The Creed Room

Sam Kramer is the kind of school teacher who is born to provoke-whether it's his students' thoughts or his principal's anger. In his classroom, he's in charge. But he soon finds himself a pawn in someone else's classroom when he responds to a cryptic ad in the Washington Post and visits an old Victorian mansion. There, he and eight others are given a proposition: for a handsome fee, work together over the next several months to develop a new creed for humankind, a unifying philosophy that will give hope to an increasingly divided world. The group starts out with great devotion to the man who brought them together. What they don't realize until later is that this "benefactor" may in fact have created the creed room for his own, more sinister purposes. Daniel Spiro's characters pull no punches as they spar about religious fundamentalism, racism, poverty and the question of God. Sometimes, these characters find common ground. They also find romance. And in the end, they change history. The Creed Room is a dramatic, thought-provoking journey through the ideological divide that now strangles the American soul. Fortunately, Mr. Spiro doesn't simply diagnose the problem; the "creed" he offers as a solution succeeds in marrying many of the best ideas on both sides of the Great Divide.