Palahniuk

Slate has an article up about Chuck Palahniuk's so-called leap of faith (an idea he cribbed from Kierkegaard):

As he prepared to kick off a new tour in Portland, Ore., the other day, Palahniuk... explained the new methods he had cooked up to arouse his youthful audience. From a large cardboard box, he produced a handful of teriyaki-beef-scented air fresheners, which were to be passed out by women in mail-carrier uniforms. Then "everyone will be offering their meat to each other to sniff, as lurid as that sounds," Palahniuk explained.

More than 800 members of "The Cult" gathered that night for the reading in the sanctuary of Portland's First Unitarian Church. Palahniuk took the pulpit just after 7:30 and began the evening by tossing plastic severed hands into the crowd—a reliable trick, he said, to whip the audience into a frenzy. "Does Norman Mailer throw out severed body parts?" he shouted. "I don't think so!" After the crowd settled down, Palahniuk read a story from Haunted in which an overzealous Christian falls into a hot spring and watches his skin boil off.

Whoa. That is one sermon I would have liked to see.