Critics' Christmas Choices

...Both early understood and rejected the large sins of our time: war, and imperialism in all its outreachings, moral, intellectual, cultural, as well as economic...

...The whole business of reading The Snow Leopard was a form of spiritual exercise for me...

...And this means that the "cost of discipleship" will be high indeed...

...it is readable...

...Dante says it...

...On his mountain, hope beats on, never gives up...

...Certainly a daunting challenge to a man like Martin Green, who characterizes himself not only as a man-of-peace and as a vestigial Christian (he was a Catholic convert in the '50s) but especially as a manof-letters, a preacher of Western civilization's Word...

...For example, the John Donne who emerges from Low's treatment is more light-hearted a Christian than usual treatments allow...

...Not to suppress it, a plight too heavy to be borne...

...It is particularly refreshing because it is a theoretical work written by an "empirical" social psychologist...

...Daniel Aaron I recommend Henry Nash Smith's Democracy and the Novel: Popular Resistance to Classic American Writers (Oxford, $13.95 (204 pp.]) and Sacvan Berkovitch's The American Jeremiad (University of Wisconsin $15 [210 pp...

...According to Dunne, human wholeness isfouhd only by pursuing the heart's desire...

...to try to identify oneself with his own historical concerns...

...Might there be ways of coping, of staying sane—ways that might be termed spiritual, imaginative...

...One caveat in reading American Constitutional Law is that it is ideologically biased...

...Father John Shea has woven the Christian symbols into stories which have a powerful impact on readers...

...Our vaunted capitalism is strictly bourgeois ideology, agreed on all sides...

...The need to be part of and representative of more than oneself may in fact be the challenge we most have to acknowledge if liberation is not to mean disintegration of communal identity and values...

...Sobrino criticizes an abstract Christ and urges an historical Jesus...

...The few who accept their challenges find them (as in "sell all and follow me") searchingly hard to meet...

...Peter Steinfels IT WOULD not be much fun to edit, any more than to read, a journal one always agreed with...

...The individual and universal dimensions of life and death, of meaning and relationships, are poignantly conjoined in this very personal statement...

...A few radicals found themselves pushed out of the church...

...Not cheaply, not with one eye on orthodoxy and another fixated on the pain of the world...

...The church's official teaching on social, issues supported progressive trends at odds with the general culture...

...The precision and artfulness of the writing give us confidence that the author is handling many precious heirlooms carefully, if not always agreeably...

...Its would-be naturalism in the form of its final, obnubilating dualism— the classic antinomy of infrastructure and superstructure—lies now, after Sahlins, in theoretical ruin...

...His special virtue is to write always in terms of his personal moral and intellectual dilemmas, so that his books offer not only a world of ideas—ideas often startlingly juxtaposed—but also a real man facing them...

...But with whole heart, with "two eyes making one in sight," with a courage that dares take into account the black moods of hell, the tempered pain of purgation—our fragile, ludicrous, tragic fate...

...It is an undertaking so prodigious in breadth and scholarship that few, if any, law professors would or could aspire to do it...

...Stories of God (Thomas More, $8.95 [203 pp...

...For example, the symbols of rescue and covenant, judgment and apocalypse, resurrection and parousia are woven together to tell a story of hope and justice...

...Her care enables us to realize, as she writes, how "fragile" is a present the construction of whose meaing is not shared with others respectful of a common past and concerned about a purposeful future...

...It is an adventure which calls for risk in loving, for letting oneself be disappointed by love, and for persevering through darkness to love again...

...This faith in American destiny, he shows, persisted in both religious and secular forms until the Civil War—in the nationalistic utterances of "Manifest Destiny" and in the messianic rhetoric of evangelical revivalism...

...Indeed unless we are all to give up to the dwarfs of technique, must it not be borne...

...Patriarchy, she maintains, could not persist in its political and legal forms unless it were fueled by the early experience of motherdominated infancy...

...Utilitarians, Marx among them, Sahlins shows (he respects Marx) have been taken in by appearances, by Western false consciousness, by the self-mystification of bourgeois ideology...

...Thank you for this Exercise...

...and to try to fashion his kingdom in our midst...

...handled with the tools of high art...

...it is the stark opposite of a dead religion...

...I was looking for a faithful vision, an alternative, a tradition...

...There are prayers of astonishing diversity such as the Prayer for Taking Stock, Prayer at the Barbershop, Prayer of the Commuter, Prayer to the Sleepless God, the Prayer of Marianne Wisneski and the Prayer to the God Who Lives in Children...

...a technical sophistication and an allusive, savagely ironic style . . . intelligence, social conscience and religious insights...

...David Tracy of the University of Chicago has called this book a "daring work of creative theology.'' The combination of these two talents makes the author someone you should meet for Christmas...

...together with friends (many of whom bore the burden more conscientiously than I) it could be borne...

...If we are politically bound hand and foot, if madmen armed to the teeth pretend to speak for us, to kill in our name—if all this is true (and it is literally true) then the question is by no means annulled...

...Development responsibilites are part of the job...

...Well, yes, one could say, though barely, that "the heroine's lust...

...Thank you for what may be (only time can tell us that) a very great book...

...the psalter, hymnody, liturgy, vocal prayer and contemplation...

...the thought of intimacy with God is so overwhelming that God seems enough and more than enough...

...But they also rejected what many of us think of as civilization's "best self," Western culture in its highest forms: art, music, literature...

...Yet at others II...

...Drawing upon the riches of both Gestalt psychology and the psychoanalytic tradition, Dinnerstein elaborates a theory of the common psychic life of men and women and its relation to the whole of organized human ,society...

...By discussing form in these poems from a new perspective, Low helps to change the full meanings we attach to a poet's whole work...

...This fidelity leads him into confrontation with and death at the hands of those who would deny the meaning of the kingdom—-brotherhood and sisterhood experienced because we are sons and daughters...

...Money talk" is an elaborate sociolect found in the West...

...because Tolstoy was their master's master...

...we are glutted with them...

...But some years ago I began noticing that Americans also incessantly "talk money...

...Reasons of the Heart challenges us to embark on an adventure into the unknown, with a strong passion to go through the exigencies of life and to emerge as full human beings...

...Likewise, discussion of four consecutive poems in Herbert's ' 'Temple'' shows Herbert in a successful contemplative movement, progressively conveying "a timeless contemplative experience in time's common language...

...Laurence Tribe believes that undue emphasis has been placed by recent constitutional scholars (like the late, famous Alexander Bickel) on discussions of the legitimacy of judicial activism in a democracy...

...This is also a psychological novel—Irish-Catholic, full of messages unspoken, quick wit and inner rage, passing from McCarthyism to the dregs of Vatican II, from Catholic girls' schools to the IUD...

...where in fact he could only have led...

...Only by going through the circumstances, guilt, conflict, suffering and death of our own personal human condition can we enter into the passion of Christ and become reborn...

...Joe Holland's The American Journey (Center of Concern) does in a more scholarly and sophisticated way...

...Green's book presses the Tolstoy-Gandhi challenge on himself and us now...

...in fact, they were full of praise for it: ' 'carefully textured...

...By way of an additional remark, one more word of praise should be given to Maryknoll for making possible in English books like Sobrino's...

...Because, with us, the economy is the dominant site of symbolic production and hence "supplies the major idiom of other relations and activities...

...Present studies bring to life the forgotten history...

...Thus both ideologies, Marxism and classical capitalism, take the part (the economic subsystem) for the whole...

...Again, td the contrary...

...But Professor Tribe, to his credit, is explicit about his liberal predilections...

...The contest between the practical and the meaningful is the fateful issue of modern social thought," Sahlins writes (p...

...There is little more to say about Final Payments," write Rawley and Moss...

...Your language is at its peak in this work, unsurpassed in precision and lightness...

...Thank you for the breadth and spareness and luminosity of it...

...The figures are Gandhi and Tolstoy...

...He lets this wonderful poetry exist for itself...

...While the book is a detailed, "dry," historical account of Catholic attitudes to the labor movement and the participation and impact of Catholics on social reform and radicalism in America, it makes fascinating reading...

...Since Catholics were so strongly represented in the labor force in the U.S.A., from the very beginning of industrialization on, Catholic bishops had endorsed labor organizations and the labor struggle for justice before Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum and long before the American government, the Protestant churches and the local authorities approved of them...

...The English-speaking authors who were interested in Canadian history tended to look upon it from the viewpoint of the Mother Country and the section of Canadian society most closely associated with it...

...A truthful image of God, of ourselves, of history...

...Let me begin this way: It has, to use the same words with which you describe a Nepalese family eating by a fire, "the pace and dignity of a sacrament...

...Our own faithfulness to the call today similarly will lead us to confrontation in a struggle for that social justice which is true brotherhood and sisterhood...

...They always got more...

...Indeed, Americans are as human as "primitive" men, and our "business" is not business, but, like theirs, shaping symbols, making meaning...

...Following Jesus is the precondition for knowing Jesus...

...Yet the book is extraordinarily well-written, lucid and clear...

...With uncommon brilliance, Sahlings draws this issue, inviting our human freedom to affirm its own meaningfulness...

...As the middle ages had cast a sacred grid over the entire society—laborare est orare: to work is to pray—so the modern code of utility inverts this to: orare est laborare...

...who will say yes...

...And then one day all of a sudden (was it so sudden...

...But the historical reality is liberating, especially for the poor and oppressed...

...In poetry, form is meaning...

...The word "payoff" is fervently used as a metaphor...

...Despite appearances, then, the West is a culture...

...this liberal quality is not always evident in literary criticism and where we meet it, as here, it merits attention and praise...

...10003...

...He is there, ascending, wondering, doubting, confessing—and judged...

...It belongs in the library of every well-educated person—which means it belongs on every Commonweal reader's Christmas booklist...

...It is a clear and startling challenge to the Western realist, here and now...

...The political consequences of his study are clear, especially as the Latin American church moves toward the CELAM meeting in Puebla in January...

...he is an experienced labor historian whose sympathies are decidedly on the side of the workers...

...They wanted a total asceticism, undercutting the best as well as the worst in our world...

...Professor Tribe has little patience with Herbert Wechsler's concern (expressed in the influential Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures at Harvard Law School in the late 1950's) that judges must act according to objectively "neutral principles'' of decision-making...

...The interest in Canadian studies over the last 15 years has brought to light that the experience of the disadvantaged groups and the view-points at variance with the main stream have remained more or less hidden...

...In the British colony and later the British dominion, little attention was paid to historical developments in Canada...

...The only radicals who, in later years, thrived in the Catholic Church were those associated with the Catholic Worker, whose secular inspiration was drawn from anarchist rather than socialist ideals...

...discusses two scandalous figures who publicly taught in the 20th century what Thomas a Kempis (for instance) urged more privately in the 15th: that man, and society, live best by denying the demands of the body...

...The paradoxes of selfsacrifice and self-abnegation, of obligation and guilt, of ecstasy and tedium...

...The two levels, religious and psychological, are puzzlingly entangled, which they are in life...

...John Dunne, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, uses the loneliness of the human condition as his starting point in Reasons of the Heart, (Macmillan, $7.95 [172 pp.]), in a book that is both logically brilliant and emotionally courageous in its quest for love and human wholeness...

...It is called a tradition...

...It is "la pense'e bourgeoise" so detested by the fastidious medievalism residued in Marx...

...An essential part of his analysis of the Court is Tribe's emphasis on the developing place of "preferred freedoms" and "fundamental rights" under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses under the Warren Court and the erosion of these concerns in recent years...

...yet it transcends what some would regard as the narrow confines and parochial concerns of feminist analysis...

...He believes that the Burger Court, under the cloak of judicial restraint, has been equally "activist" in pursuing a course "bordering on the authoritarian unduly beholden to the status quo and insufficiently sensitive to human rights and needs...

...Twain did so by revolutionizing the language of fiction, James by refusing concessions to popular taste and adhering to his exacting aesthetic...

...Money is the idiom we use to talk about (almost) everything...

...This is the challenge these two Mahatmas ("Great Souls") offered...

...What makes Sobrino so appealing— and challenging—to me is his insistence that knowledge of Jesus is dependent upon discipleship, following...

...Passion, death and resurrection are presented by Dunne in a way that is sophisticated philosophy at its best...

...But my disagreement was particularly intense in the case of Commonweal's recent article on (among other things) Mary Gordon's Final Payments...

...The peculiarity of Western culture lies precisely in its "institutionalization of the [symbolic] process in and as the production of goods, by comparison with a 'primitive' world where the focus of symbolic differentiation remains social relations, principally kinship relations" (211...

...If I were an inspired anthropologist and comparative ethnographer, and if I had been able to unpack this rudimentary insight into 263 pages of accurate prose, my name would have been Marshall Sahlins and the book would be called, as it is, Culture and Practical Reason (University of Chicago Press, paper $4.95 [263 pp.] ) "Economics, or more precisely, money," Sahlins writes, "is the empty code into which meaning is poured in industrial societies in the same way that kinship acts as the vessel and orders relations" in pre-industrial societies...

...The question is...

...During the past year, my friends have seen me carrying its increasingly dog-eared cover and pages with the same tenacity as a child clinging to a linus blanket...

...Deadline for submission of applications is January 15, 1979...

...At the same time the author shows that the strong presence of Catholics in the labor movement fostered its anti-socialist orientation and favored a language encouraging class cooperation rather than class conflict...

...We have looked upon our history almost exclusively from the view-point of the ecclesiastical institution...

...The Executive Director will be expected to organize seminars and workshops, direct research, prepare project proposals and present them to potential funding sources...

...By incisive exposition of the message of Jesus, he challenged the Christians of his day to live authentically in a time when true morality would have political consequences...

...Low feels that the work of Louis Martz, Helen Gardner, and others—who have shown how the verse exhibits patterns of formal meditation—has distracted us from the much larger background of different types of prayer...

...The recent publication of Jon Sobrino's Christology at the Crossroads (Orbis, $12.95 paper [432 pp.]) offers a similar challenge in the midst of an equally frightening crisis...

...Francine du Plessix Gray UPON reading Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard (Viking, $12.95 [338 pp.]) I sent die author the following letter: Peter...

...The book has a whole chapter on the Catholic Worker...

...Dinnerstein's contribution is to expand upon this insight and to show how the female monopoly of childcare in early infancy has profound consequences for our later attitudes towards nature ("Mother Nature"), towards political and social authority (why the hand that rocks the cradle is not permitted to rule the world), towards the struggle for human autonomy, and of course towards other men and women...

...In a relaxed, non-argumentative manner, Low discusses seventeenth-century religious poetry and shows how many individual poems achieve a new richness of meaning when understood in their relationship to a variety of devotional modes...

...in the context of Donne's use of hymnody, celebration replaces cerebration as an index to the whole Donne...

...What some would count a deficiency of the book is actually a strong point: Dinnerstein refuses to confuse the reader with statistical data but instead appeals to human experience for confirmation of her argument...

...Cunningly shaped, exquisitely written, this is a book about which there is more, much more, both to apprehend and to say...

...This book exhorts us to a love which says "I am," "I will die," but "I will live (and love) again...

...Does the Catholic participation in social movements always favor accommodation to the ruling groups rather than their dethronement...

...Frank still owes the $35.00...

...That this magnificent body of lyrics has a living relationship to the traditions of prayer of the time has once again been enunciated, in interesting new detail, by Anthony Low in his recent Love's Architecture: Devotional Modes in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (New York University Press, $16.00 cloth, $6.95 paper [307 pp...

...Dante imagined a lofty mountain of pilgrimage, delay, penance, a kind of Crogh Patrick of the spirit...

...These two books are gifts beyond compare because they turn us to wondering and, as the author says in the introduction to The Hour of the Unexpected, "With Jesus, people seldom got what they asked for...

...Why these particular forty years should account for so many of the classic devotional poems in the language—the lyrics of George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, and Thomas Traherne, as well as of Donne and Vaughan—is a matter for historical guesswork...

...For only when each citizen and lawmaker feels that the Constitution places a personal command on him will enduring progress in protecting liberty be made...

...Even what is "priceless" is hostage to the code of "money talk...

...Renewing the symbols that sustain, cherish, lend stature, beget clairvoyance and courage...

...Yes, Final Payments confronts the paradoxes of "charity" in Rawley and Moss's sense of social programs for the needy...

...Send resume', including references and salary expectations, to Anthony Cernera, Secretary, Executive Director Search Committee, BFW Educational Fund, 207 E. 16th Street, N.Y., N.Y...

...Does this mean that Catholics in radical movements will always have a moderating influence...

...I have just read your last book and feel beckoned to write the kind of letter I only write once or twice in a decade...

...They literalize the misleading metonymies embedded in our money talk and in our consciousness...

...Fortunately for us, Dinnerstein contends that presently oppressive gender arrangements need not necessarily be this way...

...One to one he goes with his friend, through clutter and darkness, to lucid essentials, discovering what a human being might be, a human life, a life worth living...

...Shea is a most engaging storyteller...

...The facts of life are in today...

...Not to phantasize about it...

...So I was trying for many years, under many suns, to imagine our plight...

...In this context I have enjoyed reading Neil Betten's Catholic Activism and the Industrial Worker, (University Presses of Florida $10 [191 pp.]) which studies Catholic social criticism and social involvement in a hundred years of American history, from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century...

...The same voyage of historical discovery is being undertaken in the Catholic Church...

...This has been a major focus of constitutional writing in the last two decades...

...muses the narrator...

...Thank you for the candor of your tears, and for those I shed in response...

...Love's Architecture wears its learning and scholarship lightly...

...the dental plan on the new job is really good...

...These prayers are born of those kinds of moments and they derive their power from the author's ability to involve us in the immediacy of the touch of God...

...I no longer knew whom or what I represented...

...This stresses that the constitutionality of a law may well depend on the extent to which those citizens affected by it have been involved, at least procedurally, in its formulation...

...Or, rephrasing the question from the opposite viewpoint, will Catholics participating in a radical movement always water it down...

...Daniel Berrigan This has been the Year of Dante...

...I awoke from my dogmatic slumber and had a (Lonerganian) insight into the obvious: "they" are not talking about money at all, but about loss, love, resentment, hopes, choice, sacrifice, envy, fondness, attachment, competitiveness, excellence, desire, vulnerability, delight...

...Maurice Ford_____ In 1978 there occurred an event in the law which will shed great understanding on the oft mysterious workings of the Supreme Court—the publication of Laurence H. Tribe's treatise, American Constitutional Law (Foundation Press, $22.50 [1204 pp...

...It is absorbingly difficult to deal with...

...It is a religious novel—what is the truth of dying to live, selling all, the one great pearl, the treasure in heaven, hating the world...

...When historians discuss the reasons why the United States, alone among the Western nations, never produced a working class party nor a nationwide socialist movement, then the answer given must include the impact of the strong Catholic presence...

...a fine talent...

...Previous psychoanalytic thinkers have all spoken of the lasting impact of early infancy on later emotional life...

...Saints are difficult.1 Most people don't understand them...

...Given modern technology (which enables mother and father to share early child-rearing), the sexual arrangements which stem from the experience of woman-dominated childcare in early infancy are mutable...

...And how hard to read anything else afterwards...

...The Jesuit theologian from El Salvador (one of those Christians directly underthe-gun for defense of human rights) makes an important exploration of Jesus and his kingdom from a Latin American perspective...

...Gerard Reedy Much of the greatest religious poetry in the English language, including some major Christmas poems, was written between 1615, when Donne was finally ordained, and 1655, when Henry Vaughan finished Silex Scintillans...

...With us, worth, trust, creditworthiness, loyalty, chivalry itself— "We honor Master Charge," reads a sign at my local gas station—are translated into an instrumental and utilitarian rhetoric of motives...

...The freedom and terI ror of this prospect is the issue of this first novel by Mary Gordon, Final Payments, (Random House, $8.95 [297 pp...

...William McCready Christmas is the celebration of birth, and birth is filled with surprise and mysterious wonderment...

...1-111, Harper & Row, $16.95 [558 PPl)Even before he erupted in a speech at a Harvard commencement, American intellectuals found Solzhenitsyn hard to understand—or, more precisely, easy to understand but hard to take...

...Writing and editing skills are highly desirable...

...We are no longer the animal in the bathtub, driven by Freud's libido, or Marx's "need" to produce, or HarrisHarner's protein deficiency...

...It is unique even within the Commedia...

...He appointed Vergil to guide him, and proceeded to follow...

...The only way to get to know Jesus is to follow after him in one's own real life...

...The task, rather, should be imbuing elected officials and administrators with the idea that they must continually consider the constitutionality of their actions in the first instance, and not slough off such problems onto a reviewing court, which may later rebuke them...

...These are not to be missed and they last longer than cheeseballs...

...The central character searches for a confident identity to replace the certainty of Irish-Catholic traditional meaning, that had died with the father to whose care she had devoted her young adult life...

...Janie Gustafson " ¦¦ t times it can seem that God is Aanot enough for me...

...surpassing that is to say, all the politics of left or right (as understood and practiced) might offer...

...Gregory Baum In Canada it has become clear that the discovery of one's history is a requirement of the present...

...Both men saw profoundly into our world's sickness...

...It is not that the authors, James M. Rawley ancj Robert F. Moss, dismissed Final Payments...

...Abstractions can be—and have been— manipulated by those in power...

...lated to my historical research has consisted in a systematic review of his gigantic canon of fictional works...

...Compared to this last work of yours, I can only think of most other contemporary outpourings in the words in which Sartre (in La Nause'e) describes a haplessly vacationing crowd: "Je ne savais quoi faire de mon corps parmi cette foule tragique qui s'amusait...

...Imperial oppression in Czarist Russia and imperialist oppression in British India...

...Dinnerstein's argument is tight, complex, and multi-leveled...

...Jaroslav Pelikan i 978 has been the 150th anniversary of the birth of L. N. Tolstoy, and most of my reading not directly reBREAD FOR THE WORLD EDUCATIONAL FUND Invites Applications for the Position of EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Bread for the World Educational Fund, established in 1975 as a separate educational service arm of the Christian Citizens' movement, Bread for the World, seeks a person with administrative skills, educational experience, and knowledge of the hunger issue to serve as Executive Director...

...This is not another heady book about the East and its wisdom...

...Green is a culture critic with a growing reputation for both subtlety and clarity in interpreting the movement of ideas...

...Such praise was neutralized, however, by observations that were not so much wrong as beside the point...

...And that is the last thing Professor Tribe would wish...

...from the adolescent who is bored with church, to the older adult who would like religion to say something about the daily problems which we all face...

...Each of these unobtrusively learned and lucidly written works is a notable contribution to the history of American culture...

...The person achieves relatedness only after he or she has willingly said "yes" to life, fully acknowledging one's aloneness and one's simultaneous need for human intimacy...

...The unexpected hour is that time when God visits us and demands our attention...

...But I have also, during 1978, read the third part of a work and an author with many affinities to the oeuvre of Tolstoy, the Gulag trilogy of Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 Vols...

...And for this I thank him, that he did not bow out of the fate of humans, but set himself firmly on the mountain where women and men must sweat out the salvation they have betrayed or scorned...

...When I finished it yesterday evening, at an hour when I habitually wouldn't think of doing anything else but begin reading something else, there was only one thing I could do: I went into a solitary room and shut out all light and lay flat on my back for a long while, partaking in some kind of sacramental substance issued forth by your book...

...The author is not a Catholic himself...

...our lives are the words mat come from his mouth...

...Not without reason did Gloria Steinem recommend this book to the numerous psychologists gathered in Toronto at the 1978 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association...

...What if you represented nothing but were only yourself...

...What Sobrino does is present a Jesus whostruggles in his own evolving consciousness to be faithful to the call of his Father for the kingdom...

...I highly recommend Reasons of the Heart to any seasoned reader of philosophical and theological texts...

...but then we also know that Moby Dick is a book on whale-hunting...

...Laurence Tribe is a clear partisan of the liberal and activist Warren Court...

...is the motive force of the story...

...the daughter's new stereo cost an'arm and a leg...

...but in reality it js the paradoxes of love—eros and agape—that the book confronts...

...What purity, what unr compromisingness, above all what rigor, as there must be in all genuine spiritual quest or work of art...

...a lightness of touch...

...Reading them is an experience in meeting someone who has immersed himself in the living of life and who has reached out to us with stories and prayers and all manner of delightful, stunning and surprising presents...

...Gandhi was a Mahatma, a Saint, and "Gandhians have given Tolstoy a Hindu honorific, rishi or Saint...

...Neutral principles' of structure," Tribe contends, "are worth embracing only to the extent that the substantive human realities they help bring about are worth defending...

...Dunne's adventure toward wholeness takes us through fear to courage, desperation to hope, sorrow to joy, conflict to peace, and loneliness to love...

...In other words, only through Christian praxis is it possible for us to draw close to Jesus...

...Even the West's attempts at a delicate balance between the claims of body and soul are of the Mtihiitmas found inadequate...

...The novel belongs to what we can hope will be a long shelf of reflections on the problems of replacing a disappearing form of Catholic culture for a I generation for whom, as for the narrator, "the Church ceased to be inevitable...

...Nurse a beer at a bar for a while, eavesdrop on your neighbors and, like as not4 you'll hear money talk: the landlord has upped the rent...

...Gandhi in turn made little of the West's cultural achievements...

...On the popular level this approach is embodied in Pat Bird's little book, A Short History of Canadian People (Canadian News Synthesis) which does in a simple manner, addressed to the widest audience, what in the U.S.A...

...Of the major post-Civil War writers, only Mark Twain and Henry James managed to resist the dominant culture epitomized by Henry Ward Beecher...

...The will of God cannot be simply that we accept the situations of life, but must be rather that we go through them and emerge from them...

...We can let up on ourselves a bit, and quit reifying our "meaning" into "being...

...They take idiom for reality...

...those who do usually reject their messages...

...These two books are both filled with more than their bindings can hold...

...Peter J. Henriot Some forty years ago, in the midst of rising social crisis in Europe, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote The Cost of Discipleship...

...The Hour of the Unexpected (Argus, $3.95 [117 pp.]) is a book of prayers by this same gifted storyteller...

...Yet Laurence Tribe, whose prolific output is excelled only by his teaching ability at Harvard Law School, has produced a work of synthesis that is essential for any serious student—professional or lay—of our constitutional system...

...Who will say yes, in face of the big bang, the big buck...

...Thank you for the unabashedness of your sentiments, a freedom I obviously partake of in this letter but which may be easier for me, being of a profoundly Slavic nature, than for one raised, as you were, in the crucible of Anglo-Saxon reticence...

...To imagine our plight...

...Salaries in the Bread-for-the-World movement are based on need...

...Thank you for buttressing our deep need to let go, accumulate less, live more simply, know ourselves a little better...

...I've thought for a long time that our plight had to be imagined before it could be faced...

...Tolstoy, in doing so, abandoned art (and greatness in art), denouncing it as an integral element in ruined Western civilization...

...Henri Nouwen of the Yale Divinity School said of these prayers that, "they are serious but full of humor, pointing to deep meanings, but staying very close to the street on which we live...

...It is difficult to imagine a better way to spend $ 12.90 for Christmas presents than on these two books...

...People passing in the street were usually talking about money...

...Dinnerstein's book belongs in every feminist library...

...Another caveat is that law students, who are buying this book in droves, will rely on Professor Tribe's thinking, rather than do their own...

...Philip Murnion would have to invent an existence |for myself...

...With admiration and gratitude, Francine G. John Murray Cuddihy As a good American I have always known that "money talks...

...begins with the notion that we are the stories God tells...

...Today this is being remedied by studies in Catholic social history, which pay attention to non-conformist trends and social critics...

...Orbis Press has consistently in recent years brought the best in Third World theology and social analysis into the hands of the Englishspeaking world—no small contribution to the renewal of the church worldwide...

...The book's great merit is that it explains and clarifies the strong, almost intractable resistance to change encountered by feminists and others struggling for equality of the sexes...

...Authentic Christian life today is not "Praise the Lord...

...I personally found this intellectually intriguing book to be a sensitive and accurate explanation of my own adventure toward wholeness...

...Perhaps his most important new theoretical contribution to our understanding of constitutional decisionmaking is his exploration (in the next to last chapter) of the notion of "structural justice...

...a flight from the horrid realities before us...

...an exceptional grip on the paradoxes of charity...

...That desire is always the longing to be loved and to be understood—the yearning for relatedness to self, others and God...

...Then I came on the Pur gator io...

...But the apprehension of failure was never entirely absent from the national consciousness as the writings of Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain and Henry Adams attest...

...Mary C. Segers The Mermaid and The Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise by Dorothy Dinnerstein (Harper Colophon Books, paper $3.95 [288 pp]) ranks with Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex as a penetrating analysis of the role and function of woman in human society...

...Why do we go around saying fruity things like "another day another dollar...

...Berkovitch's book complements Smith's to the extent that it shows how the optimistic expectations of nineteenth century Americans paradoxically harmonized with the Puritan jeremiad, a type of sermon which lamented the sins of the people, threatened them with heavenly chastisement, and ended with assurances of God's solicitude...

...For if "liberal" is understood to mean one who believes that government can make life humane by softening the harshness of...

...Anthony Low avoids pressing his themes where they do not fit...

...a plight shadowed first of all, by nuclear events, forebodings, prophecy even...

...What is God saying to us, what are we to do, as a seemingly irreversible course leads humanity like a blindfolded beast, toward the abattoir...

...Position available in January, 1979 when the Educational Fund will relocate from Chicago to New York City...

...The first examines the shift in popular taste that accounted for the sentimentalists' success in capturing the mass readership between the 1850s and the 1870s and the response of the 'classic' authors to this middlebrow revolution which virtually silenced Hawthorne and Melville and forced even Howells into an unsatisfactory compromise between his principles and his audience...

...it grows all the more urgent...

...I did not think it too heavy to be borne...

...It is a word Dante spoke first of all to himself...

...Two distinct audiences gradually emerged: the middlebrows who demanded a cheerful, moralistic and easily grasped literature of entertainment and the minority of highbrows who preferred a more psychological and imaginative view of "truth in fiction...

...One needs to descend very slowly from The Snow Leopard, the way you probably need to descend slowly from the heights of your mountain tops or the silence of your zendos...