The Age of Atrocity

...sense of somet~ing above, beyond, nineteenth century, and the twentieth, art deeper, a sense that the world held mean- draws mortals onward who can no longer ing of a "spiritual" kind that went be- voice religious formulas...

...His father died in other authors (some with famous names) Evarts, United States Senator and Secre- his mid forties, and his estate was small, tary of State under President Hayes, and so that Perkins's assets were chiefly his Charles Callaghan Perkins, son of a Yankee "character...

...Later, she converted to The editor's editor Catholicism, and attempted ceaselessly to convert Perkins, who sometimes came ma PEHUDIU: wealthy and philanthropic Boston home from work to find his parlor filled merchant who became America's first art with priests and nuns...

...That is Graduate mission forum for a deeper but from trying to absorb so much on the the meaning of the recent Gallup finding understanding of local theologies from subject of death...

...involvement approach...

...As an editor, he ROBERT EMMET LONG has recently comdisplayed a number of eccentricities...

...I can't...

...For Camus, and Madame Bovary's agony after she eats June 1l July 20, 1979 for Langer, transcendence is ruled out...

...10016 raised up against the other, giving him The Old Testament Without Illusion (Thomas the appearance of a stork...

...Tuition, literates anything but pain and extinc- $350.00...

...In the Session, Center for Mission Studies, Maryknoll, New York 10545...

...There were to be no sons, and RICHARD L. SCHOENWALD teaches in the Department of History at Carnegie-Mellon $50 Perkins was to live, at times reluctantly, University in Pittsburgh...

...By 1914, bassador to Ireland...

...therefore what they THEOLOGY period of synthesis before we can say represents the feelings and beliefs grasp their meanings...

...At a into fiction as Foxhall Edwards in kins will recognize the character of the restaurant, he reached out his hand to her Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home man, the sense they give of a spare, without quite touching her, and said, Again, and in novels by Hamilton Basso measured, and somewhat conservative "Elizabeth...

...IN DIALOGUE: passages...

...He treats the Volume 7, Destiny and Disappoint- complexities of contemporary life with • ment by Raymond H. Bailey, tries with discernment and understanding...

...View- dated manuscript and better proofreading American religion as if it were re- ing, as final volume in the series it ends flected by the total fabric of national life, the whole set on a note of competence the author feels free to range impres- and learning sensitively communicated...

...Six crewhole world dying morally on the eve of the fact that as the language of transcen- dits...

...and changing political values for his cues Its value for beginners remains despite and guidelines...

...Its content is ness, ness, social relations, recreation, moralsbetter than its outer packaging indicates...

...232 Madison Ave...

...ParFour writers receive major attention...

...Maxwell Evarts Perkins was de- As Berg explains, when Perkins Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, scended from old New England families, graduated from Harvard in 1907, he was and Thomas Wolfe...

...Tuition per credit, $75.00...

...Mann had a ity of transcendence really did not...

...covers almost two full pages) the author chapter by Ira V. Birdwhistell is inserted treats familiar issues such as theological with no explanation at all...

...at the time of living them...

...that 57 percent of the unchurched still Asia, Africa and Latin America...

...arsenic, readers find rescue by realizing The only problem becomes how to accept suddenly that Flaubert did it all with This program provides a living and the world as it is and manage to act within learning orientation for missioners words...

...Louise Perkins worked in secularist, yet early critical response to that the making of art, the writing of the amateur theater, and had aspirations of his series of poplars in ever changing light books he discusses, represents a step be- becoming an actress, but Perkins was found in them precisely an effort to re- yond mere immersion in atrocity...

...with a creative gospel message...

...Klemperer recognized Ert...

...Room and Board, $85.00 per Mozart's Don Giovanni...

...Charter Member: surrounded by women...

...Written places the 1955-75 years in context and along a simple interpretational line, it brings them to life, giving them perhaps could prove informative as an introduc- more interpretive meaning than they had tory text for the period...

...play of light on his dead wife's face, was so oblivious of everything except The painter Barnett Newman, warned though he felt shocked when he caught what he was reading that when a fire by a heart attack, attached himself to himself acting his usual role, the prac- started in his wastebasket, and smoke universal mortality and immortality by titioner of art...

...Few will wish to acquire the an important book...

...Generally the writing is titudes and beliefs to resolutely inarticu- THIRD WORLD THEOLOGIES felicitous, though overwriting mars a few late hearts...

...Madame Bovary dies, but the who are going overseas for the first "the limits of the possible," a phrase novel asserts forever that she has lived: time...

...to three of his most famous authors-F...

...miserable death does not triumph finally...

...100 or more had a lectern-desk installed in his office, JOHN DRUSKA is a writer who currently Commonweal Assodates before which he stood working over teaches high school in Indianapolis...

...the present sorry ef- total of eight volumes, but some may fort is nothing more than a hodgepodge acquire the ones which flesh out their • of data which apparently could not even overall knowledge of religious experiV I satisfy the series editor...

...tried to uncover the meaning of physical York Times, June 20, 1978...

...Commonweal: 92...

...reaching receptiveness to imaginative forms only a portion of the book, for A. Scott Berg's Max Perkins: Editor of writing that is bold and living...

...editor's editor...

...By midplace transience by transcendence...

...A kind of giddiness does en- Death has dominion, but its rule is not June 1l July 20, 1979 sue, not through any fault of Langer's, yet absolute and unchallenged...

...Their relationship, however, was qualities were incorporated into the purely platonic, for there was far too M AxwELL Perkins was a legend in his character of Perkins himself...

...Mass death imposed on baker's 1950s memoir of her dying husthousands and millions who cannot band against a collection of letters by gather any glimmer of explanation for people under Nazi sentence of death, and why they should die has transformed all a meditation by Jean Amery on the exideas of death, according to Langer...

...He went to work as REVIEWERS WILLIAM V. SHANNON, formerly of the New a cub reporter for the New York Times, York Times and political correspondent for BECOME A 1979 and two years later was hired as advertis- Commonweal, is presently United States Aming manager for Scribners...

...and Taylor Caldwell...

...The French writer death's dominion...

...Yet until now no Yankee probity, together with an out- Perkins's personal history, however, biography has been written about him...

...He had reached week...

...believe in life after death, and 68 percent ticipating theologians from the Third Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain believe in the resurrection of Jesus (New World include Raimundo Panikkar...

...Fogde Volume 8, Change and Challenge by deals adequately with urban revivalism Jonathan A. Lindsey, is a happy return to and the spirit of robust nationalism that competence as it touches on the kaleidoslay behind both foreign missions and copic events of recent decades...

...Though limited success to bridge the years from it too could have benefited from an up1900 to the end of World War II...

...Mozart Mission Studies zhenitsyn adopts the pose of a moral had dramatized the incompleteness of Maryknoll, New York 10545 (914) 941-7590 crusader" [166...

...COMMONWEAL when he was moved up to the editorial HENRY WARNER BOWDEN is associate prooffices, he had married Louise Saunders, fessor of Religion at Douglass College, RutASSOCIATE and they had the first three of their five gers University, in New Jersey...

...iment of public service and personal dis- belonging to a wealthy Virginia family, cipline, the Perkinses represented a spirit with whom Perkins corresponded for Robert Emmet Long of aestheticism, and these two different years...

...experience of atrocity, has been less It is foolishness to deny the continuing dependent on common assumptions presence of what Langer calls "atrocabout death than its ancestors, and ity," but it is also foolishness, I think, to has struck out in fresh directions to believe that atrocity, and atrocity alone, open up vistas that we have yet to holds sway in life today...

...The only many of these books, this one overlaps • fresh material provided relates to mis- some of the earlier coverage and repeats sions and church growth in the trans- (often with improvement) analyses of Q Mississippi, Intermountain West, his persons previously mentioned...

...It prepares the The enormity of the Gulag horror in Sol- A few decades ago the conductor Otto individual for a cross-cultural apostozhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Klemperer, long paralyzed, stood for the late and includes supervised field Denisovich and Cancer Ward almost ob- first time during a performance of work among minority groups...

...Room 1914...

...should have developed and stressed more dle age, she felt the resentment of a Monet feared the dark, which suggested strongly the meaning of such strategy...

...As with I domestic reforms before 1914...

...holds the single coffin and asks: " `But Richard L. Schoenwald where are the other dead people?' " (xi) Langer has an Edmund Wilson-esque w AWRENCE Langer, a professor of gift for finding books so intriguing that English at Simmons College, here you wish life could go on forever just to continues the study of the meaning of let you read them all...

...The statue's For further information write: known religiosity, observing only that entrance led to the fulfillment, in life, of Marvknoll Center For "in some of his public statements Sol- a moral aim frustrated at death...

...If the Evarts were the embod- Elizabeth Lemmon, an attractive woman Dutton, $15, 498 pp...

...Lindsey a area of special competence...

...Sustaining Member: daughters...

...He counterpoints death in the twentieth century that he John Gunther's generation-old account began in The Holocaust and the Literary of his son's death and Lael WertenImagination...

...began to fill the room, he never noticed, embarking on a series of newly daring There is an everlasting going down and continued with his work...

...At the end he wondered whether dence became unacceptable in the and Board per week, $85.00...

...woman who has been deprived of a life of her own, and the tensions between the two increased...

...They were Berg has actually written four biogGenius clearly fills this need,and, qualities that helped to make Perkins the raphies in one, giving extended attention moreover, is a hugely informative work...

...434 Charlotte Delbo, as she reports in a tril- the reality of transcendence, and it pulled 16 February 1979: 91 him up and out of the near-death of death, but he was not afraid to paint the worked in his office with his hat on, and paralysis...

...canvases that became "The Stations of into death, crueler and more difficult to Perkins's marriage was not entirely the Cross...

...Anyone much starch in Perkins's nature for him own time, and eventually passed who has read the published letters of Per- to enter into an affair with her...

...In a series strains between liberals and fundamen- marked by poor typesetting, this volume N talists, growing industrialism and in- is a compositor's disaster...

...Sickened at ORIENTATION TO MISSION: yond palpable retality...

...Professors of absorb...

...sionistically over foreign policy, busi- So the set concludes...

...The perience of being tortured during the secCommonweal: 90 ogy about her concentration camp exMy own investigation convinces perience, can scarcely free herself from me that the twentieth-century Mind, domination by that experience: life itself goaded by the insights of Freud and has become second-best, an inferior unihis successors and harassed by the verse dulled and blunted...

...Strangely, Langer re- of the unjustly slain Commander came to mains silent on Solzhenitsyn's well- life and appeared on stage...

...A supplementary ence in America...

...For inLove might not yet triumph above the nineteenth century, belief in the possibil- formation, write Director, Summer war's putrefying casualties...

...The hope for a that actually exist in men and women in Center for Mission Studies single meaning is futile...

...One gauge of creased need for social ethics, urbanism Bailey's lack of concern about his and the general failure of Protestant finished work is the fact that at least 124 z churches to meet new human conditions errors remain on 140 printed pages...

...Many of Perkins's his forebears including William Maxwell far from being well off...

...Monet fancied himself a bear now...

...He pleted a book on Henry James...

...In the hands of a master the fact that it offers them little other than craftsman such a viewpoint might yield spare prose...

...the real world, who otherwise, were it Maryknoll, New York 10545 -The Age of Atrocity not for these writers, would only go about their business hugging their atand World War...

...manuscripts, with one leg sometimes FATHER JOHN L. McKENZIE is the author of New York, N.Y...

...tion, yet love lingers, spectrally, at the the point in the opera at which the statue edge of reality...

...It incorporates a lecturefrom the title of the chapter on Camus...

...He unsympathetic to her ambitions...

...Sebastian Kappen, Kwesi Dickson and other prominent Latin American wasting caused by tuberculosis within a Langer has not made full allowance for theologians to be announced...

...The implications of at- English fall prey to a weakness like the rocity, of death as a generally inap- resort of some historians to "the intellecpropriate end despite its eventual MARYKNOLL tualist fallacy": writers, people who are necessity, are making slow inroads good with words, come out of the real SCHOOL OF on our intelligence and emotions, world, and their job is to articulate what but we will have to undergo a long the real world is like...

...Langer observes a few times happy...

...There was also EDITOR OF GENIUS critic, writing major studies of European another woman in Perkins's life, A. Scott Berg sculpture...

...Later, he More...

...Death has some dominion TIE ACE OP ATROCITY: experience of atrocity is summed up for DEATH IN MODERN LITERATURE him in the Holocaust-branded child who, seeing a funeral some time after the liberLawrence L. Langer ation of- the extermination camps, beLBeacon Press, $12.95, 256 pp...