cover image Life Is Short, Pray Hard: Forbidden Fruit II:: More Church Signs from Across America

Life Is Short, Pray Hard: Forbidden Fruit II:: More Church Signs from Across America

David Compton, Mary Katherine Compton. New American Library, $7.99 (144pp) ISBN 978-0-451-20783-8

""Satan subtracts and divides,"" reads one church marquee. ""God adds and multiplies."" Mary and David Compton offer more than 400 such marquee messages in Life Is Short, Pray Hard: More Roadside Church Signs Across America. Many of these bite-sized sermons were sent in by readers of the Comptons' previous compilation, Forbidden Fruit Creates Many Jams. Some of the messages are cute, some are poignant (and a few, admittedly, are a little tedious). Taken together, they are a slice of Americana, a testimony to the endurance of folk religion in a multimedia age.