Over the Rainbow shows how Dorothy's passage from Kansas to Oz and back again recapitulates paradigmatic stories of both America and Christianity. Defining human identity on three symbolic levels (individual, collective, and cosmic), Nathanson shows that The Wizard of Oz has come to be a "secular myth."

Paul Nathanson is a researcher in the field of Religious Studies at the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics, and Law. He is working with Katherine K. Young on the forthcoming book The Future of Nature: Reproductive Technologies and the Symbolic Frontier.