BOOKS
DOYLE, KEVIN M. & Koenig, Richard E. & Hahn, Claire & Shea, George W. & McKenzie, John L. & Magid, Nora L.
The Education of a Prejudiced Men JOSEPH GERARD BRENNAN Scribnefs $10.95 GEORGE W. SHEA Joseph Gerard Brennan, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Barnard College, has written a delightful...
...After the CIA, he came home in a sense to Yale, where he wondered how the world would be, were men to be defined in terms of their suffering rather than of their accomplishment...
...The problem was to remove or neutralize the moderates without creating a backlash in their favor or working the church serious harm in other ways...
...His school song, the recollection of which makes him shudder, goes, "Boys of brain and muscle/ Will you shirk a tussle/And submit to base defeat?/ Face your foes and fight them/Up, my lads, and smite them./Better die than to retreat...
...Maybe so in terms of some abstraction...
...And he realizes that he has never learned to deal with failure...
...Brennan said hello...
...Coffin has the ear of the press, of U Thant, of the White House, of Goldberg...
...Conservatives rejoiced that never before in American church history had a major denomination's headlong descent into the slough of religious liberalism been arrested...
...I was surprised...
...It may be the most frightening thing about institutions of all kinds, that they have this power over so many of us...
...To this streak, at odds he feels with an "Anglo-Saxon nature and duty-oriented upbringing," one is tempted somewhat presumptuously on the basis of the evidence, to add two other elements: he seems also to be an enigma and, in a paradoxical way, an innocent...
...Well, first, there is too much gratuitous name-dropping...
...At Union, he committed himself, as much of himself as he could, to as much of God as he believed in...
...Nevertheless, as an introduction to what forces are shaking one of America's largest Protestant denominations, Preus of Missouri is a skillful account that will effectively guide the general reader into what has to be a baffling phenomenon of modern American church life...
...Preus and the Missouri Synod have become notorious as a result of a fierce internal struggle between conservatives and moderates for control of the church and its teachings...
...McIntosh, I have always wanted to meet you...
...Morality with muscle...
...Eventually he left both a subsequent marriage and Yale, "the latter because I felt the need to become more vulnerable...
...In fact, I don't remember being instructed in that particular virtue at all...
...I had been groomed to succeed...
...Jack" Preus, as Adams refers to him so familiarly, may have been an outsider in terms of origin but not Missouri tradition...
...He married a dancer: when they met, "her feet were in the fourth position and she was lovely" (a lovely line), wrestled with the internal and persistently dreadful problems of academic institutions, then moved out into the wider arena...
...There are journeys to Europe later in his life, and reflections on a few of his favorite authors and composers...
...Adams, a one-time Roman Catholic seminarian, sees clearly the possibility that having won his war against the moderates, Preus might still end up turning the Missouri Synod into an "impossible sectarian nightmare" by "pushing one Reformation principle (Bible alone) to the point of absurdity and rank contradiction to other key principles...
...The Missouri Synod story is both fascinating and complex...
...At the time Preus was elected the Missouri Synod was on a cautious course leftward when viewed from the perspective of its "old Lutheran" beginnings in 1847...
...As good as it is, Adams's account suffers from a certain distance that fails to convey what was actually at stake for the participants particularly in the matter of conscience...
...The Adams chronicle leaves little doubt about Preus's remarkable success in the first of these two objectives...
...but Brennan spends almost a page on it...
...Strangely, there's not enough of him in it...
...In trouble she reaches Fortas...
...Jacob A. O. Preus, son of a former governor of Minnesota, who became president of the 2.7 million-member Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod in 1969...
...Brennan describes a luncheon with her and the well-known dancer and choreographer, Eric Hawkins...
...But people had said things like that before...
...I feel—I feel your power, your vibrancy, your dynamism, your— beauty...
...It was a non-event...
...Of himself, William Sloane Coffin says, "I was an elitist who came to question such principles...
...Brennan had "fallen away...
...and aH the notables who passed his piano are painstakingly listed in the book—Milton Berle, Hoagy Carmichael, Hume Cronyn, on and on...
...He said nothing to Brennan...
...Even better is Brennan's account of Dwight Eisenhower's first speech to the students and faculty of Barnard...
...what an honor it was to be introduced by President Mclntosh and what fine things he'd heard of Barnard scholarship (ARGH RRROWF...
...In actual fact there is lktle in the account that was not known or available to the participants in the Missouri struggle in addition to details that the author does not include...
...not at least until Prof...
...They were in firm control of the Synod's most prestigious theological seminary, Concordia, St...
...Finding the little Italian girl stowed away on their troop ship may have been a moving experience for a bunch of returning G.I.'s, but it reads like a soap opera now...
...Not so if you're black...
...Beginning with his childhood in Roxbury and his unhappy stay at the Boston Latin School, it traces his career from Boston College, where he was an undergraduate, to his first teaching job at the College of New Rochelle, to the Navy during World War II, and finally to Barnard...
...By way of postscript he notes, "I suspected he was afraid of losing his teeth," not his influence...
...The escape I unconsciously designed was magnificent...
...Speculation was rife within the Missouri Synod that Adams's book would bring to light some Watergatetype sensations that would undermine Preus's presidency much like Richard Nixon's...
...No one had asked me that before...
...Famous names and faces are forced into the text for little or no reason...
...cip Cloth $9.95, Paper $4.95 Write for 116-title catalog ORBIS BOOKS Maryknoll, NY 10545 ommended...
...Because of his strong proselytizing instinct, he has a reluctance to grant them their contexts...
...Rowf...
...These are the good things...
...a combative young squirt who espoused nonviolence...
...The author is the nation's foremost Missouri Synod watcher, James E. Adams, religion editor for the distinguished St...
...Maybe, so...
...What are the bad...
...Although he insists that his book is not an autobiography, its organization is based on the chronology of his own life...
...By the time the book appeared, hundreds of moderate pastors, teachers and administrators had either left or been driven from their posts and scores of congregations either suffered schism or seceded...
...The leap of faith was really a leap of action...
...Preus's job was not to be easy...
...Convinced that anyone raised as a Catholic, even taught by Jesuits, must be an intellectual freak, whose mind would be forever tainted, the Brahmins agonized over whether to admit Brennan to their midst...
...The best parts of this wonderful Irish stew are the anecdotes about the great and near great...
...Violence and evil, undergone first hand, led him to the existentialists and to the theologians...
...And Niebuhr, responding to a speech said, "You reminded me so of my youth—all that humor, conscience, and demagoguery...
...Agreeing with Coffin that there is no agony in the orthodox stance, the commentator decides that "equally there is no agony in yours...
...At New Rochelle the Ursulines must have worried themselves siUy over whether worldly Mr...
...True to his point of view, however, Adams doggedly asserts that in so doing Preus is only trying to actualize a vision...
...Checkerboard fashion, he has alternated periods of contemplation with periods of Christian soldier militancy...
...He also resents having been taught Spartan virtues rather than honesty of feeling...
...When after seventeen years he decided to leave Yale he worried that he was rendering his children homeless...
...Atheneum...
...Much about it, indeed the most important aspects, lie beyond the range of a journalist's report...
...Once to Every Man: A Memoir " WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN, JR...
...To which Mrs...
...Brennan worked his way through graduate school at Harvard by playing die piano at Boston bars and restaurants...
...He treats all of his students and colleagues with equal respect whether at New Rochelle, Barnard, Hofstra or Sarah Lawrence...
...About the worst thing Adams has to report about Preus is that in a crucial confrontation with arch opponent John Tietjen, former president of Concordia Seminary ousted in 1973, Preus lied...
...The sophistication and the disingenuousness that march uncomfortably hand in hand may be the key to his recent interest in the human potential movement...
...A graduate student by the name of Paul Jordan asked when he would speak out against the war...
...And as he was later to argue against Vietnam, so he argued both for the Second World War and for Korea...
...Several moods dominate the book— reserve and revelation, and several themes—success and failure, roots and rootlessness, the relationship of man and God, man and community...
...All this is topped by two chapters of philosophical musing, occasioned by the news that he might have cancer...
...Among the students and philosophers, Brennan, even when faced with death, somehow eludes us...
...Faith was not believing without proof...
...he finds fools everywhere and heroes too, and draws them as they are whether or not there is ivy on their n/aiie Indeed academics of every theological hue take their lumps for narrowness and bigotry...
...it was trusting without reservation...
...At the same time Adams reports that Preus is "machismo minded," "stubborn," "tough," "contemptuous" of the very preachers he is supposed to shepherd...
...Brennan refused to do that also and then negotiated a higher salary...
...An establishment activist—his Hfe 20 January 1978: 58 has been jammed with extraordinary affiliations and extravagant adventures —Coffin like so many of us has defined himself in institutional attachment...
...Yet even on his telling of the story, Adams's Preus emerges as a Christian leader who is never once referred to as a person of grace, kindness, compassion or good will, to whom no act of understanding, forgiveness, or generosity is ever attributed...
...What kind of a man is it who directed this extraordinary ecclesiastical battle As Adams sees him, Jacob Preus is "colorful," "feisty," "gusty," "folksy," and so forth, adding up to a persona in whom a reporter delights since, like Mohammed Ali, he is never dull...
...This repels him now—and brains and muscle is how he has played it...
...For how could I better avoid myself than to live under another name, in countries other than my own, speaking for the most part a language not my own, living a life of high adventure—praiseworthy to boot —about which I was pledged to secrecy...
...In the middle of the tightly packed gymnasium stood a blind student, whose nasty-tempered guide dog took an instant dislike to Ike...
...Mclntosh replied, "Yes...
...Further, he feared that disconnected from the university, he would be a nothing...
...The latter were in touch with a deeper reality...
...who is instead clearly arbitrary, arrogant, and given to that truculence which religious absolutism inevitably fosters...
...Helen Parkhurst, who chaired the Barnard philosophy department, when he applied for a job, actually suggested that, if he was not committed to Catholic belief, he should join the Presbyterian Church...
...When Brennan declined to follow her advice, she then asked him to write a credo— a Ml statement of his philosophical and religious beliefs...
...Preus of Missouri—and the Great Lutheran Civil War JAMES E. ADAMS Harper & Row, $10 RICHARD E. KOENIG Preus of Missouri is an "impressionistic" biography of the controversial Rev...
...Griswold addressed him both as our enfant terrible and as Yale's conscience...
...and Mother Aquinas's memo to Brennan is a monument to Catholic academic grotesquerie: While it is not for me to regulate the devotional life of anyone, it seems that a great deal of edification would be given to our students to see our faculty make visits to the Blessed Sacrament in our Chapel...
...He has scorn for the mother of a southern (black) student who says, "Good Negroes don't go to jail," and for the southern (white) seminarian, eloquent on paper on race relations, who refuses, because he prefers to work from within, to be conscripted into demonstrating...
...what a pleasant thing it was to be welcomed at the University's college for women, and such pretty women at that (Rowf...
...Where do we get this one-upmanship of the civil righters in this agony over the dilemma...
...Not to know, gentle reader...
...The lengthy citation, which includes among his achievements and qualities scholarship, literature, oratory, music, government, delicacy of tact and a profound knowledge of the human heart, is closed with reference to the haloes on haloes that encircle his reverend brow...
...To his three years in the CIA (he stresses that in the 50s it was staffed by liberals) he gives an analytic reading: it represented a flight from the WASP self...
...There are side trips to some of the neighborhoods he lived in, and to the colleges like Sarah Lawrence and Hofstra where he taught part time...
...After the event John Wright, the class valedictorian, who would himself become a cardinal one day, suggested the fotlowing headline for the Boston College paper: "Cardinal's Buttocks Bandaged after Inspiring Ceremony...
...Brennan writes a real autobiography...
...a boy with- a gift for music and languages who became a preacher...
...There is more to God than is contained in the theologies of any of our religions...
...In this, another pastor had encouraged him: such considerations as dependents, salary, benefits and no other job, he had said, were contemptible...
...Conrad summed it up with Jim in one word: romantic...
...The moderates, who favored newer measures for the Synod, were both numerous and strategically situated...
...He's probably right in saying it's not an autobiography...
...Preus of Missouri is a competent and even-handed recounting of the total rout the moderates sustained...
...Thoroughly alarmed, conservatives worked for and got a new leader to preside over a wholesale housecleaning of the Synod and a return to traditional teachings, notably the doctrine of the absolute inerrancy of the Bible...
...Later, down south, he decided that segregation was more a problem for the whites than for the blacks...
...The orphaned Korean infant whom Brennan held on his lap all the way across the Pacific may have reassured him that love and life go on, but the whole incident, which by the way closes the book, is (no word play intended) pretty drippy...
...The Education of a Prejudiced Men JOSEPH GERARD BRENNAN Scribnefs $10.95 GEORGE W. SHEA Joseph Gerard Brennan, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Barnard College, has written a delightful and charming book about his experiences as student, teacher and world traveler...
...But Brennan's tendency to sentimentalize and name drop is more than made up for by the complete absence from his book of any of the pretentiousness or snobbery that is the curse of so much of academia...
...He then says, "If you ever had a dilemma you have solved it, too, because you are not wrestling with it any more...
...One could pity the church he heads were it not for the fact that in its zeal for pure doctrine, especially for an inerrant Bible, the Missouri Synod has historically displayed the same lamentable characteristics...
...As a fatherless child, he was taken to California, where he was hit with homesickness, all the more unbearable for the realization that he had no home...
...Bundy greeted him sourly with, "Oh yes, our peripatetic chaplain...
...One night George Gershwin came in...
...God, he concluded, is best defined by Christ but not confined to Christ...
...Adams tries hard to give Preus the benefit of the doubt not only because he is a fair-minded individual but chiefly because he seems genuinely taken with the man...
...The cancer alarm was, happily, a false one...
...The former he concluded were romantic, short on strength...
...It is not to deny him his generosity and his courage to say that he also takes scant cognizance of what in the face of risk is still a margin of safety...
...Yet the author concedes that "Preus has said or written little about his dreams of the ideal Lutheran or Protestant church...
...Objections from the president's office to the book fanned the rumors...
...He knows that if he goes to prison the Yale community will care for his family, but he seems like Hellman in her brave memoir, Scoundrel Times, to take for granted the levels of access in our society...
...Louis, and occupied key posts in the administrative apparatus of the church...
...We want you," says Coffin, "not your blessing...
...Prep school struck him as too tame, the rich being underprivileged in terms of experience...
...Did he, I asked myself, ever feel the faintest stirring of desire, as he sat knee to knee with all those lovely coeds over the years...
...There is also an excess of sentimentality at times...
...12.95 NORA L. MACID His commanding officer called him probably the most aggressive man in the company...
...For Adams Preus is a can-do churchman who got his denomination moving in spite of the odds...
...But the bigotry of the Columbia and Barnard Wasps is even worse...
...Ignoring the massive amount of hard-nosed, political decision-making that had gone into their victory, as Adams reveals, conservatives attributed their success to an Old Testament-style intervention by the Lord...
...Although a former member of a Norwegian Lutheran group rather than a life-long member of the clannish Missouri Synod, the affable but pragmatic Jacob Preus was well suited for the task...
...Among the many formidable women who move with fearful tread through Brennan's pages, Mother Thomas Aquinas, Helen Huss Parkhurst, and Gertrude Hirst, among all these, Millicent Molntosh is perhaps the most formidable...
...The theology that jpforms the book, not his, he emphasizes, by inheritance, (although he was a nephew of Henry Sloane Coffin of Union) is traced in its development in relation to societal realities...
...The sight of a big strong man in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament would mean a great deal to our girls...
...Hawkins gushed, "Ah, Mrs...
...Brennan describes the speech: Ike told us how unqualified he felt himself to be a president of a great university like Columbia (Rowf...
...One of my favorites is the account of the elevation of William Cardinal O'ConneU to the degree of Patron of the Liberal Arts by the eager-to-please Jesuits of Boston College...
...In 1964, his life turned another corner...
...In the transcript for the 1967 Rational Debates in Washington, a participant reminds Coffin that he has accused his law and order opponent of absence of agony...
...So, Professor Brennan's stew is recNew from ORBIS HOW THE OTHER THIRD LIVES edited by Uargarmt White and Robert Qulgley Third World stories, poems, songs, prayers, and essays from Asia, Africa, and Latin America...
...There is agony in this very fascinating very exasperating book, set in the context of the history of all our lives— agony about ethical, theological and political questions, about family and love and loss, but what in his ruthless rectitude Coffin seems sometimes not to perceive is the agony of others...
...Not if you've gone hungry...
...For Adams to conclude that Preus is possessed of no vision save the elimination of his opponents is obviously impossible...
...Insecurity by prescription astonishes...
...Louis Post Dispatch where a great deal of the action occurred...
Vol. 105 • January 1978 • No. 2
