and his book encourages discussion of what it means to be an American, what it means to be human, and what it means to believe.