BOOKS
Keifer, Ralph A & Davis, Robert Gorham & Reedy, Gerard & Malin, Irving & Phillips, Robert & Deedy, John
The Catholic Cult of the Paraclete JOSEPH H. FICHTER Sheed & Ward, $6.95 The Charismatic Movement MICHAEL P. HAMILTON, EDIT. The Holy Spirit and Power: The Catholic Charismatic Renewal kilian...
...As to charismatic attitudes toward parish life, the report is also rather favorable...
...In the face of such incongruities, which he defines with erudition, precision and zest, Kermode looks to nineteenth century novels for some contrasting test cases...
...Trying to do Virgil and Emily Bronte, T.S...
...The title comes from the last two words of one of the best poems, "Someone in the Review Board...
...One of the grand silences surrounding the movement is the lack of any widespread response from biblical scholars...
...Even Carroll's poems now and then speak in this breathless prose, symbolic of exploding emotions that he leaves, coyly or lazily, undeveloped...
...He left-or pretended to leave-a great many matters in his fiction open to the readers' independent determination...
...He frequently resorts to sentences composed of subjects only...
...Coen can never know his proper place in the ultimate plot...
...he loves exotic foods and characters...
...Emily Bronte about as remote from Dante's Virgil as a writer could be, suggests how much the unconscious contributes to the inexhaustibility of a classic...
...Part of it is the commonly noted fact that popular manifestations of a religious phenomenon will be more rough and ready than the expressions of its more articulate apologists...
...Surely one ought not ask Carroll for theses, although he does write a fine, itemized essay at the end in answer to his question: "How does a prayerful person live...
...The Virgil who guided Dante in Hell and Purgatory is obviously much more than the mind behind the Aeneid...
...Once we get over the shock, we admire his manner of death...
...Another unanswered question in the wake of Fichter's study is the question of the relationship of the movement to the wider church-specifically to the clergy and to the parish...
...One finds far more good parts of poems than sustained structures...
...He laments the fate of Coen, the craziness of life: "Papa was no moneygrab...
...on the basis of its more mature expression...
...The first four poems seem especially flat...
...Cohen frequently digresses from his plot and characters to philosophize and speculate in a manner more befitting a treatise than a novel...
...Sacred texts constitute a difficulty, however, since a divine mind speaks through a human instrument who imperfectly understands the symbolic meaning of what he records...
...He lives on the West Side...
...How is your God my God?," Carroll asks in a poem, "Dear Pop...
...It is no wonder that he is catted "Papa...
...Hamilton's study of Suenens suggests something of the kind of breadth of concern that can lead some people to charismatic renewal...
...he spends more time with the "natives" than with other policemen...
...He understands that by writing his novel (which shapes chaos), he, like Coen, restores our sense of human order...
...A New Pentecost...
...And proper evaluation is a matter of pressing and increasing importance...
...we recognize that he has mistreated Coen-that he is "evil...
...In the appendices are lesser Kent prints, patterns and designs for textiles, and prints made from drawings for J. J. Lankes woodcuts...
...But they have little to say about what is actually functioning as a norm or guide...
...And we consider Guzmann as sympathetic mourner and "good" father...
...When he kisses a stone that a French guide, dropping his cynicism, tells him Jesus certainly crossed, he almost ruins the moving scene with his style: "Whom I still did not see then, there...
...The theological and reflective literature (Suenens, McDonnell), tends not to stress this very concrete feature of the movement...
...Cardinal Suenens may affirm that renewal in the Spirit is no more dependent on joining a charismatic community than learning Spanish is dependent on going to a Berlitz school...
...Too frequently, only charismatics get a hearing among charismatics...
...The key to Carroll's broad use of Abba involves both a clinging to and a letting go...
...One of the most striking discrepancies in the other books is the difference between the impression of the movement conveyed by writers like Suenens and the data yielded up by Fichter...
...Eliot's Virgil is Dante's the very model of a classic, the poet of civility, piety, universal Latinity, permanent Empire, the Eternal City...
...He comforts us in a strange, creative manner...
...We are left with fragments, pieces of the puzzle (which are, in themselves, incomplete...
...How differently, more honestly, and more precisely has Carroll worried about the war and God than you or I? Part of the limited success of Winter Name is owing to the image of Abba, developed over many pages...
...Coen is somewhat "innocent" when it comes to family life...
...Such a contrast calls into question the adequacy of evaluation on the basis of charismatic testimony alone...
...Lawrence and apocalypse in his book of essays Continuities...
...Reading the better materials from the movement is a little like reading Rahner's reflections on the popular devotions of the forties and fifties...
...His meaning has to be completed in the light of later revelation, and the history of exegesis shows how easily such interpretation can suffer from cabalism or accommodation...
...For example, the theological exponents deplore elitism and acknowledge that there are manifold works of the Spirit in the church...
...Briefly, the movement tends to dictate the terms of its own evaluation...
...Though Marvell is a lesser poet and Christian than Milton, Eliot prefers him to Milton because he is, in his irony and urbanity, "closer to the mind of Europe...
...We transform it from an energy into a little god with a voracious appetite...
...But to Papa cries weren't enough...
...Eliot and Roland Barthes in one brief book is too much even for Frank Kermode...
...The presence of theologians in the movement does not assure that they have more of a hearing than theologians do elsewhere...
...Although he gives us an accurate, exciting description of urban craziness in his novel, he is also interested in eternal questions of guilt, responsibility, destiny...
...Too many of these poems simply blurt out experiences in mini-phrases without the semblance of ironic control...
...The Holy Spirit and Power: The Catholic Charismatic Renewal kilian McDonnell, edit...
...Just growing there...
...We all know production costs have soared, but one could and does hope for better than this for nine dollars a copy...
...The universe is mysterious, possibly "evil...
...The final poem tells how an Air Force official brings his twelve-year old son into the Pentagon and how, as the father works late, the son slips away and gets lost...
...Proper evaluation will only be possible when attention is focused more directly on that matter...
...Occasionally, ignorance of these disciplines is abetted by antipathy to them...
...But the exuberant concreteness of the poem overcomes, I think, its stylistic dead points...
...There is also a bibliography of works by, about and containing originals or reproductions of Kent's prints...
...Could a nervous, sensitive man ever really forget the mission on which his very life depends...
...man disposes," is less satisfactory...
...The poems especially help to underscore the heart of the chronicle, James Carroll's interpretation to himself, through memory, of his family...
...The monthly New Covenant from Ann Arbor and the charismatic communication center in South Bend are the sources of an enormous quantity of printed and taped instructional material used by many charismatic communities throughout the country...
...He draws on the French theorists, on Barthes and Levi-Strauss, in defining the text "as a system of signifiers which always shows a surplus after meeting any particular restricted reading...
...The Winter Name of God JAMES CARROLL Sheed and Ward, $6.95 Forbidden Disappointments JAMES CARROLL Paulist Press, $6.95 GERARD REEDY The Winter Name of God, a prose "summer's chronicle," and Forbidden Disappointments, a collection of twenty-three poems, complement one another...
...I do not mean to imply that Charyn despairs...
...There are other forces which restrict the detective...
...IN BRIEF The Prints of Rockwell Kent, by Dan Burne Jones...
...Yet such devotion creates great problems for Eliot, an Anglo-Catholic expatriate living in Milton's England...
...He was thirsty now...
...But though our Founding Fathers had used a Virgilian tag on the great seal of the United States, still to be seen on every dollar bill, American politics, like Milton's was millennial and Biblical, not Virgilian...
...In Carroll's hand this topos remains "forbidden"-and thus interesting-but certainly not disappointing...
...This is helpful as a caution against too harsh a critique of the simple and the inarticulate and the uninformed...
...he notes that of course we must include the feminine, e.g., our mothers, in any adequate notion of "fatherhood...
...Before we know it, nor have quite realized where the logic is leading, the lectures carry us by giant steps from Dante's attitude toward the Donation of Constantine and Marvell's portrait of Cromwell in the Horatian Ode to the degenerate chickens of The House of the Seven Gables and the telepathic nightmares of Wuthering Heights...
...The time of Winter Name is post-Vietnam...
...Suddenly we see Isaac as shaper of plots...
...Those who do know him will read The Classic as a matter of course, however, for Kermode has one of the finest minds in contemporary criticism, and there is nothing that he touches that he does not in some unexpected way-to use some of his own terms-translate, renovate, eternalize...
...Suenens' own book suggests in an even more personal way how an intelligent and articulate person can find a spiritual kinship with the movement...
...Along with numerous informal encounters, immense energy is devoted to instruction and counseling...
...In regard to his own dark moments, Carroll is finally ironic: "Where has been the real desolation in my life...
...Such leaps occur because Kermode is not really talking about the classics as such, but how men and women read and use them...
...Charyn believes that Coen's rituals are warm but ineffective...
...His own ideas' do not emerge as strongly in this book as they did in the marvelous discussion of history, eternity, fiction and in The Sense of an Ending or in the discussion of D.H...
...Impressed by Dante's arguments for use of the vulgar tongue, the "illustrious vulgar," Eliot paradoxically accuses Milton of provincialism for using too Latin a vocabulary...
...But to share the charismatic experience means (with rare exceptions) to share in the life of a concrete charismatic community...
...Meanwhile, empire, with which Eliot was as fascinated as Dante, has taken its westward course to the America that he deserted...
...In many cases, the impetus toward association has developed into a system of highly structured households or other ordered groupings at the center of local charismatic communities...
...Coen dies, thinking of exotic peaches, the "imperfections in the red and yellow fuzz...
...He loves his parents who died mysteriously while he was in the army...
...Leadership patterns quickly emerge...
...The present volume too often lacks the complementary virtues: sustained discipline of thought and form, ironic rejection of stock situations, and attention to certain generally accepted rules of good writing...
...On the popular level, the impression is frequently conveyed that charismatic renewal is the renewal...
...It is only in ping-pong that he establishes his own rules of the game and wins consistently...
...Yuri Isakovsky, with his rage for justice, attempts to buck the system and exercise the one freedom which Cohen states is guaranteed in Russia: the freedom to find one's own life and the freedom to lose it...
...But the real question is whether that kind of theology is being filtered to the grassroots through the movement's catechetical materials or through the style and tone of its powerful lay leadership when it addresses its constituency...
...The movement is incredibly complex, and outsiders seem to have been slow to perceive that complexity...
...And he would rub the badge whenever he missed an easy return or couldn't cross over to his forehand fast enough...
...One is simply a matter of pacing...
...In particular too little attention has been paid to its network of communications and to its authority structure...
...Which is rather like attempting to explain Roman Catholicism and devoting a third of the effort to devotion to St...
...A Hero in His Time ARTHUR A. COHEN Random House, $8.95 ROBERT PHILLIPS Arthur A. Cohen, whose non-fiction books include a study of Osip Mandel-stam, has published a novel about a minor Russian Jewish poet, who, after decades of political evasion, faces a survival crisis when asked to perform a spy mission for the Soviet government...
...There is also a questionable dominance of instructional materials of a particular type...
...But large numbers of the charismatic leadership on the local level are professionally untrained in theology or disciplines relating to pastoral care (e.g., psychology...
...He discovers that although he can make his way through other "designs," he cannot really understand mysteries at home...
...Coen is caught in the net...
...And it is not a movement focused on one particular issue, like women's liberation or the liturgical movement...
...Those who have not read him before would do better to begin with one of his earlier writings...
...Fichter observes that it is often the most enthusiastic person who assumes leadership as the most obviously "spirit-filled...
...The word becomes Abba...
...But what is to guarantee that the "mature expression" is any more than the point of view of a handful of atypical individuals...
...I find the sermons on "flesh" and the "world," for example, full of cliches...
...He was used by his "fathers," by Isaac and Guzmann...
...There is little about the Catholic phase of the movement...
...Other poems also delight...
...It had something to do with God...
...The novel has other important flaws...
...Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was one of the extraordinary talents of his period, and the University of Chicago Press serves both the arts and his memory well with this handsome catalogue raisonne of his prints...
...After reading Cuvier, Buffon and Agassiz, Hawthorne extended this interest to natural species, with the miserable Pyncheon chickens as a crucial instance...
...But here again...
...Misleading as the title is (charismatic renewal is more aptly described as a Jesus cult), the book brings important new dimensions to serious critique...
...Vacant./ Just grass...
...This has often been a- question of life and death, not to speak of damnation and salvation, ever since sacred texts have required a clerisy, priesthood and church to interpret them...
...It does so because of the strong reliance of outsiders on the movement's favorite genre-membership testimony...
...surely this may occur also through complex rhythm and syntax, but here Carroll is especially weak...
...The presence of large numbers of professionally untrained people in an active teaching and counseling ministry surely poses hard questions...
...Through it, Carroll understands again Jesus' relation to his Father, and his own relation to his mother and father...
...The last poem, "Pentagon: A Memory," is the most successful of the longer poems given...
...But a movement that is rapidly creating new social structures and carries a claim not only to an experience but also to a set of values and pattern of living to offer the whole church, is political by definition...
...McDonnell defends the movement's relative crudity of expression on the basis of its "lay" character, i.e., its character as a popular movement, "lay in the modalities of its expression, in its procedures, in its immediacy with which it approaches religious reality, in the lack of nuance of its religious expression...
...Worse, Cohen's own language is often trite, as when Yuri consummates his affair with the American Greta: "At last, some time beyond the familiar time at which Yuri Maximovich would have been done with his pleasure, they completed the festivities: the final display, the rockets, the rockets exploded, and dizzy from a thousand lights they fell apart and stared up at the ceiling . . ." Orgasm described as rockets and fireworks is a staple literary stereotype-Tennessee Williams had the near-illiterate Stanley Kowals-ki use the analogy decades ago-and Cohen surely could do better...
...We suspect that he will endure because he is so "human...
...We are sympathetic towards blue-eyed Coen...
...For those wanting general background on the movement, Hollen-weger's The Pentecostals (Augsburg, 1972) is immeasurably superior to this patchy and ill-conceived potpourri...
...He needed the weight at his hip to make his best shots...
...The four-line stanzas of this poem discipline Carroll's emotion and thought, as does the dominant, skillfully developed image of the "soft middle," the charge against the speaker by someone on the review board for ordination...
...The point was obvious to me -but only after Carroll made it...
...He couldn't determine how he had gotten from the table to the wall...
...Although Carroll includes a few tight, controlled poems in Forbidden Disappointments, much of the volume is talky, overly reliant on meaningful, stock phrases and situations, and imag-istically destitute...
...Where there is abandonment it is mutual, a consequence of two freedoms at work on each other...
...For particular readers, it may have all sorts of incidental historical or personal significance, but these are irrelevant if not part of the original intention, permanently implicit in the work...
...he can merely live briefly and, perhaps, pass on his light to others...
...These mourners had sensible rates...
...Winter Name frequently talks of suicide and occasionally of its author's fear of starting his day...
...The language of Winter Name tends to evoke rather than explicate meanings, especially in the core passages about fatherhood...
...Charyn forces us to observe his "hero" as a loser in the grand game and, by doing so, he terrifies us into recognizing the final deceptiveness of life...
...The new, Frostian image of the last stanza partly achieves its success because the previous stanza has ended definitely, syntactically and thematic-ally, in a Eucharistic reference: "Does that mean I am tough around/ the edges like, say earth...
...His report indicates a decided charismatic preference for priests who are also charismatic...
...He redeems any elements of over-dramatization in his chronicle with final, ingenuous self-effacement...
...He respects his former superior, Isaac, who has apparently fallen from policeman to thief...
...an involved conceit of bombs as salt, victims as food, and us the devourers James Carroll exhibits the bursts of power and fresh perception that poems cannot live without...
...It is therefore a matter of importance to determine whether such claims are warranted...
...For example, one author coolly describes such things as ESP, telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance as having demonic origin...
...This movement claims to have something to offer the whole church, and it is unequivocal in that claim...
...His shoes were in his face...
...Negatively Kermode proves well his case against the "one true reading" doctrine...
...Shaded...
...Most annoying, the open book snaps shut like the jaws of an alligator if the reader does not keep it firmly and constantly held in both hands...
...But in evaluating this movement, the question takes on new immediacy...
...His detective is a kind of priest-Coen in Hebrew means spiritual leader-who tries to order reality and to offer faith to others, especially the crippled...
...As such it is an essential item in the study and appreciation of a man who was quasi-ideologue as well as artist-exquisite, and who is emerging into a new prominence as the temperaments of another day sweep away the last of the prejudices that penalized artists and their art for political and social theories held...
...Is it biblical...
...it happily avoids the cuteness of "The Captive Speaking" and the wordiness of "Dear Pop" (a poem which still holds some brightly conceived passages...
...But his positive argument under the slogan, "the work proposes...
...In "Mom in Your Boots," Carroll finds a fresh image and builds it into a frightening question about the closeness of tragedy to our innocent family joys...
...The literature produced by the...
...I found personally memorable: the speaker's father, "warm in the sleep of your God/ after all, not even snoring...
...LEON JOSEPH CARDINAL SUENENS Suenenss A Portrait ELIZABETH HAMILTON RALPH A. KEIFER Catholic charismatic renewal found a place even in Newsweek last year, so these books are apt to attract more attention than they normally would...
...Wherever he turns, he finds cross-shots, ambiguities, tricky services...
...Having assumed the ethos of the searcher and doubter, Carroll occasionally strikes the false note of preachiness...
...Biblical foundation is claimed for all kinds of attitudes and practices, especially in the movement's teaching and catechetics...
...He could have hired professional mourners to trick the three judges of purgatory (Solomon, Samuel, and Saint Jerome) with powerful cries from the lungs...
...He writes a "metaphysical" mystery...
...Even when he plays ping-pong, he seems to transform the game until it becomes a new, startling ritual: "The gun became a habit...
...The occasion was ceremonial, and Ker-mode's title-taken from Eliot's own lecture, "What is a Classic?," delivered to the Virgil Society in 1944-might suggest a conventional approach to an exhausted subject...
...Coen was a patsy...
...And at last, we have Fichter to thank for drawing attention to the fact that it is also a "political" movement-though charismatics would vigorously resist the description, and Fichter does not use the term...
...Virgil is a semi-sacred author whose Messianic Eclogue was so completely accepted as a prophecy of the birth of Christ, that a Renaissance writer had the angel Gabriel quote it to Mary at the Annunciation...
...The unanswered question is: how much of the unhealthy religiosity the movement sometimes generates is being fostered or at least left unresisted by its leadership, especially by its leadership that controls its cate-chetics...
...Which is more than can be said of the physical production of the book itself-those properties over which the author has no control or responsibility...
...Not every person who becomes in-volved in charismatic renewal appropriates all those complex facets of the movement...
...The god is grasping and hungry...
...The dead needed whole families to intercede for them...
...The book also displays an inordinate interest in speaking in tongues (more than a third of the book...
...The point of re-entry, and of previous departure, is religious faith...
...But he does not show how this surplusage, this overdetermination, is peculiarly the case in classics as compared to lesser works, or what it is in the genius of classic authors that makes nearly everything they write so permanently profitable...
...Which readings are permissible...
...John deedyy...
...None of the rest of my life would hold if I could not sustain a sense of his nearness...
...We are unsure about heroes and villains...
...this image transforms the author's anxiety and hope into an object of contemplation and makes criticism of content beside the point...
...But there is a definite thrust toward distinctively charismatic lifestyles, distinctively charismatic communities, and toward inviting the whole church to that distinctive style and tone...
...His sidekick is lame...
...University of Chicago Press, $32.50...
...Unfortunately, the other characters are largely two-dimensional foils who function merely to propel Cohen's increasingly preposterous plot...
...A text's meaning, Hirsch insists, is what a mind has designed it to express...
...It seems appropriate: "Coen felt a crunch from his teeth down through his groin and into the pit of his legs...
...That best known vehicle of association, the prayer meeting, is far from the only one...
...The Pentagon wildly becomes circles, a carousel, circus rings, and, symbolically, much else, as the lost boy penetrates to its heart...
...Four poems ("Crows," "Cobbler," "Rain Dance," and "The Window of His Room") consist of visual perceptions, well-drawn, with a political or theological punch...
...At that stone...
...For him, as for Horace, a classic is a work still taken seriously after a hundred years...
...But the first sentence, in which Kermode addresses Eliot as imperialist, not poet, dispels any such fear...
...Joseph...
...In the summer of 1973, Carroll retreats to a monastery "halfway between Bethlehem and Jerusalem," there to think, go over his life, and read the Scripture, especially the gospel of John...
...Blue Eyes JEROME CHARYN Simon and Schuster, $7.95 IRVING MALIN Jerome Charyn is wonderfully deceptive...
...Priced at $8.95 before tax, the "hardback" novel's boards are cardboard with only a cloth spine...
...It is clear that Charyn is interested in more than a fast-moving, sharp, and grotesque description of New York crime...
...But that is not the way most charismatic groups live and act Too little attention has been paid to the "political" character of the movement...
...Kermode himself is arguing against the "true meaning" position taken by E.D...
...We regard him as an "artist...
...The poet, Yuri Maximovich Isakovsky, is portrayed with affection and understanding and true insight into the Soviet government and world of letters...
...He says, "If a theological evaluation is made at the level of its populist expression, then the judgment on the renewal may be severe . . . judgment should be made...
...The Clastic: literary Images of Permanence and Change FRANK KERMODE Viking, $7.95 ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS This brief, erudite and strangely diverse book consists of the T.S...
...They highlight positive values and potentialities and correct mis-perceptions...
...Kermode treats with admiring disagreement Queenie Leavis's attempt to separate out the "true" novel Wuthering Heights from the evidences of false starts and inappropriate influences still inhering in the text Emily Bronte left us...
...Hirsch in Validity in Interpretation...
...Fichter draws attention to the highly organized features of the movement- a contrast to the public image long projected by the movement...
...How can our "hero" die...
...This is probably not the best way to assure that appropriate teaching and guidance are being given...
...For instance, Fichter notes the typical yearning for a "spirit-filled" priestly leadership...
...At the same time he shared Kermode's preoccupation with permanence and change, with types and antitypes...
...Or, before breaking, bread...
...Two memories of the Carroll family concretely enrich the concept of Abba: his father successfully defends another son's CO status before a draft board and his mother suggests that a fugitive Daniel Berrigan might hide safely in her home...
...By then the author is dead along with his first readers...
...Carroll interrupts his narrative with his thoughts on a number of topics like the revolt at Masada, midrash, Catholic attitudes towards the body and the "world," male chauvinism, and suicide...
...I was alone and confused and desperate for a word that would explain me to myself...
...The Charismatic Movement is less successful all around...
...These the classic somehow satisfies in ways that its author could not conceivably have imagined...
...John deedyle confirms the range, and solidifies the genius and versatility of Rockwell Kent...
...It is more than a devotion or a teaching, though it contains both elements...
...indicate an integration of charismatic experience and contemporary Catholic thinking that is bound to give skeptics pause...
...Irish Christianity functioned for centuries on a similar model...
...But the leadership that has control over publication is none of these things...
...While the editors of the Paulist Press have shown their generosity in publishing this volume, this generosity is misplaced in allowing so many generically stated, half-formed items to appear...
...New generations follow with new assumptions, new demands, new "internalized probability systems...
...Hawthorne has a double relevance...
...Despite these reservations, A Hero in His Time (the title doubtless based upon Lermontov's A Hero in Our Time) is a worthwhile read...
...Grass...
...One still finds Carroll's stylistic quirks: "Green...
...is not a question that has engaged Catholics as a matter of central concern for centuries...
...I did not see Jesus...
...McDonnell argues (rightly) that the theological evaluation of the movement requires attention to the best it produces, not the worse...
...It will not do simply to state that one has stayed up late, smoking cigarettes and worrying...
...non-charismatic parishioners were not interviewed or surveyed in significant numbers...
...Green...
...He appreciates the Guzmann clan-the family has known him since childhood-but he realizes that their criminal activities have partially influenced the fate of his parents...
...The whole confirms the range, and solidifies the genius and versatility of Rockwell Kent...
...Eliot Memorial Lectures given by Frank Kermode at the University of Kent...
...Lay leadership is much in evidence, and clergy more often than not function in a kind of chaplaincy role...
...The poems often lack such transformation...
...In the company of my fellow tourists...
...His portrait of Stanley Kunitz, barely disguised as "Panitz," seems especially gratuitous and unfortunate...
...The excerpts from Yuri's journal, sandwiched within chapters, do little to contribute to our knowledge of the poet...
...He tasted blood behind his nose...
...Worse, some charismatics resist the assistance of non-charismatic professionals...
...If, as in Williams, the description was intended to be attributed to Cohen's hero, all the worse: it is a poor poet indeed who is not more original...
...The question of the relation of charismatics to non-charismatic clergy is unexplored territory (apart from some very negative remarks from charismatics noted by Fichter...
...The controlled form mirrors the frank acceptance of the potential destruction of self and others in a priesthood...
...theologians of the movement tends to be impressive...
...Similarly, McDonnell et...
...He was only part of an overall design, a "figure in the carpet...
...Some of them are apt to be of particular significance as critique of the movement is rising as an issue...
...His death was "meaningful" as a means to an end...
...Some of the articles reflect serious incompetence...
...They could tear through walls with a cry for anyone who could meet their price...
...It requires sacrifice and propitiation...
...His hero is Coen, a detective, who is a loner...
...It is a popular spirituality...
...On occasion even Cohen's understanding of his "hero" is questionable: Twice during the concluding chapters he expects the reader to believe Yuri completely forgot "the piece of work," the spy job, he had been sent to America to execute...
...Its author, at the time of writing a Paulist priest, has grown warweary from anti-war activism...
...But I saw them...
...This at least suggests that the ministrations of non-charismatic clergy are received with less than open arms...
...To put it crudely, charismatics do not simply invite people to a renewal in the Spirit, they may also invite them to have Jesus is Lord bumper stickers and ail manner of other specificities which may or may not represent spiritual renewal...
...He uses "is" endlessly...
...As he writes in the poem, "Priest's Lament," "Here is the worst part./ He has no right to the terror/ into which he crawls at night . . ." Although Carroll reiterates that we are watching the drama, in our day, of "massive cultural mutation," he carefully lets others play the tragic roles...
...And in a church where ministry dominated by priestly leadership is probably not desirable, and very likely not feasible, such an arrangement may be a pattern for the church of the future...
...Worthwhile because the reader ultimately is involved with Yuri's fate, and cares about the outcome of that proud and somewhat self-loving poet's mission in America...
...Yet this is not the general impression conveyed by either the New Covenant or the commoner catechetical materials in the movement...
...He is divorced (and yet deeply in love with his former wife...
...Had non-charismatic clergy been surveyed as well, they might have registered more negative impressions of movement-clergy relations...
...What is functioning as norm and guide for teaching in the movement is unclear...
...Nor are Cohen's hits at the American literary establishment terribly clever...
...The movement thrives on association among charismatics...
...Some of these are integrated in his personal search for faith and understanding, some are not...
...Which readings are right...
...In the absence of Coen we see continuing power play...
...The unsewn binding is of the so-called "perfect" variety-that is, merely glued...
...No chairs...
...He remembered a peach he had bought during maneuvers in Worms, a giant red peach, a 'Colorado,' for which he paid the equivalent of fifty cents, because the fruitman swore to him in perfect English that the 'Colorado' had come from South America in a crib of ice...
...The movement's use of scripture ought to be a matter of special concern...
...1937) and "Eternal Vigilance Is the Price of Liberty" (1945...
...That book, Kermode says, "strongly and subtly asserts the view that the sole meaning of a work is its author's...
...This is quite pertinent when speaking of the movement's theology...
...the speaker at breakfast, "watching the day with my other eye/ as if it were my father...
...Along the way Cohen conveys a good deal of knowledge of contemporary Russian history, as when he posits the thesis that, for Russians, history is a god to whom they sacrifice, as a way to humanize history...
...The prose chronicle develops a richly personal concept of God as Abba in such a way that Carroll's renewed faith renews the meaning of his parents' "embraces," a focal image in both books...
...There are many sudden beauties in Forbidden Disappointments...
...he emphasizes by using italics where the trained eye and ear expect greater syntactical a-droitness...
...But it is not quite as simple as all that...
...the sudden returning remark of an airline stewardess, putting the superiority of the speaker in its place...
...Thus we are totally unprepared for his sudden death (in a police raid...
...But his sources for this are his reports of charismatic attitudes and views...
...His style of writing, in general, is not exemplary...
...In the eyes of the Frenchman...
...Jones' book features 156 prints, including the famous "Workers of the World, Unite...
...Read on this level the novel satisfies...
...If so, the church has the right to ask on its own terms, not on the terms defined by the movement, and not even on the terms defined by its best representatives...
...They might have registered rather different perceptions than their charismatic fellow-parishioners...
...On the other side of the fence, Fich-ter's work is especially important because it reflects the first large-scale disciplined study of the movement in its Catholic phase...
...Index gaps notwithstanding, the book is a careful piece of scholarship by the person who is Kent's official bibliographer...
...On the other hand, Carroll does partly integrate his critical remarks about male chauvinism with his central concept of Abba...
...We believe that he has not lost his fresh way of seeing reality...
...This situation is not necessarily bad...
...In his own life, this means that painful differences in theology and politics-his father is an Air Force General-do not empty his cry of Abba but strengthen it...
...As in Winter Name, the best writing depends on apparently autobiographical incidents, although not all the autobiographical poems merit equal attention...
...Yet there has been no outside attempt to evaluate either the quality or the impact of this immense flood of devotional and catechetical material...
...The movement will have a lasting impact on the history of the church in this country, representing as it does a diverse and broadly based aspiration for spiritual renewal at a time when there is a growing Catholic concern for a deeper spirituality...
...He offers an odd mixture of hope and absurdity...
...Papa regards Coen as his "son," But he cannot resurrect him...
...Fichter concludes that the movement is not notably anti-clerical...
...Carroll's return and thanks are these two books...
Vol. 103 • March 1976 • No. 7
