BOOKS

...Attempts to answer that question lead Schillebeeckx to an assault upon what he describes as the great heresy: any gnosticisim that leads one to assume, with a narrow myopic view, that he possesses the whole truth...

...One great thing among many in Massacre in Mexico is the way it urges us to take all these things into full recognition...

...With a slightly variant use of Anselm's "Credo ut in-telligam," Schillebeeckx argues that faith is not something that is thought out by us...

...But that does the book no justice at all...

...So there are now as many varieties of unbelief as there are of belief...

...This trio, each of which is significant in its own right, provides a little of something for everyone...

...Just as the survivors of the massacre can only stretch toward TV and the movies for adequate comparisons to describe their experience, so we readers, distinguishing between history as sequence of events and history as discourse, know that historical REVIEWERS bernakd mccabe teaches in the English Department of Tufts University in Massachusetts...

...Though almost...

...Individually, such details lull us with our own sentimentality...

...The essence is the hermeneutic question of how the Christian message should be interpreted today...

...No one of these "voices," whether it is a hippy button found at the slaughtering place (I LOVE LOVE) or the cry of a mother ("My daughter's blood was tracked all over the Plaza by the shoes of youngsters running from one end of it to the other"), is sufficient in itself to rise above the poignant or the pathetic...

...Less fortunate, though more predictable, is the publisher's decision to change the original title of "La Noche de Tlat-elolco," with its insistent ringing of Cortez' "Noche Triste" in a modern context...

...Recording everything she could about the incident and the events that led up to it, Poniatowska has assembled what she calls "a collage of voices," a brilliantly edited text whose texture is the weaving of anecdote, official history, gossip, placards, graffiti, journalism, eye-witness accounts, agonized interpretation...

...I am going to approach these books in the order of increasing difficulty, which happens also to be the alphabetical order (lending an illusion of impartiality...

...The cascade of references to philosophical, theological and social theory, and occasionally the social autobiography makes this book very interesting if only for the vast array of ideas that are assembled in it...

...Following upon Brown's sophisticated tongue-in-cheek style, the hyperpedan-tic form of Pruyser's work, Between Belief and Unbelief is a bit heavy...

...And given a more refined ability to estimate one's taste, and if one's eyes do not become bigger than one's stomach, the entire collection in defense of faith can be enormously enriching...

...every morsel in these three books has food for thought, the mix can be a little rich...

...with delights, one tends to lose all sense of discretion...

...but what they receive is not expressed in the same way...

...It is this about gnosticism leads into a discussion about the Church's teaching authority, and a prediction that that authority will become more and more the pastoral regulation of Christian Language, and the determination of which language is to be regarded, as valid within the Church...

...is palpably rhetorical, as Brown argues that we are believers even in our unbelief...

...Linking by contrast, threading by atomizing a narrative account and then distributing it among other fragments, Poniatowska shuffles startling contrasts of innocence and scorn, dealing out heroes and villains whom we come to care about as their actions develop in the context of information which seems to have been a mere fifty-two pick-up before Poniatowska...

...So he insists that all Christians receive the same revelation...

...In a very clearly Stated way he reviews the many approaches to faith: the personal, stressing belief in a person rather than in a series of lifeless propositions, the traditional belief to things not seen, the faith that relates to the past, but in freeing one from the evidence of the present, allows us to leap into the unknown future...

...In this area of the buffet table, we can start to be overwhelmed...

...Over-simplistically stated, Pruyser is attempting to show that both belief and unbelief spring from man's pursuit of happiness...

...Unfortunately, the title Is Faith Obsolete...

...This collection of books, as I said before, has a little something for everyone...

...The style is rambling, readable and interesting, allowing us to identify with the person of the author, as we think through problems of faith with him...

...Pain and suffering, in history as in personal life, can vanish, often to the point where they lose the power to instruct But during those years since 1968 a young Mexican novelist, Elena Poni-atowska, has been trying to remember too, and her efforts have resulted in this shatteringly beautiful book which we need as much to understand ourselves as the Mexicans...

...truth is an esthetic question, "Surreal" is the word our young people carelessly misuse to describe whatever has powerful meaning for them-from the napalming of children to a mix-up at their registrar's-but at least their diction indicates our universal need for art to tell us the truth about "history...

...In this section there is an eloquent appeal for all to avoid the heresy of their own orthodoxy...

...rather it causes us to think...

...translation prize for Juan Goytiscolo's Count Julian) filters the Spanish through a crystal idiom that never blocks the original and never shadows the nature of English...

...This work too is composed of a series of lectures, though I suspect the audience response must have been quite different...

...In a final effort Brown demands that faith is always involved with community...

...A theology that is born largely of faith in the third world that will threaten most of us before it can release and transform us...

...Here, indeed, is a terrible beauty...

...Important, then, that the translation by Helen R. Lane (recent winner of the P.E.N...

...I suggest, therefore, that (a) each be read, and (b) they not be devoured without adequate rest between courses...

...The underlying agenda is the careful propagandizing of what Brown describes as "liberation theology...

...All of this is theoretically engaging, but offers little enough solace to one who might be foolish enough to ask the unanswerable question, "What is faith...

...McAfee Brown's book is, as everything that Brown writes, filled with urbane wit, and presented in a descriptive, off-the-cuff lecture style...

...thomas Leclair is an assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati...

...Besides, the characteristically fine introduction by Octavio Paz, Mexico's ubiquitous genius, does the work of connecting the slaughter with Mexico's past and the very useful chronology at the back of the book gives us the necessary perspective on a savage act all too characteristic of our civilization...

...At least I do...

...but passing time, the weather, children playing- all aspects of happiness-erased every sign...

...One can approach the buffet, scan the many offerings, and sample what appeals...

...PRUYSER . Harper & Row, $10 The Understanding of Faith EDWARD SCHILLEBEECKX Seabwry, $8.95 CARLO A. WEBER With one faith-crisis after another descending on us in what sometimes appears to be an endless flow, a series of boob in "defense of the Faith" is scarcely surprising...

...For me, at least, the book at the top of the ladder is the Understanding of Faith by Edward Schillebeeckx...

...The essential message that Brown conveys throughout is that faith involves risk and includes doubt as an essential component Unfortunately too what passes for faith in many "believers" is really fear...

...Unlike the other two books, this is not made up of lectures, and enjoys a more developmental unity, at least, that is, until we reach the section on critical theory...

...This requires an analysis of language, its importance in theology, the role of languages as structure and finally a quite brilliant appeal for linguistic analysis...

...Masacre in Mexico ELENA PONIATWOSKA Trans...

...Urges us to take our own lives and political destinies into full recognition...

...carlo A. weber is Chief of the Division of Training and Consultation at the Los Angeles Department of Mental Health...

...Evolving gradually from the expectance of unbelief and belief as striving postures in a pluralistic society, Pruyser rejects any tolerance that is based simply on civil agreement, and reaffirms a tolerance which is a positive respect and affirmation for different ways of viewing the world...

...I recalled the news coverage-how, for instance, the soldiers fired till their guns were literally too hot to hold-and here I was on the site itself...

...ronald Christ is Editor of Review, published by the Center for Inter-American Relations...

...If anyone is allowed these days to write a Summa, this is one...

...At this point what began as a dialogue around the question Is Faith Obsolete...

...For a while there is a feeling of unjointedness, until we realize that it is only in the light of the study of critical theories of social and political processes that we can make sense out of any contemporary theological language...

...But it is only for those reasonably well-versed in technical theological language...

...But one does get an impression throughout of more academic overkill than originality...

...Language is the form of life, and the expression of a living Faith...

...So Massacre in Mexico speaks a universal message because what Poniatowska has been able to do in creating a prose sequence on the order of Eisenstein's Odessa Steps sequence in Potemkin is to create in prose for contemporary Mexico what the earlier Mexican muralists did for the Mexican Revolution...

...What emerges is no simple-minded indictment but a complex morality, a moral cubism that permits us to see the famous silent arch, the subsequent skirmishes and the final, apocalyptic massacre in a context of prejudice and belief, idealism and contempt, patriotism and personal concern...

...A perfectly thorough, if perhaps humorless scholar, Pruyser begins with the sociological observation that belief is no longer the norm for contemporary society nor unbelief the exception...

...It is high artifice in the best sense, operating on the principles Eisenstein set forth in Film Form, the principles of dialectical montage where single "shots" by combination and juxtaposition create an effect that is larger than the sum of those parts...

...Nonetheless, some sections deserve to be reread many times, as does one on the pre-eminence of the virtue of obedience in Christian life...

...If that sounds like a put-down, it isn't...

...It is brilliant theology, a scintillating refutation of the historical propensity to articulate faith in abstract and unchangeable moral propositions...

...In what is openly a series of lectures only slightly altered for print, Brown winds his way through a very careful analysis of the context of contemporary belief...

...To criticize a government is not to criticize a country"-and perhaps even apply his dictum to our own situation- we must also take into full recognition the force of a postal clerk's saying "It's the mini-skirt that's to blame...

...The problem is that when one faces this kind of theological buffet, set on a literary table groaning (they must groan, mustn't they...

...The Riveras, the Orozcos, the Siquieros with their teeming panels and outsized villains and heroes are here all over again and here too each individual face is rendered because it is important, really...

...Massacre in Mexico is, then, no mere litterature verite...

...But Poniatow-ska, with great skill, has edited these fragments into a meaningful, moving account that reads like the best of fiction...

...For instance, if we agree with Carlos Fuentes that "To criticize Caesar is not to criticize Rome...

...Though not all of them are explicitly included in the text, the bibliographical references are voluminous, and his scholarly zeal for classification and taxonomies is nothing short of stuffy...

...Kent, Watergate, Woodstock-everything...

...concludes with an almost tautological Q.E.D...

...by Helen R. Lane Viking $8.95 RONALD CHRIST Last August I stood in the square of Tlatelolco in Mexico City and tried to imagine the daughter of some 300 people as they gathered peacefully to hear student protests against the government...

...But Massacre in Mexico is a more commercially satisfactory label and we may comfort ourselves with the thought that the book will reach more people this way...

...I scarcely feel prepared to review it all...

...In no instance will the diner be disappointed...

...The result of partaking too liberally from such a well-set table is a case of intellectual heartburn...

...Poniatowska's mural is vast and it moves, because literature, unlike painting, can encompass time, and it moves significantly because she has dealt time out in a montage that makes for significance by comparative contrast...

...What makes the large scale movement com-prehensible is all the small scale detail...

...and then add a quick caveat that the order of difficulty is not coincidental with the order of relevance...