Re-creating the Experience of Life-change and Religion/Sexual Dimensions of the Celibate Life
Balsam, Rosemary H.
covers, lo, Spinoza's argument has been neatly inverted! Whereas Spinoza located "meaning" in the author's intention, disclosed by his words and their total context, while "truth" was the...
...Instead the reader is forced into an ordeal of endless facts, peppered with "I don't know...
...Although he accepts the broad consensus of gospel criticism which holds the literary priority Of Mark among the Synoptics, he is not influenced by the irreversible gains of form criticism, nor does he show any acquaintance with the discussions of Mark's "messianic secret" that have been led by the Germans...
...She herself has very interesting thoughts but they remain isolated from the central material...
...From the first he attempts to widen the usual definition of celibacy to those who have no commitment to live with another human being...
...McDowell's defense that "there is no such thing as 'raw' data.., that life history is construction," 1 feel that this work is still too close to virtually unprocessed data to warrant a book...
...Kraft's use of language throughout seems designed to obscure thought...
...Have you guessed...
...Of c0urse, if one renounces all responsibility to the historical circumstances of a text's formation, any discomforts caused by such a vision can be left to the exegetes de m$tier in their musty cloisters...
...She then transcribes long verbatim accounts from each...
...The Cursillo emerged via Europe to the U.S.A...
...i there are Gail Sheehy's Passages in the popular literature, Dr...
...At the moment, as in this example, Dr...
...Brendan McGrath, O.S.B...
...SEXUAL DIMENSIONS OF TEE CELlBATE MFE William E. Kraft Andrews and McMeel, $12.95, 215 pp...
...Munder Ross and Alan Gurwitt...
...Juan Lozano, C.M.F...
...in the 1960's as an effort of the Roman Catholic church to "convert the individual by providing a profound experience of both community and marginality...
...To follow up from Dr...
...Whereas Spinoza located "meaning" in the author's intention, disclosed by his words and their total context, while "truth" was the validity of what he said under the sovereign judgment of reason, Kermode's "truth" is the moot issue of the author's intention, and his "meaning" is the blue yonder of patterns and associations that appear when interpretation really begins...
...No live issue will ever be touched by such probings...
...The evangelists are portrayed as "midrash" specialists--a shibboleth on the rampage!--each with a stylus in one hand, a biblical codex in the other (apparently already in economical "Gideon" format), playfully transferring narrative motifs from the Jewish books to the story of Jesus...
...Unprocessed data, wooly thinking I RE-CREATING TIlE EZPERIENCE OF LIFE-CHANGE AND RELIGION Vlrglnia H. McDowell Beacon Press, $9.95, 197 pp...
...Richard Costigan, S.J...
...YOLA UNIVERSITYOF CHICAGO 25 North Sheridan Road icago, Illinois 60626 We are an equal opportunity educat(x/employ...
...It is phantasmagoric, this vision of so much literary creativity and caprice in a preliterary age, when reading and writing were privileges of the few, and in a Christendom which spent its early years looking for the end of the world...
...Daniel Levinson's work on the decades of male development in the professional literature, the huge body of writing on motherhood and the renewed interest in fatherhood led by Drs...
...From the I BLOOD OF SPAIN Ronaid Fraser Pantheon Books, $15.95, 608 pp...
...Due to his inadequate grasp of the psychoanalytic concepts of defense mechanisms of the ego, he makes the common error of the pop psychologist in inferring that defenses are bad, and that by an act of will a person can avoid "repressions" that lead to unhealthy sexuality...
...Our author's apology for limited acquaintance with mainline exegesis should have been more sincere since his information seems to come mostly from conservative British and American works...
...The affect and liveliness of either a face-to-face encounter or a good description are lacking...
...Despite the bitter disillusionments it eventually brought, the Spanish Civil War was perhaps the last conflict in which both sides could Commonweal: 600...
...McDowell's book is a painstaking work...
...Complex evolutionary patterns in the four passion narratives derive mainly from the four evangeli,st-impresarios, not from a vigorous and highly ramified oral tradition...
...Kermode's style 6f interpretation is not mine...
...Mark's individual narrative units and fleeting lateral personages are all so many tricks of an author's trade, and to see any reflexes of preliterary tradition in them only discourages entrepreneurial hermeneutics and shows an exegete's naivet6 about the virtualities of "Narrative...
...Frederick Moriarty, S.J...
...In my opinion, it forecloses the real meaning of Mark, and of any book called a "gospel," by bracketing the traditions of belief which formed these books and emphasizing the mystical senses and aesthetic pleasures to be found in their textual configurations...
...But if Blood of Spain has a real model in literature it lies in the realm of fiction rather than conventional history: it is War and Peace, in which the religious anarchist Leo Tolstoy decided to depart from the view of history as a parade of great men's deeds, and+ to consider it as a pattern of actions and interactions within the lives of many people, ordinary and extraordinary, living at the time of a decisive historical event, in Tolstoy's case the French invasion of Russia in 1812, culminating in Napoleon's disastrous retreat from Moscow...
...One Chicano woman is different...
...By the end we know that they changed externally many facets of their lives, and we know that they became disenchanted with things as they were, but we are not much wiser about the inner impetus towards the changes...
...Virginia McDowell's book is therefore in tune with the times, as it concerns people's description of their adult changes towards further maturation...
...TTh 4:35-5:50 PM Christian Spirituality: Histo/'y Rev...
...She has an opening chapter on GRADUATE THEOLOGY PROGRAM SPRING SEMESTER BEGINS JANUARY 14, 1980 ENDS MAY 2, 1980 Psalms and .Wisdom Literature Rev...
...Mary Peter McGinty, C.S.J...
...Tolstoy achieved his marvelous historical effects partly by research into documents, and to a great extent by elaborating what he knew of the experience of his own and other Russian noble families at the time of the Napoleonic wars, which were half a century in the past when he was writing...
...MW 6:00-7:15 PM Moral Teaching of the New Testament Rev...
...Just the kind of ulterior perspective that Spinoza wishes to exclude from the research of intended "meaning" returns with a vengeance in Kermode's divinations...
...William Kraft's book on the sexual dimensions of the celibate life could have been fascinating...
...The Radical Nun," "The Dissenting Pilgrim," and the description of what we are about to hear from them fills one with anticipation...
...MW 4:35-5:50 PM Religion and Politics in Christian History Rev...
...Yet, in spite of.the different methods which Fraser has used, there emanates from Blood of Spain something of the epic feeling that envelops War and Peace, something of the same pristine and Homeric actuality...
...However, I think that her hermeneutic rationale for letting the text speak for itself in the interest of preserving the immediacy of experience fails, and becomes an excuse for disorganization and a lack of any attempt to integrate the data or provide bridges between her underlying theoretical ideas/ from Erickson, Perry and others, and the live material...
...The writing therefore deteriorates into a vague celebration ofunhappy people who in mid-life took steps towards actively determining the course of their own lives...
...The titles of her chapters rival "The Canterbury Tales," e.g...
...Kraft's book concerns opportunities for adult psychological and spiritual development, focusing on the sexuality of the celibate...
...McDowell's introduction and suggestion that the Cursillo was central as a "setting for change," the individuals would have had to expand the accounts of their feeling experiences in the group to show the reader the place of the movement in their assessment of their various changes...
...I admire her humanistic approach to the individual, and I share her wariness about the limitations of psychodynamic extrapolations and generalities...
...l-rh 6:00-7:15 PM Grace and Person Sr...
...His absence of logic then shows immediately when he tries to talk about the" "married celibate," a contradiction in his own terms...
...No impolite suggestion will ever be made to the "outsider" that he might consider becoming an "insider...
...This is virtually absent and therefore remains mysterious...
...Kraft reaches a typical crisis of conundrum in the following sentence: "In a sense, celibates who want to get married should not get married until they are already married...
...Unfortunately his thinking is woolly, confused, and overlapping...
...Tl'h 7:25-8:40 PM 26 October 1979:599her own involvement with the Cursillo movement, where she became associated with these people...
...The special ingredient he added, and which Ronald Fraser has denied himself, is that of inventive reconstruction...
...George Woodcock heart of the population B lood of Spain begins with epigraphs by Engels and Brecht, and the Engels quotation is especially apposite, opening with the remark that: "History proceeds in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, and every one of them is in turn made into what it is by a host of particular conditions of life...
...In the life stories here the impression is that each sought out the Cursillo as a peripheral aspect of wide sweeping re-assessments already begun in their relationships to authority, to their spouses, work etc., and also the church...
...In a psycho-social way she looks closely at the individual lives of nine people...
...To mention but a few, Study THE.0LOG at Loyola of Chicago For application or information contact: MaW Peter McGinty, C.S.J...
...In spite of Dr...
...He wants to convey that celibates are in no way asexual, that there is a place for sexual abstinence within mar, riage and that constant sexual activity is no guarantee of flourishing mental health...
...buts" or a bland meaningless psychological jargon, curiously common to most of them: "negative response," "my deep and honest response," "being a growing thing," "so-and-so was freeing," "not phony," "the goodness of a decision...
...He proceeds by loose association, tautology and the setting up of pseudo-profound opposites...
...It is an excellent idea and title...
...The trouble about these direct transcripts also is that the people sound flat in spite of the interesting facts of their lives...
...She happens to be brilliantly, verbally talented...
...Rosemary H. BaLsam N THE PAST several years there have been more and more books in the psychological field stressing the fact that the crises of adolescence are in no way statically "resolved" when a person becomes an adult...
Vol. 106 • October 1979 • No. 19
