Turning/Creative Dislocation
CARMODY, JOHN
tailed and accurate. The writing is clear, but the "beauty" mentioned in the blurb is confined almost entirely to the last paragraphs of each chapter--evidence that they were origi-...
...But for now, it is likely that the violence will continue...
...Offering graduate undergraduate degreesand in theology, pastoral studies and religious education...
...For the convert surprised by joy, following the golden string of love, divinity becomes not too strange to be believed but too good...
...Small is beautiful, but inhumane bigness will not go away soon...
...1 I Christians, messianism, & Marxism NAHISN topic...
...A recent conference on "Federalism" co-sponsored by Glencree and Corrymeela offered some encouragement to those of us who believe in reconciliation, first in the north and then in the whole island...
...Fall Semester classes begin on August 31, 1981 and end on December 18, 1981...
...He is in good company in depicting it so, but surely the most evident historical fact is that by far most of the people in the north try to live decent, industrious, loving lives--like Jack's mother, for instance...
...Since 1971, however, beginning with Paul VI's Octogesima Adveniens, church documents have treated Marxism in a more careful and nuanced manner...
...The author's suggestion at the end shows no originality: British withdrawal, an ail-lreland conference, a 32-county state with a Bill of Rights...
...Reports from the recent conference on "Federalism" have it that Glenn's "Independent Ulster" stood up well as an alternative to other proposals...
...Turning develops the maturation thesis tactfully, blending personal reminiscence and analysis with materials from other converts such as C.S...
...the fork we take can make all the difference...
...the convert's self matters less and less, CHOOSE Loyolaof Chicago tor Theological Studies ~A in a vibrant urbanvigorous major university center...
...These were the same "law and order" forces which had been arresting and jailing people merely on suspicion...
...The motif has been from liberalism to radicalization...
...Other readers will feel Griffin stays at too safe a distance from our social cancers and politics, or that she has been packaged too cleverly by Doubleday...
...NABX AGAINST TIlE NARXISTS Jose Miranda Orbis Books, $12.95, 316 pp...
...Let me detail something of how each book develops this thesis and then risk reflecting on it briefly for another winter of our discontent...
...YungblUt, E/D DodsonI Gray,C...
...Emilie Griffin is an advertising executive interested in the dynamics of conversion because of her own passage from Christian Science through Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism...
...In the aftermath of surrender to this goodness, struggle and dialectic and desire continue, but with a better sense of proportion...
...At specific times and places the Christian God creates a carrefour...
...New York, N.Y...
...Insofar as Brown is not a convert to Christianity, in the normal sense of the term, he reports no technicolor turning that sent him to new commitments...
...I found the descriptions of desire most affecting...
...C]EEATIVE HSLOCAT/011--TIIE NOVENENT OF aACE Robert McAfee Brown Abingdon, $7.95, 144 pp...
...The Protestant clergy took the initiative toward the December 1974 Feakle meeting with PIRA, not vice versa...
...They knew both "sides" would try to use them, but felt the time was ripe for opening up channels of communication between the British government and the Provos...
...Public education does not introduce people to the Marxist tradition...
...One thinks of Pascal: you would not seek had you not already found...
...The Ulster workers' strike in May 1974 not only brought down the Faulkner partnership government, but immensely increased the minority's distrust of the police and army...
...Jack Holland sees much Communist influence in the conflict...
...no merely logical "solution" is possible, with bigotry setting the scene and the dead ruling the living...
...Like the grace of Jesus or the saints, Griffin's stories remind us that God is particular, personal, no comfortable generality...
...Both books are honest confessions of faith...
...Robert McAfee Brown's warming faith that God uses time for our maturation expresses itself both less dramatically than Griffin's and more...
...Both have often called the official IRA "Communist" as a tactic in their internecine strife over territory in Belfast...
...I am sure the book is inaccurate in a couple of important matters...
...I TURNING REFLECTIONS ON THE EXPERIENCE OF CONVERSION Emille Griffin Doubleday, $8.95, 189 pp...
...While Marxist thought exerts great AN AMERICAN CHRISTIAN PERSPEC- cultural influence in many Western sociTIVE Arthur F. McGovern Orbis Books, $12.95, 339 pp...
...Communist" they are not...
...Ecclesiastical documents spoke of Marxism as an unchanging, self-identical system char-t...
...EYent s: GAY, LESBIAN & CHRI.STIAN JUNE 12-14, 1981 John McNeill~ C. He yward, AI ~armines~ .Bev Harrison TRAINING IN THE ART OF BIBLE STUDY JUNE 16-22, 1981 Walter Wink, Shar...
...Granted the place of dialectical reasoning, the place of the struggle that pins the recalcitrant will to the mat, and the place of surrender or conversion proper, the beginnings, undertow, and hints of wisdom tend to play in the key of love...
...Until fairly recently, Catholic teaching has encouraged this ignorance...
...The author thinks the UFF has always been a pseudo-organization, a cover for UDA killers...
...Church and State, pulpit and lectern --Brown has scanned faith in them all...
...Both books merit more than a perfunctory good review because they are ' benefactions...
...The divine call that brings some persons to dramatic shifts may be found trying to lure many others to greater depths or new horizons...
...As Dorothy Day's title The Long Loneliness suggests, the story of conversion is well seen as a romance...
...The marvelous marriage to Sydney shows the reader how more causes, a bigger world, and even painful consciousness-raising can mean faith better broken and shared...
...I prefer to Conversion & maturation think that Andy Tyrie is a force for moderation, and that the New Ulster Political Research Group is genuinely converted to politics...
...A Merton or Dulles, wrestling with Roman Catholicism, had a definite doctrine and discipline to confront...
...I I in | = = 9 9 n 9 r For further reformat/on contact: Theological Studies Loyola University of Chicago 6S25 North Shendan ROadLChicago, ithnois 60626 Telephone 312274-3000 Extens~ons 437 or 451 22 May 1981:315 Kirkrid e...
...Partly because of its close use of these other authors, it evokes moods of the 1930s and forties, when Christian faith probably seemed a more exact entity than it does today...
...The Holocaust bids all mortal flesh keep silent, yet which of us could contain our hearts' burning when he talked with us on the ( road and explained the scriptures...
...Pray for the people in the north...
...The Amnesty International and Bennett reports have only deepened this distrust, although the present Chief Constable, Jack Hermon, is more and more seen to be fair...
...In the final analysis, these are but cavils...
...I hope it does, and that i...
...there are such people, but I do not know them...
...Yet the Republican Clubs in the north have some capable political operatives, like Seamus Lynch on the Belfast City Council...
...Lewis, Bede Griffiths, Thomas Merton, Avery Dulles, and Dorothy Day...
...Continuing the Jesuit tradition of excellence in teaching, research and community service...
...Hirni, R. Raines ~"ontact: V~ ~ KIRKR I DGE IA Mountain Retreat Center Bangor, PA 18013 (215) 588-1793 ii i 1 ii to subscribe to COMMONWEAL...
...They saw hundreds of illegal actions--seizing of petrol stations, blocking of roads, intimidation of workers at the entrances to estates--go unpunished...
...For all her gratitude or weakness...
...The disillusions with Stanford and Union Theological Seminary, fine institutions first and God's good servants second, are almost too magnanimous...
...Turning and Creative Dislocation built up this reader's hopes that the twofold command, the one same love, really can be enough...
...However, insofar as he has been deeply engaged in the social and political movements of the past twenty-five years, his journey has been scenic indeed: the deep South of the Civil Rights struggle, the Rome of Vatican II, Vietnam and the Pentagon, South Africa and Cuba...
...Griffin advances the mood into the sixties and seventies, when most hard disjunctions, softened, but she retains a motif of either/or...
...Still, by imposing the heightened narratives of converts on the general religious grid, Turning makes prevenient grace or the common lure of God more than bloodless abstractions...
...Sixty now, he looks back with both gratitude and sobriety...
...That is not to say that conversion is a one-shot affair, nor that Griffin provides no analogues from religious lives less dramatic than those of converts...
...Our views on the UDA differ, too-although I admit that my friendship with Glenn Ban" may color my judgment...
...Gregory Baum A RTHUR McGOVERN's Marxism: An American Christian Perspective is an eminently useful book on an important eties, it remains largely unknown in North America, even among educated people...
...transcendental operations of divine love from seeming Teutonic fog...
...The writing is clear, but the "beauty" mentioned in the blurb is confined almost entirely to the last paragraphs of each chapter--evidence that they were originally separate articles...
...In the face of systemic evil the only hopes that now endure have been well grounded, well annealed...
...The Dublin group has been consistently merely socialist...
...Again these lessons are offered with blessed specificity...
...In the winter of those discontented by Ronald Reagan and John Paul II, by rampant selfishness and straitened faith, genuine edification is especially precious...
...There has been so much grace, there are promises of so much more grace, that he has to write a eucharistia...
...He says the UDA's "real business is assassination" again...
...Most Americans think of it as alien...
...Rinse THE PILGRIMAGE OF FAITH JUNE 22-28, 1981 Wm Stringfellow, W. Wink, Jn...
...This may be the direction in which things will go, but hardly in the way he predicts: no civil war, because the Loyalists would not fight for "Ulsternationalism" and the Provos would not fight with the British gone...
...My main quarrel with the book is its excessive focus on violence as the historical reality--violence from both "sides" and from security forces...
...acterized by atheistic materialism, class war and the denial of private property...
...I would call it "Marxist" or "leftist...
...They should get credit for this...
...A Lewis or Day found that choosing Christianity meant Commonweal: 314 separating from friends or lovers who bitterly opposed it...
...Jack Holland says he has written a book to arouse thought, rather than slogans...
...When she schematizes conversion, so that a modest bit of generality might illumine the'particulars, Griffin speaks of a progression: desire, dialectic, struggle, surrender, and afterwards...
...Commonweal: 316...
...They were willing to be used for peace, and they helped bring about a cease-fire at Christmas, lasting for six months...
...Although they draw on different resources, they share a faith that God uses time for our maturation, even when we resist him...
...John Oarmody T HESE TWO fine books make an interesting comparison...
...He says: "the greatest and most disastrous compromise was the creation of Northern Ireland itself . . ." so he will surely arouse more than thought in the majority there...
...slmp/y complete this COUl~ or send s tacsimlle to COMMONWEAL 232 Mmlboa Ave...
...The Belfast Provos seem recently to lean further leftward...
...A first virtue of Turning, then, is that it reminds the reader how concrete conversions are...
...Both are edifying -an old word I wish I could use more often...
...As one of my Northern Irish friends said, this is the most optimistic scenario possible, and in my opinion is unreal...
...The categorical stories of converts keep the...
...They talked of the northern Loyalists' view of PIRA...
...Providing opportunities continuingadditional for education through correspondence study and non-credit courses...
...To be sure, some readers will ask Brown to chasten liberation theology with a reading of Marxism like that of Solzhenitsyn...
...Robert McAfee Brown is a prominent Protestant theologian interested in the dynamics of grace because of his own passage from cradle Presbyterianism through Christian ecumenism to liberation theology...
...I do not know anyone living in Northern Ireland who thinks civil war is unlikely...
...One recalls Augustine: late have I loved thee...
...There has been so much dislocation, so many exhibitions of evil, that he has to announce a dies irae...
...Her own journey took her to specific crossroads and she renders them effectively...
...The majority has plenty to fight against, and to fight with--one hundred twenty thousand registered rifles, for one thing, plus guns retained by ex-B Specials...
...God has blessed America, but with the ( rest of the North, America faces a terrible reckoning before the Son of Man/King depicted in Matthew 25...
...But the process in any scenario will be long and difficult...
...w'ill reach even the thinkers in Northern Ireland...
...Maybe his next series of reports will provide this balance...
...10016 ['7 One year, $22 17 Two years, $39 1"] i I-issue trial, $ 8 Name Address citY, State, Zip 5~2~i the convert's God matters more and more...
Vol. 108 • May 1981 • No. 10
