Critics' choices for Christmas Traveling widely, reading closely (even eccentrically), and judging perspicaciously, our panel of Christmas critics has put together a list of titles that includes everything from an obedient Lassie to God's brilliantly wayward "biographer" And then there's the poetry and the theology Please share the good words
Baumann, Paul
Paul Baumann Paul Baumann is the associate editor of Commonweal. Now this is fun! It's not every day, or every Christmas, that one gets to share space with two of the authors one is about to...
...Commonweal readers will find one essay especially illuminating...
...For Catholics with a soft spot for natural-law arguments about sexuality (never my favorites), Sullivan's exegegis of the church's muddled homosexual anthropology is telling...
...That means no antidiscrimination laws protecting homosexuals, no barriers to service in the military, and no marriage laws discriminating against same-sex couples...
...Shakespeare, Karl Barth, Helmut Thielicke, Augustine, and the philosopher Michael Oakeshott figure prominently...
...It's not every day, or every Christmas, that one gets to share space with two of the authors one is about to recommend...
...Meilander explains: "Worldli-ness-that is, an appreciation of natural reality and a recognition that its existence cannot simply be absorbed by Christian vision...
...anthropologist Mary Douglas's most recent essays, has been issued in paperback...
...The Debate on Women Priests" is the best discussion of what is at stake for the church in the ordination question...
...Sullivan, the editor of the New Republic, is gay, Catholic, more conservative than liberal in his theology, and more classically liberal than progressive in his politics...
...he is out to make sense of Christian freedom, human nature, and even the limits of the Christian vision...
...Pieper described the legacy of the Christian West as "theologically grounded worldli-ness...
...Lodge's novels have chronicled an entire generation of English and mostly Catholic academics, and he can make you laugh out loud...
...Meilaender, an ethicist graced with a lucid prose style and a literary sensibility, is such an exception...
...Luke Timothy Johnson (Commonweal, May 19,1995) found much that was dubious in Miles's attempt to read the Bible strictly on its own terms as a kind of novel...
...Even while feigning detachment, Miles relies on that 5,000-year-old theological tradition in creating his "character...
...But there are exceptions...
...Only Updike can turn the possible sexual subtext of a dental hygienist's touch into an erotic poem so gently trans-gressive that the reader's jaw aches from smiling...
...is required reading...
...Meilaender's careful critique of universal moral absolutes is very helpful, especially his ability to make room for ambiguity and exceptional cases-indeed, for both human and divine freedom-without rela-tivizing fundamental values...
...we need also some way to maintain contact with all that is good in that civilization, to understand that if it is often vicious (in the technical, moral sense), its vice is, at least sometimes, 'splendid.'" On a lighter, airier, and entertaining note, David Lodge's most recent novel, Therapy (Viking, $22.95,321 pp...
...is a delight from its hobbled protagonist's entrance to the winning, if perhaps too winning, conclusion...
...Admittedly, this will not satisfy either side, but it just might salvage the legitimate vision of both...
...If your taste runs to politics and polemics, Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality (Knopf, $23, 222 pp...
...Finally, Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (Routledge, $17.95,323 pp...
...Still, despite its heterodox conclusions, God: A Biography leaves the reader with a powerful sense of the biblical God as a real presence, not merely a doctrinal formula or a philosophical conundrum...
...Compared to Job or 2 Samuel, reading ethics is like rooting for the Red Sox...
...one is continually let down in the end...
...The legitimate autonomy of the secular sphere is also shrewdly assessed...
...Douglas argues that the gender-based sacramental imagery the Vatican defends in the exclu-siveness of the male priesthood is valuable, and that change should incorporate that imagery, not eviscerate it...
...Jack Miles and Gilbert Meilaender demonstrate their erudition above, and it is a great pleasure to champion their recent work here...
...In fact, he's a bit of a Tory...
...Miles's bold revisionist reading of Job, in which God himself is silenced by Job's ironic challenge, is one example of how disorienting this "biography" can be...
...Whether the liberal state can ever be, or should be, as neutral as Sullivan suggests remains the question...
...Not many novelists capture the everyday humanity of their characters with as much affection or sympathy as Lodge does in Therapy...
...In this context, Meilaender relies on an essay by the Thomist Josef Pieper (which appeared in Commonweal...
...He can also quote and explain Kierkegaard-and make you laugh out loud doing it...
...Sullivan advocates a strict state neutrality concerning the legal status of homosexuality...
...He is especially good on the tension between particular loyalties to family and friends and broader humanitarian responsibilities...
...This is a sometimes difficult, but always rewarding collection covering topics as diverse as witchcraft, the usefulness of stigma, the misguided search for the historical Jesus, and the contrasting cultures and consequent effectiveness of Swedish and English trade unions...
...Her suggestion, which she has recently fleshed out elsewhere, is that the church create a commission of women somewhat parallel in status and authority to the college of cardinals...
...In Faith and Faithfulness: Basic Themes in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame Press, $11.95, 211 pp...
...John Updike's The Afterlife and Other Stories (Fawcett, $6.99,316 pp...
...Douglas takes the arguments of both the Vatican and reformers seriously, explains why the two talk past one another, and hints at a possible compromise solution...
...Does anyone else suffuse the conflicts and minutiae of middle-class American life and longing with such transcendent ambition...
...Johnson's reservations are well-taken...
...What, he asks, are homosexuals for, if, as the church now accepts, homosexuality is a given, not a choice...
...Catholicism should make institutional changes that give concrete expression to the church's already very positive symbolic vocabulary regarding women...
...Similarly, the discussion of God's sexual jealousy and "characterological" masculinity is refreshingly free of either nervous apology or any reactionary agenda...
...For my money, Douglas's sure grasp of how symbolism is tied to social relations is indispensable in making sense of contemporary religious conflict...
...But more important than any one example of interpretive daring, is how the grandeur of God is enhanced, not diminished, by the travails of self-discovery and the startling lack of omnipotence that Miles finds everywhere in the text...
...Can such a "natural" condition logically require a lifetime of sexual and emotional denial...
...This is a book that can change minds, and is especially noteworthy for the graciousness with which Sullivan engages others...
...Miles's beautifully written, learned, and mischievous "literary" reading of the Hebrew Scriptures, does what most books of theology or scriptural exegesis sadly fail to do: it brings the protagonist of the Bible to life, his bloody sword, unfathomable motives, unrequited longing, and scandalous masculinity intact...
...She is equally convinced that the church will continue to lose credibility, especially in the first world, if it does nothing more than issue ultimatums about the unchangeable nature of the priesthood...
...Our ability to think about the God of the Bible as a coherent character is largely the product of our extrabibli-cal theological understanding, not something that emerges unabetted from the often bewildering complexity of the biblical texts...
...God: A Biography (Knopf, $27.50,424 pp...
...shows his powers of observation and incantation are undiminished...
...Later, relying on Augustine, Meilaender elaborates: "For we need more than a way to carve out a distinctively Christian life amidst the ruins of a surrounding civilization...
...Tubby Passmore, a successful TV sitcom writer and hypochondriac, is at the very full heart of Therapy, fitfully navigating both the perils of a suddenly collapsing marriage and his long-collapsing, fifty-something body...
Vol. 122 • December 1995 • No. 21
