BOOKS
Taylor, Mark & Meyers, Jeffrey & Silver, Isidore & Dohen, Dorothy & McInerny, Ralph
liberation, Revolution and Freedom: Theological Perspectives EDITED BY THOMAS M. McFADDEN Seabury, $9.95 God of the Oppressed JAMES H. CONE Seabury, $955 DOROTHY DOHEN These are two of the...
...The Friends of Richard Nixon GEORGE V. HIGGINS Atlantic, Little-Brown, $10.95 ISIDORE SILVER George Higgins' literary prototypes appear to be Jimmy Breslin and Murray Kempton...
...For there are illustrations, dozens of them, beautifully reproduced, many in color...
...Church...
...Every reader of Natural Enemies who neglects the preemptive copy on its dust jacket will have a natural desire to learn what Paul Steward's surname is by the time it finally appears on the book's last page...
...Furthermore, his attitude toward the visible or instituThe only antidote to the poison front Caesar's laurel crown comes from Jesus's crown of thorns...
...Shea's book is more overtly erudite than Muggeridge's and he does those awful things to the language that scholars do...
...Similarly, in his eagerness to answer Freud, Durkheim, Feuerbach and other critics of religion who dismissed it as only a projection, he argues that they could do this because they never saw the living religion of the black community...
...And what it, Steward, is can't be an accident: putative guardian of, custodian of, carer for self, family, profession, and community- Steward botches the job of steward...
...Thackeray, the art critic for Frasefs Magazine, described the little demon of a steamer, belching out a volume of malignant smoke, dragging to her last home the slow, sad and majestic old ship, with death, as it were, written on her...
...In the end one is silenced by Cone...
...The other and major reason-the one which has agitated a legion of commentators-is the attempt to debunk some of the mythology about the nature of the law enforcement and criminal justice processes that broke the case...
...Paul's world, built of money, power, and prestige, is bereft of comfort and ideals: 'The dream that sustained people through all kinds of nightmares, that dream that we were individuals, just doesn't work anymore...
...A book like Natural Enemies can succeed only by persuading us, against our hopes, of the legitimacy of its protagonist's enterprise...
...The concluding section of Liberation, Revolution and Freedom presents the thought of two theologians who have been highly critical of liberation theology...
...Dorothy dohen is a professor of Sociology and Chairperson of Excel, the interdisciplinary division for adult students at Fordham University...
...Things suffer and tend toward inertia, without ever attaining it...
...While prosecutors should "react" to crimes rather than aggressively "target" (i.e...
...The quality of that interest, to be sure, in many cases, leaves much to be desired, and it is not the least merit of Malcolm Muggeridge's excellent book that he is able to account for this...
...Petersen's generosity in permitting Maurice Stans to testify privately rather than before the grand jury is almost skipped...
...All is woe...
...What we expect from Muggeridge, and what we get, is the caustic dismissal of all efforts to commend Christ by pandering to the Zeitgeist, to twist his message to some current and evanescent purpose...
...In Natural Enemies, Julius Horwitz* sevcnth novel, the fantastic-the captive, tormented thought-is what one character calls "the insensate drift toward obliteration...
...Higgins describes the former's perplexity when all of the original burglars refused to talk, a singularly improbable circumstance when criminals are caught red-handed...
...Silbert and Petersen...
...These killings have only started in modern times," says Paul, albeit in a passage rife with the adolescent mendacities to which he is prone...
...How many are so productive and vital at his now patriarchal age...
...Turner's Slave Ship (1840), which depicts the slavers throwing the dead and dying to the sharks as a typhoon approaches, was originally exhibited with a rather turgid poetic caption from his own fragmentary pessimistic epic, the i ullacies of Hope...
...Not even half...
...He frequently painted with his fingers or the wooden end of his brush...
...Liberation, Revolution and Freedom is a collection of essays given originally as papers at the 1974 meeting of the College Theology Society...
...Bonhoeffer wrote: "Men go to God when he is sore bestead, Find him poor and scorned, without shelter or bread . . . Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving...
...The reason is found in Jesus Christ who is God's decisive Word of liberation in our experience that make it possible to struggle for freedom because we know that God is struggling too...
...And yet there is something else as well...
...it must be in accord, if not with universal laws, at least with circumstances that we recognize...
...john p. sisk teaches in the English Department at Gonzaga University in Spokane...
...Paul's action cannot be an aberration, a caprice...
...You said nobody could understand these killings1 except the men driven to them," Paul's wife Miriam tells him...
...Jeffrey meyers' books include A Reader's Guide to Orwell and Painting and the Novel...
...With Renan, Jesus becomes an object of sentimentality, not of faith...
...One of his most famous paintings, The Fighting Temiraire (1838), evokes nostalgic patriotism by portraying the gallant man-of-war that had played a distinguished role under Nelson at Trafalgar in 1805, as she is ig-nominiously tugged to her last berth to be broken up...
...the debased, enslaved mind unsuccessfully strives towards consciousness and freedom...
...Although Higgins narrates the account from John Dean's perspective, he tells us not only what the President knew (and, in Senator Baker's unmemorable phrase, "when he knew it"), but what the conspirators, especially Dean, knew, didn't know, and suspected as the long months dragged on...
...Turner LUKE HERRMANN N. Y. Graphic Society, $37.50 JEFFREY MEYERS The Turner exhibition at the Royal Academy in London last year, which celebrated the bicentenary of the painter's birth, was a magnificent revelation of sixty years' continuous experimentation and of the astounding creativity that produced 19,000 sketches, hundreds of watercolors and 500 oil paintings...
...Natural Enemies JULIUS HORWITZ Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $7.95 MARK TAYLOR The fantastic in literature, as Sartre once observed in an essay on Kafka, does not merely juxtapose a strange person or an anomalous event and a familiar setting...
...the fat . of this review being already served, only the lean remains...
...These barbs are always subservient to the main end and Muggeridge is not concerned to score off others...
...one is painfully aware that in his book there is no transcendence of race by Christianity...
...Style and content are not divorced, as Kempton's sophisticated pirouettes have consistently demonstrated-and Higgins is not the most graceful essayist on any level...
...Beyond some flip generalizations, he does not explore the implications of his sketchily stated positions about Power, Role, and Function of various actors within the criminal justice system...
...As for most of the remaining 40% - "What bullshit...
...Always present is the hypothesis (though only one of several) that Paul's action, however sanguinary, may be the one right action...
...And I kept wishing history had been different and that James Cone had been at Union Theological at another time-in the school year 1931-1932 when another theologian was resident there,, spent his free time working with they people of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, went back to bring to German seminarians the fruit of black religion in his recordings of Negro spirituals, and went on to fight oppression and die a martyr to it...
...For instance, the title is doubtlessly meant to arouse the reader knowledgeable about the author's first book into a smug recognition of a certain symmetry...
...He begins with an odd contrast between theology and faith, seems irenic to a fault, if only intermittently, and then gets down to his main concern which is to show the way in which Christ challenges us to repent, to celebrate, to trust, to forgive and to love...
...Rather, "it is an entire world in which things manifest a captive, tormented thought, a thought both whimsical and enchained, that gnaws away from below at the mechanism's links without ever managing to express itself...
...Of course Muggeridge's world-weariness is a familiar disguise...
...He is free...
...We are still slave or free, still white or black, still not one in Christ Jesus...
...The book is, in format, a gift book, a coffee table book...
...No fundamentalist, Muggeridge acknowledges Scripture scholarship without permitting it to become an impediment...
...He alone can deliver us from the monstrosities and buffooneries of power, as has been discovered by the most perceptive spirits of our time, such as Solzhenitsyn...
...What Paul Steward does need not, appear inevitable, but as terrible as it may be to postulate such destruction in the abstract (and more so in the particular), neither can it appear unlikely...
...Without this dream some men, like Paul, will hurry their families into eternity...
...Muggeridge recognizes (p...
...Love calls us to the things of this world," as Richard Wilbur observed...
...Not chiefly Cone's...
...And Miriam, who listens to Paul, says to him, "You said every man thinks about killing his family when the act of annihilation seems like the only solution...
...Cone, Professor of Theology at Union Theological Seminary, has written previous books on the relationship of black theology to black power and on the place of the black spirituals in the religion and life of black people...
...Paul, who listens to Rosenthal, says that some men "think by killing their families they may be saving their families from pain and suffering and emptiness in a world falling down on their heads...
...This essay can serve as an excellent introduction to both political theology and liberation theology for neophyte spectators who have trouble identifying players let alone keeping score in the current theological games...
...and according to one witness, sometimes "began by pouring wet paint onto the paper until it was saturated...
...In the one it is enlightenment...
...One wishes to reject the book's nihilism, the savagery of Paul's mission, even the relentlessness of Mr...
...Born of a Virgin, divine and human, apolitical, a wonder worker who deprecated his own miracles, Christ died on the cross and rose again from the dead, ascended into heaven and from thence he shall come to judge the living .and the dead...
...When faith goes, sentimentality rather than scepticism fills the resultant vacuum...
...That pretty well exhausts the similarity between Muggeridge and Renan et hoc genus omne...
...12) Muggeridge puts his finger on what has happened...
...Beyond that, he is an intellectual smartass and the book's style consistently elevates complexity to flaccidity and even disingenuousness...
...Today there is no one to kill to set things right except ourselves...
...in the other it is salvation...
...Afterwards, the good things fell apart...
...How this relates to liberation theology, . sittipa?di does not say, but his essay might possibly stimulate creative thinking in liberation theology which unhappily has become banal rather quickly...
...He tore, he scratched, be scrubbed it in a kind of frenzy and the whole thing was chaos...
...Petersen's comment to Dean that Jeb MacGruder got through his (early) grand jury stint "by the skin of his teeth" evokes not ev,en a passing comment...
...Half in love with easeful death...
...Turner achieved his visionary and poetic effects not by the striking opposition of light and dark, but by the contrast of the cold, grey, morning with the flame that burns like gold and bathes like blood...
...The book convinces...
...To be a Christian is to discount this world, to see it as the enemy, to renounce it...
...His most recent book is Gate of Heaven (Harper & Row...
...Turner also portrayed the cataclysmic changes of the Industrial Revolution...
...Sadly, Natural Enemies succeeds all too well...
...Beyond tantalizing insights such as these, much of the book is persiflage...
...Turner represents the pinnacle of English art and, in the words of Ruskin, "is the greatest landscape painter who has ever lived...
...mark Taylor teaches in the English Department at Manhattan College...
...And Cone, in turn, writes: "Although the continued existence of black suffering offers a serious challenge to the biblical and black faith, it does not negate it...
...Yet, for all the high-minded generalities about the necessity for judges not to be prosecutors, for committee lawyers to ask pointed and probing rather than flabby questions, for prosecutors not to smear the presumably innocent, he is as ambiguous about the "system" as are the rest of us...
...Muggeridge has been cultivating a similar attitude towards earth in general and his preferred tone is that of one reporting from Apocalyptic ruins...
...It is the traditional faith, as articulated in the creeds that (Continued on page 474)we find here...
...But, what "saves" the book and gives it value is the author's ability to use his prosecutorial "smarts" to analyze-or shrewdly guess at-the bizarre dimensions of the repellent enterprise labeled Watergate...
...But whether one is a Christian or a Zen Buddhist, "What he is, in the end, is himself, a self which is unattached to bis condition, yet who can also be passionately concerned about that very condition...
...But did they ever see the living religion of the white community...
...Men ran home from Europe and they kept running...
...40) Facing the page on which the last remark is found is Millais' Christ in the House of His Parents...
...or he makes the best of a bad show...
...Virgin Birth, Hypostatic Union, Trinity, Resurrection-the faith of Malcolm Muggeridge is as solid and old-fashioned as one would expect, though he confesses difficulties with Transubstantiation...
...On balance, the score is about 60-40 in favor of the perceptive surgical job performed upon the President ("Rage did not wither, or custom stale, his infinite variety as a liar") and his friends...
...or he too liberally interprets the assignment...
...There was evidently no one in the administration who could compel him to perform even that menial assistance to the program of covering up what he, after all, had instigated...
...It has become abundantly clear in the second half of the twentieth century that Western Man has decided to abolish himself...
...In some circumstances a man who feels he can no longer protect his family may kill his family to save them from further harm...
...When it is too late for him to be helped, as it turns out, Paul recognizes that there might be a growth to real human maturity, painful but possible, that would free the will of its paralysis...
...of the central pictures of the nineteenth century and prefigures Monet's Gore Saint-Lazare, records the dramatic effect of the tinted-steamed fiery monsters more ambiguously...
...But Turner's exciting Rain, Steam, Speed-The Great Western Railway (1844), which is one REVIEWERS Robert K. landers is a newspaper editor in Connecticut...
...The buoyant and bending ship, caught up in the swirling vortex of this painting, reflects his preoccupation with the vivid effects of light and atmosphere in a raging sea and stormy sky, and with the hostility of the destructive natural forces that either reduce man to insignificance or obliterate him entirely...
...33) With Muggeridge presumably looking on dry-eyed, perhaps even grinning...
...Having wearied of the struggle to be himself, he has created his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, his own vulnerability out of his own strength . . . until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keels over, a weary, battered old brontosaurus, and becomes extinct...
...And of course it is in this world that we must work out our salvation...
...Cone can't dismiss Augustine and Monica so easily-but he does...
...James Gaffney, in a generally sympathetic account of the writings of Jacques Ellul, does a service to that French Protestant theologian by summarizing his sometimes-stringent criticism of Christian proponents of revolution in the context of his (Ellul's) own intense political and social involvements...
...One wishes to, but here one can't...
...We were the first batch of refugees from the city wars...
...But with Bonhoeffer, I am sure, Cone has an affinity which he ought to investigate...
...he has been reading the signs of the last days with lugubrious relish for some time...
...How better convey the nature of that faith than to tell again the life of Christ, who he was, what he taught, his continuing role in history...
...Like William Buckley, he perceives himself to be outrageous when he is merely nit-picking...
...This reviewer found herself profoundly moved by God of the Oppressed, but highly critical of Professor Cone's line of argument He is too sophisticated a thinker and scholar not to know that white theologians are equally removed from the concerns of white folk religion...
...And whose fault is that...
...seek out) public enemies, he admits that "the passive model" of law enforcement, though generally acceptable in ordinary crime, "is not so good" "for conspiracies, frauds, rackets and such like...
...This impression has been so effectively conveyed that it requires quite an effort to recall how, according to the Gospels, Jesus spent most of his time in the company of his disciples, who, as far as we know, were impeccably respectable...
...Not that Muggeridge aficionados will be disappointed, there is the distinctively Muggeridge voice, the Old Man quite audible in the New...
...He reveals himself to be a witty, sophisticated, knowledgeable modern, no longer recusant, wistful for lost innocence, marvelously possessed of a strong and peasant faith...
...When we were young men in battle," Paul reflects, "there was Stalin to assassinate, Hitler, Mussolini, who else...
...I think that Mr...
...Jesus deposed from Godhead becomes Jesus Superstar, an infinitely less credible figure...
...Faced with power at its most unbridled and most brutal, they turn for help and comfort, not to Universal Declarations of Human Rights and other pronouncements, solemn undertakings, Covenants and Charters in a similar vein, but to the man wearing a crown of thorns, decked out in a red robe of absurdity and with a court of jeering soldiers...
...Jesus: The Man Who lives tional church is equivocal, though he has no difficulty at all accepting the reality of the devil...
...Higgins is scornful of the performance of the reputed "heroes" of Watergate, Sirica and the Ervin Committee (he omits discussion of the Woodstein endeavor...
...Forenza lucidly recounts the main themes of the theologians of liberation whose thought was stimulated by the social, political and economic oppression of Latin America, and of the political theologians, whose theology developed as a criticism of the existential theologians' focus on personal anxiety to the neglect of political structures...
...How much Bonhoeffer the theologian learned from American blacks I don't know...
...The latter essay is a brief version of some of the thoughts Cone develops in greater depth, and with greater indication of their complexity, in God of the Oppressed...
...One wishes to say it cannot be so, that it is fantastic in a sense quite different from Sartre's, that a man who murders his family is a madman, unlike the rest of us...
...Incidentally, the reader should not overlook the valuable notes in the back of the book...
...Muggeridge clearly loves the Gospels...
...They may be as recent as fifty years old...
...But, we shall need ev£n Higgins' flawed accomplishment in the days ahead-for Richard Nixon is once again threatening to inflict his egregious presence upon a Nation which, like the children he once deigned to call us, may not fully remember some relatively recent White House Horrors...
...Here, Renan opened a rich vein which has been heavily worked, especially of late, to the point that Jesus is commonly believed today to have consorted largely with whores, drunkards and rogues of one sort and another...
...If this were all to the book, then Hig-gins' critics, most of whom have excoriated this foolishness, would be right...
...God of the Oppressed gives the social context out of which black theology has arisen, a context where oppressed people fanned their faith in a liberating God and kept their hope of freedom alive through hymns and spirituals and folk tales...
...From beginning to end Paul is obsessed with his lack of freedom, with everyone's lack of freedom, with living after "the free life in America" has ended...
...unfortunately, any attempt to blend those dissimilar styles (which might be called "low" and "high dudgeon") runs and even doubles the risks of both crudeness and pretentiousness...
...Either Jesus never was or he still is...
...Jesus: The Man Who Lives MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE Harper & Row, $17.95 The Challenge of Jesus JOHN SHEA Thomas More, $7.50 RALPH McINERNY It cannot be said that ours is a time when interest in Jesus is in decline...
...And may we not say," Nietzsche asked, "that ethics has never lost its reek of blood and torture...
...In a final essay William J. Sullivan looks at the idea of poverty, in the context of the beatitudes and in the tradition of the Church, and raises the question whether Christians in their current concern for the problem of the poor and oppressed of the world are not misconceiving the solution...
...someone whose bent and style contrast with those of John the Baptist, that austere and prophetic precursor...
...ralph McINERNY teaches philosophy at the University of Notre Dame...
...But reading his book, I kept thinking of the one white theologian who was...
...For the freedom of space, subtlety of light and variety of color in Turner's late work (like the Norham Castle series) anticipate Monet's Impressionist paintings of Rouen cathedral, while Turner's lucid dissolution of form into pure color and light foreshadows the abstract works of the twentieth century...
...Among the more valuable essays are Francis P. Forenza's, which does an excellent job of distinguishing political theology, which originated in highly industrialized, secularized Germany, from liberation theology, which has grown up in Latin America where the Church is still a power and where the "privatization of faith," so marked in the European context, does not fit the social reality...
...Renan wrote his book in the Holy Land and Muggeridge found his own interest, and faith, quickened by the experience of making a television documentary film of the life of Jesus on location...
...liberation, Revolution and Freedom: Theological Perspectives EDITED BY THOMAS M. McFADDEN Seabury, $9.95 God of the Oppressed JAMES H. CONE Seabury, $955 DOROTHY DOHEN These are two of the growing bibliographic additions to the theology of liberation, or theologizing on liberation movements...
...Higgins' bizarre, tenuous, and wholly incomplete explanation attributes this gross breach of prosecutorial tradition to "the democrats, and the Common Cause liberals" (who were suing CREEP...
...But "world" is ambiguous and it is the paradox of Christianity that it gives back what it,has taken away...
...If the book has a weakness it is Father Shea's attempt to be a broker among too many disparate and conflicting viewpoints...
...in them Cone gives some of his most telling responses to his critics, as well as makes some of his most interesting comments in "throw-away" lines this reviewer wishes he had developed...
...Horwitz' perfectly supportive style: blocks of wrenching, excoriating monologue that spring up from commonplace stichomythic exchanges Paul and Miriam, Paul and Rosenthal, Paul and miscellaneous whores...
...He is right that white theologians-Barth, Bultmann, etc.-have not been influenced by black oppression...
...A more spectacular example occurred when Turner, like Odysseus defying the Sirens, was lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours as a vivid preparation for his Snowstorm (1842...
...Like any collection, some papers appear to have greater value than others...
...Higgins then guesses that everybody was afraid of the Big Enchilada and that "the reason for their fear was so great that it was never confided to Dean, or discussed during the recorded conversations that have been released...
...Letty Russell's discussion of themes of feminist theology, Carl Starkloffs insightful comments on the American Indian religion, and James H. Cone's essay on black liberation specify the relation of liberation theology to liberation movements...
...The coverup involved multiple plots, subplots, and obstructions of justice, all of which became a seamless web-to the public...
...This drift is partly visible in die felt necessity that drives Paul Steward to kill his wife, three children, and self, to allow no alternative into his perceived scheme of things, to contemplate nothing else during the day of that atrocity except other atrocities committed by other men on their families, those inexplicable acts of madness, or of awesome privacy, that burst on us from the morning papers and then pass as quickly as an odometer reading...
...Undoubtedly, other chilling stories await either further revelations from the tapes or the Great Stonewall's autobiography...
...It is ironic that the paintings which were most ridiculed in Turner's time-the Snowstorm was called "soapsuds and whitewash"-are today the most admired...
...What we thought we had claim to, we gave up and fled...
...At times, he seems to relish his own quixoticness, but does not quite believe what he is saying...
...Some Christian theorists now seem to suggest that the goal of charity is to make the recipient as invulnerable as the giver," whereas to Sullivan, "Christian love demands the giving of self so that one becomes as vulnerable as the person assisted...
...By contrast, Luke Herrmann's beautifully designed book on J. M. W. Turner also has a fifty-page introduction, which provides a general (though not original or definitive) commentary on the 190 larger plates (42 in color) and a brief account of Turner's life and work, but has only ten pages of notes on the plates and costs $37.50...
...Dietrich Bonhoeffer, according to his biographer Eberhard Bethge, was troubled by what he saw as the (unconscious) hypocrisy of American theologians in condemning Nazism while remaining largely untroubled by the oppression of American blacks...
...But gradually and as if by magic the lovely ship, with all its exquisite minutia, came into being...
...But he found it too painful to live with "that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight and, cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea...
...Maybe and maybe not...
...Turner willingly risked his life to achieve the direct and immediate experience of the whirlwinds, avalanches, conflagrations and tempests that dominate his work...
...Turner was totally absorbed by the urge to create and loved to astonish people by repainting his pictures as they hung in the Royal Academy the day before exhibition...
...Turner, the contemporary of Constable and of Ingres, equaled the brilliance of the Venetian colorists, Titian and Giorgione, and transcended his first masters, Claude Lorrain and Aelbert Cuyp...
...93) that the impulse to apocalyptic utterance, like that to Utopian fantasies, is self-indulgent, even vulgar...
...This reader suspects that he knows he cannot accommodate quite so much...
...To make the poor and the oppressed wealthy and powerful is simply to create a new caste of oppressors...
...Paul's sense of determinism is no illusion, but it may follow in part from his prior conviction of its existence...
...The strength of the book is just the sense the reader has that Shea is a sensitive, informed guide, in via himself, a reassuringly priestly presence...
...It must show us that the whole social mechanism, in Sartre's words, is being gnawed away from below...
...We were driven out of the city by an enemy population...
...Other theologians before Cone have learned theological concern at their mother's knee (I am aware of my white self-righteousness in noting that Cone protests too much that where he learned his was at the Macedonia, Arkansas, A.M.E...
...The Tate Gallery's paperback exhibition catalogue has fifty pages of text, 150 plates (24 in color) and 160 pages of notes on the plates, and seems a gift at less than $4...
...a few address themselves to the central concerns of the theology of liberation, others appear peripheral to it...
...He witnessed the burning of the Houses of Parliament on October 16, 1834 from both sides of the Thames, made nine rapid water-color sketches on the spot and then painted two apocalyptic oils (now in Philadelphia and Cleveland...
...Though Turner's poetical faculties were limited, he was a fine illustrator of expensive editions of Milton, Scott and Byron...
...and there is not so much a suspension of belief as a readiness to believe anything...
...In short, Muggeridge has, perhaps partly malgre lui-meme, written a work of edification...
...Francis J. Reilly evaluates the thought of the Swedish theologian Gustaf Wingren, especially Wingren's negative judgment of liberation theology, and points out some of the inconsistencies of Wingren's own theological position...
...he cherishes their surface inconsistencies, their patent lack of editorial finish, their quantitative bias in the direction of the final days of Jesus...
...There are several essays taking up themes tangential to liberation theology, such as the ethics of violence and nonviolence, and the psychological origins of violence and non-violence, and the psychological origins of violence and revolution...
...The fantastic is the improbable, even the unthinkable, raised to a way of life (or death), translated to a principle of existence (or non-existence...
...It is the war that should have been the grotesquerie, but in fact everything was easy then, normal...
...it works to depressing effect...
...Cone indicts white theologians for being concerned about issues which have no relationship to black people, and urges that they look to black folk religion for a living expression of the theological concerns they should investigate...
...Presumably, dissection of the mechanics of the coverup constituted one purpose-not, apparently, the primary one-of the tome...
...The ability, to sustain the multiple narrative (and to pungently comment upon what participants are "really" saying through various semantic fogs) results in certain provocative judgments-John Mitchell "had little to do with management of the coverup...
...To concentrate on this is to overlook Higgins' ability to retell what, in all its intricacy, is not that familiar a story...
...He begins his own with a reference to Renan's Vie de Jesus which dates from the early 19th Century...
...Why wasn't Silbert suspicious rather than merely surprised...
...191) Father Shea's The Challenge of Jesus suffers the fate of the faithful son when a flashy prodigal like Malcolm Muggeridge comes home...
...In substance, it is a personal testimonial, a profession of the author's Christian belief...
...The dichotomies are there, certainly, but they are not as Cone states them...
...John Ruskin, who devoted the first two volumes of Modern Painters (1843-46) to a monumental defense of Turner's late work, called his friend, the son of a Convent Garden barber, "a somewhat eccentric, keen-mannered, matter-of-fact, Englishminded gentleman...
...Take the putative vindication of Messrs...
...One of the most lyrical passages of the book recounts the preciousness and attractiveness creatures and quotidian activities take on for the man of faith...
...Ellul, it should be noted, foresaw the plays of the theologians of liberation years before they even thought of them...
...Paul and Rosenthal met in Europe at the end of the war...
...As a typical product of these confused times, with a sceptical mind and a sensual disposition, diffidently and unworthily, but with the utmost certainty, I assert that he still is...
...Why did he acquiesce to the CREEP lawyers' demands to sit in on interviews with that ill-starred organization's employes...
...the analogy is false, for while Eddie Coyle's friends did him in, Richard Nixon's went to the well for an ingrate president...
...Paul's daughter Sheila knows the glories he has seen: "Daddy . . . you saw all of the good things...
...God of the Oppressed seems to have been written out of Cone's concern to clarify his theology in the face of criticisms from both black and white theologians, and in response to members of his own community who see both religion and theology as irrelevant to the black struggle...
...Horwitz would have us understand these killings as a distinctive feat of the contemporary will...
...The Slave Ship (now in Boston) was given to Ruskin as a present by his father, the sherry tycoon...
...The meaning of personal freedom in the Zen Buddhist and Roman Catholic traditions is explored by Silvio E. Pittipaldi...
...Higgins does not mention Mitchell's constant allusions to the "White House Horrors" during the Ervin Committee hearings, not all of which have been revealed...
...More to the point is a remark of Paul's friend, Rosenthal, a survivor of Auschwitz: "In the West we have made men believe they alone have a solitary and titular responsibility for their families...
...Apart from marring the narrative with a few crude neo-Breslinisms such as "What bullshit" in reference to a tedious Nixon speech on Watergate, Higgins ably provides a running account of both events and motives...
...Evelyn Waugh became convinced that the only way he could continue to live in England was to imagine himself a tourist there...
...We live a refugee existence...
...Isidore silver teaches Constitutional Law and History at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City...
Vol. 103 • July 1976 • No. 15
