Religious booknotes
Sawicki, Marianne
A novel of intelligence (cont.) dilemma facing three persons in middle age who've had a lifelong obsession for I I I each other." (Continued from page. 306) fidelities are to Mara, to...
...What, then, can the individual do to advance economic justice...
...The world of the title is not so much endless as Vicovian, cyclical, the rise and fall and rise again of love, of aesthetic movements, fidelities and successes, failures and' dissatisfactions...
...The structures of reason, progressively acquired, exist as programs for an individual's creative response to situations...
...He,regnfds production and consumption as eucharistic realities, for all the fruits of the earth and of hunma labor are llffngs that God can make and then we settle back comfortably with them into middle-age, believing with them that "after the age of forty there isn't much to live for except friendship...
...reason, liberty, equality, and fraternity...
...II I I' IIIIIIIIIII II I iiii 22 May 1981:309...
...but those with consciences piqued by the priest-poet will fred Deedy's glimpses of Berrigan's life,a fascination...
...The other is Claire (called Pebble or Peb), daughter of "Babsie" and "Plinker" Sanfoi'd, an American aristocrat who slakes her guilt at being born into privilege by wholehearted social action...
...The ethical ~ing implicit in U.S...
...Conn's lofty analysis never touches down to the clay of everyday moral dilemmas, nor does it make the jump from individual to social ethical problems...
...To ethnicians and moral theologians falls the task of interpretive criticism of the works of this art...
...II II I I I ] it doesn't deliver the ethical impact, ~ that spark of insight, that one experiences in apprehending Berrigan's poetic-prophetic gestures directly...
...An Interim Biography ~ Daniel Berdfan, $J~ by John Deedy, Fides/Claretian, $6.95, 15I pp...
...The nation is awash with dubious creativities: "creative accounting," ".'creative management," and "creafive" cuts (euphemism: "savings") in the federal programs for the poor...
...I gan's logic is called upon to corroborate the scientific data of the deveiopmentalists, particularly Kohlberg's most controversial finding: that the formal structures of moral reasoning eventually become the content of ultimate moral choice, as the moral subject chooses to be what he or she truly is9 Conscience, the quest for selftranscendence in the patterns of moral reason, compares favorably with, for example, "authenticity" as a criterion for the evaluation of moral choice, Conn says...
...Claire and Sophie love each other as many women do...
...241 pp...
...There are changes in their lives, but their natures remain very much the same...
...Overberg's advice for rousing it: more dialogue, discussion, education, and action...
...The problem of incarnating principles into choices is approached from an ecclesiastical angle in Kenneth Overberg's careful study of the moral magisAn inconsl#tentEtlgeP TGat'klnls of ~# Amtrlccm Catkolir Biskop, by Kemteth R9 Overberg, University Press of America, $9.75, 219 pp...
...Sophie, Claire, and Edmund live their lives separately at times, but always in touch9 Claire marries Jeff, a teacher who is a tennis buff, they have a daughter who grows up with her mother's conscience and studies for the Episcopal ministry, and then Jeff dies, freeing Claire for Edmund...
...John Deedy's "interim biography" of Daniel Berrigan, meant to infect readers with the motivation that prompts Berrigan's exploits, portrays a man whom many consider a virtuoso III III II IIIIIIII I II IIIII cards they exchange for all those years, do we ever feel close to these people...
...Beckmann's perspective is unusual...
...I I[ sonal morality is based largely on an appeal to the cherck's authority, Oyer~berg says, while their teaching on social morality, being more recent, relies on three other sources as well: Scripture, human experience, and personal responsibility, There is a certain logical incoherence about this discrepancy of sources...
...the creative reasoning behind his own moral choices...
...Moral reasoning never was a more timely topic for discussion than it is now, as the nation rethinks its responsibilities to care for the poor at home and the peace abroad...
...The cognitive calculus of value has been the domain, philosophically, of Bernard Lonergan, and empirically, of the developmental psychologists Kohlberg and Eriksou...
...Yet "Apolast#s, Good Friends...
...The moral response of a model Christian's holy materialism, Beckmann says, should exhibit the surprise of God's Spirit, "'the individuality, the adventure, the bold freedom...
...once in Russia Edmund walks in upon them: 9. . they were lying in a large double bed, Claire reading half reclining on a pillow, Sophie bared to the waist, her head on Claire's lap, trying to have a brief afternoon sleep, splendor of two women's flesh joined in ancient affection, sensuality of sheets rumpled in great heat...
...Despite the impressive and always accurate documentation of place (Edmund's visit to the Hermitage and the art he looks .at there consumes five dense pages) and character, social movements, parental backgrounds, lovers, husbands, visits with each other, letters and postholy...
...Conn identifies conscience as creative selftranscendence, that is, a certain facility which the individual acquires with progressively more sophisticated patterns of thinking abom values...
...He reads'the Old Testament ~ "an inquiry into the wealth of nations...
...If the personal moral ma~sterium is being ignored because it neglects important sources of ethical reasoning...
...Beckmann sets his moral imagination to work within this perhaps too-simple matrix of analysis...
...While the three travel together in the Soviet Union, Edmund reflects "on the I H OW TO DISTINGUISH good from evil, right from wrong...
...Francine Gray would be the first to admit that llae novel is about the changelessness of personality, I am sure, and yet this keeps us from experiencing among cremqve ethical artists...
...church statements about perI I I Commonweal: 308 ties, learning that what they were is what they are and will be--Sophie's warm but self-contained ambition, Claire's selfless service to mankind, Edmund's reactionary devotion to his mother, his art, his two friends, himself...
...Engagement with life is the spark of ethical creativity...
...hence the title An Inconsistent Ethic...
...Human beings become "creators in the ethical art of living...
...We know the trio well soon after the novel begins, we watch their forays into one experience after another, representing the major currents of twentieth-century American thought, to paraphrase V. L. Parrington...
...Deedy's book will not likely inspire anyone whom Berfigan has not already touched...
...Ov~berg asks, what then.accounts for the fact that the progressive and constructive teachings of the social magisterium also.have failed to make an impact...
...dilemma facing three persons in middle age who've had a lifelong obsession for I I I each other...
...But we are chronically short on ethical artistry and moral imagination...
...At forty-five they are still looking for themselves, or "finding themselves" in the odious phrase of the sixReligiousbooknotesl Ethical artistry & moral imagination Marianne Sawicki II say that anatomy is destiny...
...Authenticity is not a criterion at all, "but rather an ideal which stands in need of a criterion.'" Conn proposes that structure is authenticity, in the same sense in which Freud could I I I I Since that lifelong obsession is the subject-matter of the book, one does not expect much "to happen," and of course it does not...
...Otherwise, Beckmann's theology is somewhat odd...
...One of those friends is Jewish Sophie Ross who marries into extraordinary wealth and then loses a second, Israeli, husband in a Lebanese border skirmish...
...The concept of conscience as the keystone,of moral reasoning is rehabilitated by Walter Corm in an excellent treatise on foundational ethics...
...David Beckmann, one fe~ls, is engaged with life...
...or that the impact of charitable con tribufions to poor nations is negligible when compared with the effect of foreign investment and trade upon them...
...God's creative thumbprint reveals itself in "modem materialistic economic culture," a culture defined by six values: this-worldliness, progress...
...So Deedy did for Berrigan what the synoptics did for Jesus: tidied up the world-shattering parables into exemplary stories with lessons at the end...
...In his thoughtful essay, an ethical artist with dirty hands shares . 9...
...The realities .of starvation and unemployment and racism and miserable housing do not touch most lives," Therefore, the social conscience sleeps...
...Amidst his suggestions, Bockmann wryly points out the irony in the profiferation of organizations that ~n to show people how to live more simply...
...In Conn's synthetic discussion, LonerCostsdtnce: Dewelopment and .Seif...
...Overber$ suggests it is because American Catholics have little direct experience of social evils...
...The book is sprinkled with pithy conclusions...
...But the bond among the three heroes, from their adolescence on Nantucket to their tour of the Soviet Union in June 1975 and into the present, is unbreakable...
...he is both a Christian pastor and an economist for the World Bank...
...This is the first of wha~t will be a regular column...
...All four books are welcome, MARIANNE SAWICKI (Marianne Sawicki is a theologian, editor, and writer...
...this is due perhaps to his choice of the ethereal Lonergan for his philosopher, and to his over-hasty dismissal of the mounting criticism of developmental theories which itself merits philosophical examination...
...It is a complex thirty-year friendship...
...They are so detailed and so cerebral, their talk is so elevated and informed, we know so many facts about their milieus that, somehow, passion is smothered in them...
...III I terium of the American Catholic bishops...
...In this case, however, the inspimtiou-starved nation and church still have access to the historical Berrigan, parable that he is, through his own writings...
...Each of these values is served, to a greater or less extent, by the two opposite systems of economic organization in the world: markets or bureaucracy (i.e., capitalism or socialism...
...Religious Education Press, $11.95...
...306) fidelities are to Mara, to painting (which he abandons when the tastes of the country change from realism to pop art) and to the two friends he makes a/fifteen on Nantucket...
...Where Faitk and Economies Meet: A Christian Critique, by David M. Beckraann, Augdmrg PubSslu'n 8 House, $5.95, 154 pp...
...for example, that reducing our consumption does not directly help the poor...
...9 ill II I lllll [ III I' ,,,m...
...Trasucendetlee, by Walter E. Corm...
...But can .one explain such a prophet...
...her "diversity of causes.., expresses an almost frivolous abundance of dissenting passions...
...Deedy's highly readable pastiche of interviews, press accounts, and Berrigan writings makes an engrossing story ind~xl...
...He tells stories about his experiences with World Bank projects all over the globe, in places where the six values of economic culture are realized in widely various ways...
...Sophie has loved Edmund since she was fifteen: "She'd accepted the evident certainty of his love for Claire with a cool, complicated patience which had to do with her own adoration of Pebble...
...Sophie's two marriages are passages she lives through in order to free her for her enormously successful television life (in some respects resembling Barbara Waiters's...
...Ink and paper can't give you the smell of the napalmed files at Catonsville, or the sound of ihe hnmmer blows at King of Prussia, Pa...
...Curiously, not really...
Vol. 108 • May 1981 • No. 10
