CORRESPONDENCE
CORRESPONDENCE The Devil's Due Flushing, N.Y. To the Editors: I read your review of The Exorcist [Mar. 1] with some astonishment. Does not Mr. Westerbeck realize that, far from claiming a...
...Dig Wells 7 SUB-SAHARA COUNTRIES stricken with severe droughtl Water urgently needed for drinking cook;ng, bathing irrigating...
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...To be sure, Commonweal might well (or better) have selected one steeped in GKC to review Barker's biography, On the other hand, a legitimate principle for eds163 assignment is the current state of readership and I suspect that my own blankness on GKC is not entirely idiosyncratic...
...20009...
...etc...
...Thomas Aquinas by G.K...
...I certainly don't accept the radical point of view and it has its own self-deception which confuses muttering with mystic wisdom...
...Write: Dlrattor, INSTITUTE FOR MENTAL HEALTH...
...It is just possible Chesterton realized that the force of the triple reduction to absurdity that constituted the backbone of his book was a personal gift to him that could not be expected to impress anybody who didn't share the gift, and who had read more widely than the rules of the Index of Forbidden Books prescribed...
...Go read his lines to "the Don who dared attack my Chesterton," and beware...
...45c, seven times...
...Watergate shattered this placid pattern, and the candidate labeled "Nixon's man" bit the dust...
...The dimensions of his defeat are significant...
...I imagine that Chesterton would have had some comment with at least Commonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...
...Jam...
...Commonweal...
...There may be a message that life is founded on primeval joy--perhaps it can be conveyed in the granite intricacies of a medieval Summa, perhaps in the troubled confessions of a martyr or saint, but I lack the imagination to see it in accents of "charm and wit...
...Like Vice President Ford's old district where the GOP had previously lost, Michigan's 8th District in which Mr...
...fetal cost $1~, deposit $20, MURPHY CENTER, Eos |1, Notre Dame, /rid...
...The Everlasting Man was better suited to my pedestrian talent...
...Issues on Paris Agreement, PRG, etc...
...Now available in Aweflca...
...If so, the deficiency need not be located in just Barker or Chesterton...
...42c, thirteen t~mes, rwslve words minimum...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 000 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued ]rom page 229) Commonwears reputation would do this to any literary figure, much less to the gallant and currently beleaguered Chesterton, at whose chubby knees many of your readers first learned that the English language could be applied to contemporary issues with charm and wit...
...Chesterton & Friends Rochester, N.Y...
...Westerbeck realize that, far from claiming a victory, the devil was soundly defeated...
...Thus Vice President Ford, appearing before thousands of cheering Illinois Republicans, denounced the Committee for the Reelection of the President as "an arrogant, 61ite guard of political adolescents...
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...The sincere man was therefore supposed to be confused and hall articulate and anguished in his selfrevelation...
...I noted, for instance, that Chesterton's book on St...
...Nixon carried it with no trouble in each of his Presidential efforts...
...Interested persons should submit a curriculum vitae and three names of persons to be contacted for recommendations...
...If OKC's day is past, it is because "debate style Christianity" of which he is a brilliant example is past...
...FRANCIS Milwaukee, Wis...
...To the Editors: With regard to the review of Barker's Chesterton in your March 22 issue, it was startling to learn that reviewer Dean O'Brien isn't sure that he ever read anything of G.K.C.'s nor intends to start doing so at this late date...
...In the letter of William F. Buckley, Jr., in the April 19 issue, the word "autology" in the third last sentence should have read "tautology...
...Workshops In Psychiatry and Religion...
...Obviously he did not...
...Chesterton...
...Belloc was a hard and dangerous fighter...
...As Barker notes, the book on Thomas expresses GKC's own belief in the blessedness of life...
...He won't haunt you...
...Llnus Ascheman, O.S.B., INSTITUTE FOR MENTAL HEALTH, St...
...Choice of ultra-smooth exlr~ fine, fi~e or medium standard nlbs...
...am just not sure I could take a whole book full of that much confidence...
...Chesterton [Mar...
...Ten issues par year, $4...
...Rays...
...plunger filling mech~nism...
...rooted in the primeval joy of God and finding its fruition in the final happiness of humanity...
...Barker, p. 282...
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...Ford said in a speech that poli.tieal commentators saw as putting a certain distance between him and the President...
...He was not above substituting ridicule for logic, as when he noted that belief in Providence allowed of no exceptions, even in the presence of its apparently most meaningless manifestation, meaning de Rougement...
...22] by a man (Dennis O'Brien) who makes a great point of never having read Chesterton except in the form of some "great lines" reproduced by this biographer...
...Tallahassee...
...Conference, June IO-II...
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...Until now there had not been a Democrat elected from the district since the black days of the Depression, and Mr...
...Barker, p 281) Oh well, perhaps there is a ~ournalisCs gift for reaching the essence without too much reading...
...I suppose that it is reassuring that Dean O'Brien indicates that he did read the book he reviewed...
...10016 Please send a copy of the 50th Anniversary Year issue and the next 17 issues...
...The devil, upon demand from the frenzied Karras, leaves the body of the child he had vowed to possess until she should "lie stinking in her grave...
...It assumed that any show of qogic or rhetorical skill was prima /acie proof of hypocrisy and dishonesty...
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...Ford told the Middle Western party leaders, could the Republican party allow the Presidential candidate to bypass the regular party organization and set up a campaign group that would make its own rules "and dictate the terms of a national election...
...am sorry~sorry indeed-that I lack the faith which would justify the ~tyle...
...JR.: Movies JOHN FANDEL: Poetry BRIAN WICKER: Great Britain ALAIN WOODROW: Paris HENRY TEN KORTENAAR: Rome JOHN COONEY: Dublin EDWARD S. SKILLIN: Publisher JOHN BRUBAKER: Advertising Manager COMMONWEAL A Weekly Review at Public Aflairs, Literature and the Artl...
...The anger/ anguish of the GKC supporters almost persuades me to try again...
...Contact: Dr...
...Five-bedroom house and salary...
...Only $'/~0 at artist msterlal and pen shops as well as college book stores...
...But look out for BeUoc...
...10 May 1974:246 low wit, shallow irony and mild sense to make on this sort of situation...
...Institutes SACRED SCRIPTURE: Sixth Annual Institute, August 11-16...
...The death leap of Father Karras precluded the devil's possessing the priest's body and his obvious desire for confession just before he died foiled, as well, any chance the devil had of taking his soul...
...RICHARD JOHN NEUHAU$ Woodbury, Conn...
...If it were not such a serious matter there would be something almost comic about the efforts of GOP leaders to disentangle themselves from their Republican President...
...It occurs to me that he might have applied this same label to the man who faulted a writer without having read him...
...Second class postage paid at New York...
...Heterodoxy was a surfeit of brilliance...
...IRLICAL INSTITUTE Trinity Collegq, g~linqtoa, Vermoet ~,$1, J~e V-I4...
...He'll make you wish you had given the book to someone like Maisie Ward or Frank Sheed...
...Nixon's special campaign units--as if all the wrongdoing inside the White House itself had never happened...
...If there are any more cliques of ambitious amateurs who want to run political campaigns, let the Democrats have them next time," Mr...
...Write...
...Nixon campaigned was a traditional Republican stronghold...
...After two or three pieces of that rich cake, I put it away...
...10016 MUrray Hill 3.2042...
...Florida 3230b...
...Ohwand even the exorcism was effected although in somewhat unorthodox fashion...
...To the Editors: Regarding Dennis O'Brien's review of G. K. Chesterton [Mar...
...Thomas declared vitally, vividly, that life is a living story, with a great beginning and a great close...
...Send contr;buttons for dlgqlng wells and saving human lives to: MISSIONARIES OF AFRICA, 1622.21st St., N.W., washington, D.C...
...I ask myself, why should I want to read something on St...
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...I am sure that the jolly journalist was completely sincere in his view of life as a story with a happy ending...
...John's University, Collegeville, Minn...
...It showed what a tyro, a journalist could do with opinions made available to the public by scholars like Denis de Rougement who seemed to expect their reputations to compensate for the sloppy logic of their presentation...
...If this can happen in a district that has been held by the Republicans without interruption for 40 years, small wonder that GOP Senator Robert P. Griffin of Michigan, assistant minority leader, said after the voting that "no Republican should assume he has a safe seat any more...
...But then what is the intuited essence...
...WRI,~HT MUR~YO'CONNOR, SUELZER, COLLINS, MIni'EAR...
...INDOCHINA RESOURCE CENTER, P.O...
...Controlled ink flow...
...Indeed, so set is the area in its GOP ways that both Democrats and Republicans reportedly rarely bother to campaign hard there...
...His writlag style ~ssues from bastions of se,curity...
...Maybe O'Brien is only saying that Barker's biography of GKC didn't move him to a course of action (i.e., reading Chesterton) which his poor opinion of ghetto-mentality Catholics who admired Chesterton when O'Brien was young precluded him from taking...
...It seems to me I read one or another of the Father Brown mysteries but found them too clever to my taste...
...b e r . Convenient screw...
...22] by a man who has never read GKC, and has no intention of beginning now...
...To the Editors: I admire Dennis O'Brien's honesty in confessing [Mar...
...The Pelikan l~ Is the great classic fountaln pen from Germany, long a favorite of European pen purists...
...Nixon is obviously a political albatross, and he is dragging the GOP down...
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...To the Editors: You mean you had a new Chesterton book reviewed [Mar...
...I accepted the assignment because I have always had a curiosity about Chesterton from the high praise he received from those for whom I retain great affection...
...v. s. hBBOTt Repll Middlebury, Vt...
...one time...
...22]: just nitpicking or is there really something extraordinary about a reviewer confidently dismissing Chesterton as irrelevant while happily admitting he has never read any Chesterton...
...He had supremely the journalist's ability to drag the meaning and usefulness out of a book without actually reading too much of it...
...14 a year...
...It is inconceivable that a journal of (Continued on page 246) NEWS & VIEWS: 228 CORRESPONDF, NCE: 220 EDITORIALS: 229 PENNSYLVANIA GOTRIC: Russell W. Gibbons 230 SPRING IN TIlE LAND---AND IlUNGER: Abigail McCarthy 232 WALKER PERCY AND TIlE SELF: Lewis Jerome Taylor, Jr...
...For box numbers add 50c per insertion...
...Thomas was advertised in a recent issue of Commonweal and I thought that for my sins against the man I might offer to read ~t and correct my views and review, But I really don't have the heart for it...
...Post-Dachau, post-Bonhoeffer, Vatican II, Ingmar Bergman-post-something--I believe many Christians find it hard to rise above the stutter style when it comes to talk of God, and to the extent that this is true, the dashing polemics of Shaw and Chesterton (both sides) become virtually unreadable...
...233 IIEINRICII BOLL ON WORK, FAITII, GERMANY: An ~nterview 330 VERSE: Michael Paul Novak 238 THE SCREEN: Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr...
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...DENNIS O'BRIEN Correetions In Congressman Henry S. Reuss' April ]2 articte, "A No42ontidence Amendment," the Presidential-succession act cited on page 129, line 6, was that of March 1, 1792--not 1972...
...10011...
...When GKC was halfway through the writing of this biography, he sent Dorothy Collins to London to get some books on the saint...
...Name Address City, State, Zip [] I prefer a full year, and the Anniversary Year issue, for $14...
...GKC was the most genial of men...
...Never again, Mr...
...22] that he "can't exactly recall reading any Chesterton," but I am puzzled as to why Commonweal should assign such a reviewer to Dudley Barker's GKC biography...
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...In 1976, the Vice President said, the Republican party should demand a pledge from all candidates that they would not set up such Commonweal: 229 I believe, energized by the best stories McKay has written, which also prove that art makes the most forceful polemic: Before him it had been generally said the Negroes were inartistic: But he had found artistry where others saw nothing, because he believed that wherever the imprints of nature and humanity were found, there also were the seeds of creative life, and that above the dreary levels of existence everywhere there were always the radiant, the mysterious, the wonThe Florida State UniveHi~ Department of Religion announces an opening in New Testament Studies to be filled at the advanced assistant or associate Professor level--available September 1974...
...qc, 1hies Sleet...
...Michael Harrington notes in his autobiography the emergence of "the stutter style" in the radical rhetoric of the '60s...
...5-10-74 derful, the strange great moments whose magic may be caught by any clairvoyant mind and turned into magical form for the joy of man...
...Savings ,,p to 9G...
...He left the selection up to her and "when she got the books, Chesterton sped through them...
...I rather hoped Barker would convince me to make amends for a wasted intellectual adulthood...
...321...
...To the Editors: It surprises me that you would publish a review of Barker's G.K...
...Those of us who grew up on the Chesterbelloc are angry with you...
...The movie, I might add, was stunning...
...SISTER ST...
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...239 REVIEWING TRE REVIEW (NY): Raymond A. Schroth 240 BOOKS: Nathan A. Scott, Jr., John Druska 242 ILLUSTRATIONS: Front cover: photograph o~ Walker Percy by Franke Keating JAMES O'GARA: Editor JOHN DEEDY: Managing Editor RAYMOND A. SCHROTH: Associate Editor ANNE ROBERTSON: Editorial Asslttamt COLIN L. WESTEREECK...
...State color and nlb preference...
...Large visible ink chant...
...A favorite ploy even before Michigan was to shift all Watergate blame from the GOP to Mr...
...The irony would have amused GKC, but it depresses me...
...Single copies S0c 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 KFTER MICHIGKN Now that the dust has settled, what picture emerges from the Democratic victory in Michigan...
...10533...
...Leading titles ;n Political Science World Literature, Phil'~sophy...
...Can one attach any greater importance to such a review than to a put-down of Shakespeare some years ago by a critic who found the plays to be mostly a stringing together of quotes anyone could find in a thesaurus...
...Foreign $16...
...The President took a big gamble and lost...
...GERARD HINRICHS Brooklyn, N.Y...
...Dear Chesterton lovers: I apologize if I wounded your good and genial friend...
...PATRICIA A. PRYBIL P.S...
...John J. Carey, Chairman, Department of Rellqion, Florida State University...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 10
