Critics' Christmas Choices
Bellah, Robert N. & Foner, Eric & Carroll, James & L'Engle, Madeleine & Cullinan, Elizabeth & Janeway, Elizabeth & Keating, Thomas & Lawson, Steven & Peters, Karl E. & Smith, Huston & Hacker, Marilyn & McBrien, Richard P. & Maloff, Saul
Books: CRITICS' CHRISTMAS CHOICES James Carroll JAMES CARROLL has just published his fourth novel, Family Trade (Little, Brown). THE GREAT POWER of the Christmas narrative-how the earthly life of...
...Even though this series of essays is somewhat repetitious, Hick makes a convincing case that the future of religion involves the recognition of the many ways God has become known to different peoples at different times in human history...
...Little wonder that one traditionalist reviewer has already written off the work as the musings of a scholar in his dotage...
...Selections from Susan Sontag's works are also gathered into a "Reader," offering us a welcome retrospective on that unfailingly interesting, valuable writer...
...Martin's Press, $10.95, 221 pp...
...Add a novel: A Chain of Voices by Andre Brink (William Morrow, $15.50, 525 pp...
...An almost incredibly complex woman, this: daughter of a noble father and middle-class mother, wife of a Baron struggling to run a coffee farm in Kenya, foster mother to innumerable natives and neighbors during her seventeen years in Africa, striking confectioner of ghost tales and naturalistic recollections...
...Soon after came Out of Africa- for many of us, the best book about that continent ever written-followed by Winter's Tales, Last Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny, and her final African memoir, Shadows on the Grass...
...Blithe though Stevie Smith often was, she twice attempted suicide, but in these pages death is repeatedly overruled by the writer's pleasure in life and its redemptive routine...
...It is at once lucid and profound, learned and unpretentious, Catholic and ecumenical...
...Last, a book of pictures to open and fall into entire: Old France, Volume One of The Work of Atget (Preface, John Szarkowski...
...women, three dollars a day...
...McHale turned the Christmas story on its ear...
...and if he is at times acerbic or satiric in tone and attitude, he is steadfastly decent, fairminded, compassionate, affectionate, save where even saints might falter, avert their gaze, faint dead away...
...Straus & Giroux...
...Lodge writes from the inside, obviously, as a writer who has not only witnessed but experienced the convulsions and vicissitudes his characters endure...
...The first volume to appear in a projected multi-part collection of documents culled from the virtually untouched holdings of the National Archives, this brings together evidence concerning the role of the black soldier in the Civil War, and its impact on race relations...
...arrives as a major event...
...On the day I finish boxing my compass with these four books, Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk (Harper & Row, $12.95, 177 pp...
...Oh, sorry,' they would mutter aftfir each clumsy little bump or jostle . , .''And the London where this occurs is...
...In the novel he published this year, Dear Friends (Doubleday, $16.95, 378 pp...
...NY READING list each year is more apt to be of old books which are still around, rather than current books which vanish in a few months, unless the book is by one of my favorite authors...
...His books include Crisis of Faith, and And the Word Was Made Flesh FOR THOSE interested in rooting their activities in Christian prayer and motivation, the following books are especially helpful.In his book, In His Spirit (Paulist, $4.95, 114 pp...
...has been out a while and needs no fresh boost from this quarter...
...She teaches at Fordham University...
...WOULD LIKE to start with two books by close collaborators in my current research...
...Richard Yates's heroes suffer from self'consciousness of an exacting and exalted kind...
...in the latter, self initiates all good acts and God rewards...
...So, too, is Tom Wolfe represented by a "Reader" (The Purple Decades, Farrar Straus & Giroux, $17.50, 396 pp...
...Tom McHale was a gifted writer who focused on the black-comic element in human disjointedness...
...Maclntyre's profound pessimism does not allow him to suggest much in the way of alternatives but his book is invaluable to those for whom the search for an alternative is still viable...
...Roland Barthes could be arcane, gnostic, enigmatic, even opaque...
...Joseph's Abbey, in Spencer, for twenty years, now lives at St...
...does for moral philosophy what Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature did three years ago for epistemology...
...The tragedy of that beautiful, fertile land is prefigured in the culture clash of Boer farmers and original inhabitants already being uprooted...
...In his recent novel (The Dean's December, Harper & Row, $13.95, 312 pp...
...The quantum exists only in relationship...
...His agony is like Job's in all respects but one...
...Virtually nothing in the history of the volatile, turbulent period is without its fictional representation- crises of faith and conscience, deviations and departures from immemorial practices, modes of conduct and habits of mind, clerical and lay, sacred and profane...
...These poets and others of their generation seemed to squander themselves their capacities for the simple pleasures and duties of ordinary life...
...that contains "Gimpel the Fool," "The Gentleman from Cracow," "The Spinoza of Market Street," "The Unseen," "Yentl -the Yeshiva Boy," "The Letter Writer," "Old Love," "Passions," among many others as good or nearly so must be reckoned among the good things of the world worth taking with us...
...They also appear to be able to talk without speaking: there is neither speech nor language...
...We do what we have to do," our ancestors tell us, and in these pictures we can share the heaviness of their necessity, the inventive pragmatism of their reality...
...This is women's history becoming something even bigger: a look at society's need for women's work and its agonizing confusion over rewarding and valuing the workers fully...
...That their squandering was not on high life but on work that issued in some of the greatest writing of our time is what rescued them from pathos and makes them compelling figures...
...In the New Deal years, "Male WPA workers got five dollars a day...
...This is Maigret's France, where life goes on inside, behind closed shutters-but the church tower looms, all-seeing, its bells waiting to call together the sullen and the simple, the greedy and the work-worn...
...In addition to the usual analysis of major Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant traditions, she discusses examples of American Indian religion, occult and metaphysical movements, the influence of religions from the East, and regional religion in Southern Ap-palachia...
...they help develop human cooperative behavior that makes the rise and continuation of civilization possible...
...Hauser warns us, however, that the attitudes arising from the Western model continue to function even when they have been intellectually rejected, and suggests ways of integrating the scriptural model into the whole of one's life...
...Here are half a dozen lively works, some written by scholars, all accessible to the general reader...
...The positive reaction to the book suggests that he has largely succeeded...
...Toward a Scientific Theology is not easy reading, but along with the other books it is important for developing a coherent understanding of the meaning and purpose of human life in a scientific-pluralistic age...
...provides a look at the past by someone who lived it, and a perfect example of how we who weren't there can get things wrong, falsify emphasis, and miss the inner song of experience...
...Carol and Warren Matthews of the title story find the breakup of their marriage mostly awkward: ". . . they seemed unable to do anything at all in their small, tidy basement flat, without getting in each other's way...
...And the last third of the book is a particular triumph: in a sweeping, year-by-year journal, Beauman vividly traces the innovations of Peter Hall and Nunn and such international successes as Peter Brook's Midsummer Night's Dream, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Wars of the Roses...
...May is able to distinguish the roles of psychiatrist, pastoral counselor, and spiritual director, giving each its due without confusion of roles or relinquishing the primacy of grace with its secret, healing, strengthening, and transforming effectiveness...
...Not all of the master's stories are first-rate-he's written too much, too fast for that...
...Paul and the Western image of the st\(-outside-God, which has been the commonly accepted model in Christian instruction for several centuries...
...In the by now rich tradition of Annales historiography, this lively, anecdotal, often surprising inquiry into the curious relations of food and culture-or of taste and sensibility-by Jean-Franpois Revel, the fractious author of Without Marx or Jesus and The Totalitarian Temptation, Culture and Cuisine (Doubleday, $12.95, 289 pp...
...was, quite simply, the best in-depth analysis of a major artistic organization I've come across...
...Saul Maloff SAUL MALOFF, a novelist and critic, contributes regularly to Commonweal...
...These Gifford Lectures, The Human Mystery (Springer International, $26, 255 pp...
...That old question was raised again this year when John Gardner, arguably our most serious religiqus.novelist, died a brutish death in a motorcycle accident...
...The bird-like old lady who survived on oysters and fruit juice, who traded quips with Marilyn Monroe on an American visit, who cast a loving but sardonic eye on those around her-Danes, Masai, literary rivals, loved ones-comes to life in Thurman's book...
...professional self-interest aside, the excellent among them are books that will not be exhausted in one reading, books that should be owned because, after the first reading, they will likely be wanted again, at an hour or in a place where the library or a friend's bookshelf aren't possibilities...
...So the circling radar beam shuts down on a 1982 mandala for book-lovers...
...Her second novel, A Severed Wasp, will be published early next year by Farrar...
...but a Collected Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $19.95, 610 pp...
...The new poems review and renew urgencies: the trebly-endangered lives of "invisible" black women, the racist complicities white women and men of good will must acknowledge, the insistence that the woman Lorde is, personally and emblematically, not be forgotten, made invisible again, behind the powerful and public poet's persona...
...Hauser's clear and practical analysis of these two fundamentally opposed views of the self with their respective clusters of attitudes is invaluable for establishing the spiritual journey on the solid foundation of revelation...
...But all will have to admit that Tracy is a scholarly pacesetter-a theologian from whom one learns not only in terms of content but also in terms of industry, care, insight and a disarming modesty...
...Charles Cumin and Richard McCormick continue to enrich us with the third in their series of Readings in Moral Theology: The Magisterium and Morality (Paulist Press, $7.95, 512 pp...
...but far more often his slant, wonderfully original vision truly lit up the landscape and espied connections by creating them out of a void...
...And so falls into despair . . ."In better spirits she tells us, "Friendship and the revolt from friendship is the stuff of life...
...At first glance simply one amone innumerable "local studies" (covering Jackso-nian politics in a single North Carolina county), Watson's book actually has far broader ramifications...
...I can only say this is glorious...
...She was Whitmanian in her breadth and populism, but her "songs" were as likely to be of Akiba, Kathe Kollwitz, Wendell Willkie, or John Brown as of herself...
...Uncomfortable facts crop up to confound pleasant fables...
...This book should last...
...The novel ends with a suicide...
...edited with an Introduction by Susan Sontag, remind us of his lamentable, untimely death, a void no one else can quite fill...
...A chink in our everyday, contractual world appears, and in two or three sentences we are carried beyond...
...Through outlandish plots, stunning perceptions, and marvelous wit, he gets my complete attention and then moves in to create an opening...
...Dutton, $12.50, 256 pps...
...One helpful book is John Hick's God Has Many Names (Westminster, $7.50, 140 pp...
...Bohm's model has things more interrelated than they were in previous scientific cosmologies...
...Richard Hauser distinguishes two images of the self: the self-m-God put forward by St...
...Undis-tracted by "period" figures and fashions, we look right back into "Our Forgotten Past," secret, mysterious, unforgettable...
...Our Forgotten Past: Seven Centuries of Life on the Land (Thames and Hudson, $27.50, 240 pp...
...If one reads nothing else from this list, one should read and ponder this book...
...concern men hamstrung by their reluctance to kid themselves and others, but Mr...
...what if the longed-for child has come not as salvation, but as the final disappointment...
...In anger, in love, in wisdom, Ponsot celebrates emancipations: from constricting marriage, the toils of romantic love, from male power and female abnegation, from beloved parents and beloved children...
...Simpson gives us intimate portraits of John Berryman, to whom she was mar- . ried from 1942 to 1956, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell and Delmore Schwartz...
...When completed, the entire series will transform our understanding of slavery, abolition, and the still unresolved legacy of emancipation...
...After Virtue, by Alasdair Maclntyre (Notre Dame, $7.95, 245 pp...
...It is the whole story of Christ's life that moves us, precisely because it is- a whole and as such represents a victory over the dis-joinfedness that seems to characterize the earthly lives of the rest of us...
...yet with reverberations far beyond her own frail being...
...There are others in the series...
...Architecture, landscape planning, forms of oral communication and slave culture are only some of the diverse elements from which this tale of the rise and fall of a distinctive society are constructed...
...The challenge awaits the creative solutions of monks and nuns well-grounded in their tradition and open to contemporary spirituality...
...It is the deepest truth about reality, a fact that awaits our discovery...
...Their place in our hearts is only made more secure by this troubling memoir...
...Care of Mind, Care of Spirit, by Gerald May, M.D...
...Bawden's subject is always happiness and the lengths to which we must go for its sake...
...and The Human Psyche (Springer International, $26.00, 279 pp...
...addresses itself to the contemplative dimension of the spiritual journey...
...Richard P. McBrien FATHER RICHARD P. McBRIEN is chairman of the theology department at the University of Notre Dame...
...I would mention also her splendid sequence about the chosen experience of becoming a single mother at forty, written in 1950, when few would have considered that choice either political or "poetic...
...Some One Sweet Angel Chile, by Sher, ley Anne Williams (William Morrow, $7.50 paper...
...Here we find the tables turned, though to speak precisely, it is not from an Asian perspective that Nasr describes the West, but from the standpoint of perennial truths the West has (temporarily...
...Laura's reflections on the twisted events preceding her second marriage constitute the substance of the story,.but Mrs...
...the Western model, external acts...
...Jackson Lears has written a fascinating book on anti-modernism in America in the period 1880-1920: No Place of Grace (Pantheon Books, $18.50, 375 pp...
...argue for a scientifically unorthodox dualist-interactionist thesis on the human-brain-mind and relate this view to questions of human values and human purpose...
...Teachers of Christian doctrine and spirituality need to recognize the virtual eclipse of the scriptural model and the urgent need to return to it...
...His last book, Mickelsson's Ghosts (Knopf, $16.95, 590pp.'), is a novel about a contemporary man of letters whose life is.a complete shambles...
...The book is particularly exciting in its depiction of an alternative public philosophy rooted in Plato and Aristotle but also in American republicanism and philosophical pragmatism, that could provide a more viable set of directives for our public life...
...Towards the end of Nina Bawden's latest novel, Andrew says to his wife Laura, "Try walking naked...
...Rukeyser, who died in 1978, was, throughout her lifetime, an activist, a polymath, an explorer...
...During the past few years several worthwhile books have been published that can help guide us in responding to this question...
...The feminization of poverty began early, and continued...
...He was a man of talent and sensitivity...
...The days of our ancestors' lives go on show before us: work and leisure, squalor and luxury, drudgery and deprivation, revolutionary hopes, stratagems for getting by, inventions, folk wisdom, food, clothes, tools, houses, travel, all woven together into a solid structure so real we might almost move in ourselves, so real that the differences from today make clear how change becomes irreversible process...
...Madeleine L'Engle MADELEINE L'ENGLE has published over two dozen books...
...She received the National Book A ward in poetry in 1975 for Presentation Piece...
...IN LOVE REALITY," a friend recently said to me, and in the passionate spirit of that declaration I recommend An Unsuitable Attachment by Barbara Pym...
...AS ONE who likes to feel oriented I scan a lot, like the radar beam that keeps sweeping its circle around an airport approach tower...
...The interplay of traditional ideals and economic change also informs Nick Sal-vatore'.s Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (University of Illinois Press, $24.95,432 pp...
...Well known for his models approach to the church, Dulles here adds a sixth to his original list: community of disciples...
...one which, for our secular but still aspiring age may be as affective a talent as there is...
...is among the best books of its kind...
...lost sight of...
...Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres (Yale University Press, $19.95, 288 pp...
...Alice Kessler-Harris mines the overlooked record of wage-earning women in the United States...
...This does not mean multiplying cloistered monks and nuns, but sharing -the core of monastic spirituality the contemplative dirrien-' sion with everyone on the spiritual path in ways that are congruent with the facts of our time...
...In the ninety-three years of its history, no lectureship in religion has rivaled the prestige of the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh: (James's Varieties of Religious Experience and Niebuhr's The Nature and Destiny of Man are there for proof...
...This, her sixth book, sends Mark Aigner, vicar of a North London church, off to Rome at the head of an...
...Good writers like these serve above all to remind us that we need to be redeemed and that we cannot redeem ourselves...
...They came from four directions: from science, philosophy, religion, and the arts...
...I IN THE WRITING of American history, 1982 may well be remembered as the year the "new histories" achieved maturity...
...Or better, we are enabled ourselves to go beyond, for Bellow is never doctrinaire...
...The New Testament model emphasizes interior dispositions...
...WHEN selecting books to give, and to keep, I most often choose volumes of poetry...
...SAUL BELLOW is our incomparable urban writer: an urban intelligence and wiliness working on urban types, strategies for survival and transcendence, city scape, extreme situations, insoluble dilemmas...
...Rebecca West's 1S900 (Viking, $19.95, 192 pp...
...though it is a learned work which delights in its learning almost as much as it does in good food and vintage wine, and in truly anathematizing the highly publicized nouvelle cuisine as a "new academicism...
...These tiny subatomic particles cannot be studied objectively...
...Out of that awareness-in religion it is called humility-the eternal Word of God springs again...
...Huston Smith HUSTON SMITH is professor of philosophy and religion at Syracuse University...
...That all of them were published by university presses reflects, unfortunately, the accelerating retreat of commercial houses from the publication of serious works of American history...
...And shortly thereafter I read in A Story Like the Wind that the birds know, and that when they change their song it is often to warn of danger, and I was grateful that this spring song was not a changed song, merely the usual joy of sun and wind and the greening world...
...Born in Denmark in 1885, she was a literary unknown until she turned fifty, when her Seven Gothic Tales was published...
...It begins with an elegant and revelatory series of epistolary poems,' 'Letters From a New England Negro,' ' written in the persona of an educated young black woman gone south, in 1867, to teach her newly-freed people...
...The Life of a Storyteller suggests that she-like the Royal Shakespeare Company-will last for some time to come...
...One cannot, of course, consider the beginnings of those brilliant careers without an eye cocked on their tragic endings...
...While these books are not easy reading, with the aid of their many diagrams they are one of the best resources from the sciences for people to use when addressing questions about human nature...
...This volume charts the development of the poet's incantatory and powerful voice, underscores the perpetual and uncompromising breadth of her concerns...
...LEADING my list is Karl Rahner's Concern for the Church: Theological I Investigations XX (Crossroad, $12.95, 191 pp...
...Introducing us to the richness and diversity in a universe that has evolved over fifteen billion years, Eric Chais-son's Cosmic Dawn (Little, Brown, $14.95, 302 pp) beautifully presents the latest scientific theories on the origins of matter, life, and human culture...
...Karen," "Jerie," The Baroness...
...Notes, Maria Morris Hom-bourg, The Museum of Modern Art/New York Graphic Society, $40, 177 pp...
...These books about a young white boy of French descent in very black Africa are, for me, deeply theological, with their sense of the unity of all creation, and their reminder that we are woefully out of touch with God's other creatures, the birds, the trees, those who are different, superficially, from the rest of us...
...The Mirror Mind, by William Johnston, (Harper and Row, $10.95, 176 pp...
...In a completely different vocabulary and rhythm, the middle sequence of poems celebrates Bessie Smith, and illuminates another facet of the history and heroism of black women...
...While appreciative of the contributions of those he analyzes -writers such as Bell, Heilbroner, Rawls, Nozick and Kohlberg--he nonetheless finds their liberalism inadequate as a public philosophy...
...rivalry with the Old Vic (later the National Theatre...
...and Roman Catholicism...
...AS MODERN SCIENCE continues to specialize and give us new knowledge about ourselves and the world in which we live, and as the technologies of transportation and communication make us more aware of the different viewpoints of people around the world, more and more persons will face the question of what it means to live religiously in a scientific-pluralistic age...
...Nasr's Knowledge and the Sacred (Crossroad, $19.50, 341 pp...
...It is easy to tell from the books which have spoken most deeply to me where my own mind is turning at the moment...
...As good and moving a novel as the year has seen...
...She is the author of two novels, House of Gold and, most recently, A Change of Scene (Norton...
...I should argue that no seminar or course on Rahner can responsibly neglect this major statement...
...In Out to Work (Oxford, $19.95, 400 pp...
...While thoroughly accepting the basic values of traditional monastic life, Pannikar perceives a similar commitment to these values in the lives of genuine seekers of the Absolute who cannot identify with the structures of the cloister...
...cleverly illustrated by the multiple gifted author...
...Specifically, it sketches the outlines of a world view to replace the Cartesian-Newtonian model which no longer works...
...That the RSC has lasted this long is an achievement...
...the contradictions and rewards of the life she has left, as well as the situation she has come to, are unfolded with a clarity and complexity that were as satisfying to this reader as a 500-page novel...
...Thomas Groome's Christian Religious Education: Sharing Our Story and Vision (Harper & Row, $12.95,296 pp...
...Rukeyser's style was open, experimental, and fluid: she used rhymed, metered, and free forms, internal and dramatic monologues, informed her work with her knowledge of history and of science...
...David Tracy's The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (Crossroad, $24.50, 467 pp...
...In the last days of the earth's turning, it must be that we'll be listening to some voice telling us the best of Isaac Bashevis Singer's magical stories...
...to study them is to change them...
...is notable for the clarity, depth, and practicality of its handling of the psychiatric dimensions of spiritual direction...
...The comparison of the language of some of the quantum physicists and that of the medieval mystics is fascinating...
...Still Gardner told Mickelsson's story with such bravery- humor like his is the highest form of courage-and with such compassion-it was his own story, clearly-that the reading of it, and this is the wonder of good writing, is pure pleasure, a joy...
...has written one of the most important books of the decade...
...Eugene Atget's landscape whose barns and houses, haystacks and fishing boats, rutted roads and pollarded trees bear mute witness to human presence...
...In a farce about suicide, one must be more wry than sardonic, more profound than grave...
...Both were works of non-fiction...
...Robert N. Bellah ROBERT N. BELLAH, Ford Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies and chairman of the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley,is currently collaborating on a research project on American mores, the results of which will appear in a book entitled Habits of the Heart...
...Alasdair Maclntyre in After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, $15.95, 252 pp...
...This time out McHale moved from the wildly extravagant to the dangerously extreme, and it cost him...
...Our hope for these writers at Christmas lies in the belief that the Saving Word is spoken to them too, whether, through the clamor of their unhappiness, they heard it or not...
...Black, lesbian, mother, cancer survivor, urban woman...
...Most of the stories in Liars in Love (Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, $14,95, 272 pp...
...there must be quanta...
...This book seizes our attention like a good mystery: crammed with interesting characters, of a piece, hard to put down...
...brings together the poet's selections from earlier volumes: Coal, First Cities, Cables to Rage, From a Land Where Other People Live, and New York Head Shop and Museum, together with a group of new poems...
...which recreates pioneer life in South Africa in the 1820s...
...During a Saturday in March, she and Andrew meet with business associates of his, attend a party, call on her aged parents, and visit the prison where her son from a previous marriage is confined on charges of drug smuggling...
...This spring, in the midst of the idiotic terror of the Falkland crisis, I was planting onion sets, and while I was getting my fingers deep into the rich earth, and smelling the pungent odors of the onion sets, the birds sang to me, a glorious song of affirmation...
...The book has much to say about the impasse that has been reached when modern philosophy, theology and ethics have sought to be "autonomous...
...Two books by Nobel Laureate Sir John C. Eccles explore the human brain-mind in the context of the evolution of the universe...
...Here, in cadences echoing the blues, the author animates a chorus of men and women around the legendary Bessie to give a rounded and reverberating oratorio...
...The latter springs from the cultural conditioning of Cartesian philosophy and Newtonian physics and is a distortion of the Gospel...
...has recently appeared in paperback...
...Sally Beauman's account of the first one hundred years of the Royal Shakespeare Company (The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History Of Ten Decades, Oxford University Press, $21, 388 pp...
...Nor fashions of sensibility: Singer is not interested in tiny tremors...
...Anglicanism and anthropology are the disciplines that Miss Pym's people struggle with" as the writer, reveling in details of English character and custom, bares the state of perpetually conflicting emotions out of which we all speak and even act...
...Ponsot's craft, in crowns of sonnets, sestinas, sustained sequences is stunning: she is particularly master of the sustained long poem generated by meditation and speculation...
...the protagonist, James Sutherland, is a failed suicide who is haunted by a prankster who stages false suicides...
...How can people so gifted for the truthful and beautiful use of language live such sad, unbeautiful lives...
...The primacy tuff music continues as a theme, along with' the complexity of relationships between black women and men...
...big and drab and unwelcoming.'' But the late Stevie Smith, a Londoner, wrote, "In this northern suburb where I have lived all my life, the colours are exquisite...
...The action of the novel takes place on Christmas when Sutherland's own child is born...
...I also love the fact that there cannot be a quantum...
...Moving to religious pluralism, Catherine L. Albanese has written a very useful work on America: Religions and Religion (Wadsworth, $13.95, 389 pp...
...These are books I've returned to myself...
...Fancy that...
...The study sheds as much light on central American values as on the exotic groups themselves...
...American distributor: Zygon Editorial Office, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida, $18.45) is a series of essays that not only synthesizes evolutionary theory and theology but offers a scientific hypothesis concerning the role of religion in human evolution...
...Four approaches to the sacred center, the Tree of Life that Annie Dil-lard always brings to view...
...but their voices are heard among them, as the psalmist knew all those years ago...
...She is editor of the feminist literary magazine, 13th Moon, and teaches at Columbia University...
...One point for advocates of Reaganomics to ponder: traditional values and practices have always been at war with progressive land use and, especially, with "the free market...
...A historian of religion, Albanese discusses both the plurality and unity of religion in America in terms of basic beliefs, rituals, ethical codes, and institutional organization...
...In order of chronology, the most significant new works are: Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (University of North Carolina Press, $29.50,451 pp...
...Uniting the approach of the cultural anthropologist and the social historian, Isaac paints a compelling portrait of the social order constructed by Virginia's gentry and of the dual revolution the Great Awakening and the struggle for independence that transformed the world they had made...
...KNOWING HISTORY, it's said, can keep us from making the same mistakes twice...
...is the poet's first published book, besides translations, in twenty-five years, yet hers is one of our mature, major, and prolific poetic voices...
...subtitled "Spirituality and Transformation," should be of interest to anyone concerned with the things of the spirit, as should my son-in-law's, the Reverend Alan Jones's book, Exploring Spiritual Direction, subtitled "An Essay on Christaian Friendship," published this past spring by Seabury Press ($12.95, 135 pp...
...Harry J. Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict (Louisiana State University Press, $32.50, 354 pp...
...112 pp...
...expedition that includes Ianthe Broome whose attachment to John Challow is unsuitable because he's several years younger than she...
...by Jeffrey Stout, a young scholar much influenced by Maclntyre...
...The second is William M. Sullivan's Reconstructing Public, Philosophy (University of California Press, $19.95, 238 pp...
...According to this Templeton prizewinner, the diversity of religious beliefs and practices share a common functional feature...
...In a cumulative and uncomforted elegy to a friend dead at fifty, Ponsot challenges that silence, imposed from within and without, on women of her generation...
...Of the books that entered my orbit this year, four bounced back stronger signals than the rest...
...What Judith Thurman's fine biography (Isak Dinesen: The Life Of A Storyteller, St...
...contains the lifetime's poetic work of one of this country's major writers...
...His new book, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, has just been published by Crossroad...
...Many of the earlier volumes were small press publications, now hard to find...
...Many crucial points regarding monastic renewal are faced head-on in this book, which make it essential reading both for monastics and those interested in the vast ramifications of the monastic lifestyle as a model for the formation of Christian community and as a teacher of contemplative prayer, reverence for work, respect for the earth, Use of leisure, concern for world problems, and social action...
...The book's "Impediment" is, in the end, to the acceptance of circumscribed lives...
...Another volume edited by an articulate scholar, Jerome Blum, concentrates on rural life, where dreams of a golden age tend to cluster...
...In this she might be a super heroine, Barbara Pym-style, except for her refusal to be distracted...
...And, on the same subject, basically, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, by Gary Zukav (Bantam, $3.95, 331 pp...
...In this context, S.H...
...Karl E. Peters KARL E. PETERS is associate professor of philosophy and religion at Rollins College in Florida, and editor of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science...
...Religious anti-modernism gets the most space and consists largely of those attracted to Anglo-Catholicism and Japanese Buddhism...
...will not disappoint those who have come to expect excellent work from him...
...The interviews are themselves often eloquent and Tipton's analysis incisive...
...and A Far Off Place (Harcourt, Brace, $3.95, 311 pp...
...Then he learns that the newborn child is the prankster's, not his...
...Like spirituality, .religious education has sometimes suffered from superficialities and how-to-ism...
...I think Isak Dinesen would have grasped the essential heroism at the root of the RSC's growth into greatness: her own story of endurance was intimate, personal, inner...
...Elizabeth Cullinan ELIZABETH CULLINAN's short stories have appeared in The New Yorker...
...The English novelist and critic David Lodge populates this steadily interesting, often amusing and sometimes touching, finely formed and adroitly written novel (Souls and Bodies, Morrow, $12.50,244 pp...
...Tania," Karen Blixen (her married name), "Mrs...
...The book by a' scientist was David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge & Kegan Paul, $8.95, 218 pp...
...Trevor Nunn's accession to the RSC directorship "looking like every Vietnamese waiter in the world...
...he cares more about interior cyclones and invisible forces...
...Chosen Poems Old And New, by Audre Lorde, (Norton $5.95 paper, 115 pp...
...He thinks that he is rescued at last...
...His two chapters on the magisterium are particularly forthright and historically illuminating...
...none of Lorde's selves has ever silenced the others...
...The importance of the history of thought to our current problems of thinking is beautifully illustrated...
...Using the insights of modern science, Ralph Wendell Burhoe's Toward a Scientific Theology (Christian Journals, L9.5O, 240 pp...
...it critiques the prevailing approach and points a new direction...
...To be more than wheel-spinning, moral theory must be about virtues that are genuinely esteemed, and only virtues that prove themselves in practices that are embedded in still-vital traditions are wholeheartedly esteemed...
...an astonishing series of glimpses into Japanese life and culture, and A Barthes Reader (Hill & Wang, $20, 495 pp...
...Regards at Home" gives us Bill Grove, who lives unfashionably with his mother, till he marries arid moves to Greenwich village where...
...In the former, the Spirit initiates all good desires and we respond...
...Admit, Impediment, by Marie Ponsot (Knopf, $5.95 paper, 123 pp...
...represents her telling of a soberer story...
...Lears admirably combines cultural and psychological analysis and is particularly interesting when he finds the roots of our current therapeutic culture in this period...
...His posthumous Empire of Signs (Hill & Wang, $12.95, 110 pp...
...Lears is interested in the many forms the revolt against modern industrial society took among a variety of Eastern intellectuals around the turn of the century...
...Yates's beautifully compact sentences make the bleakest scenes vivid, the sorriest truths bracing...
...THE GREAT POWER of the Christmas narrative-how the earthly life of this person began-depends on our knowledge of' the Paschal narrative-how his life ended...
...When Tom McHale killed himself last spring one sensed that the desperation he so vividly rendered here got the better of him...
...with a group of Catholic women and men and takes them, stage by stage, from their university days in the fifties through Vatican II and aggiornamento and the volcanic revolutionary changes in Catholic life and consciousness of the sixties and seventies...
...Finally, let me mention The Flight from Authority (University of Notre Dame Press, $26.50,307 pp...
...She learns-as much as she teaches...
...Maclntrye is provocative in importantly disturbing ways...
...Previously uncollected writings of hers have been edited by Jack Barbera and William McBrien and published under the breezy title, Me Again (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15.95, 360 pp...
...She died in Denmark in 1962...
...the counterpoint among them is often the material of her strongest poems, the contemporary classic "Black-studies," (1973) is a meditation in despair and hope, a mediation between the single threatened woman and the poet become almost-acknowledged legislator of her needing, angry people...
...Even if the setting was nominally the Mexican hinterland or some imagined African bush, one felt the presence and pressures of the great American city...
...is anything but an academic study (in the invidious sense-is there another sense...
...Martin's Press, $19.95, 495 pp...
...By broad strokes and in fine detail Bucharest is evoked as a contamination, a pestilence, the essence of an oppressive society governed by a threat always imminent and lurking and appearing more as a total petty inscrutable bureaucracy of unlimited and unquestionable power than as legions in jackboots or an omnipresent secret police...
...In a field where so much bad thinking and writing has passed for authentic Christian spirituality, this one sets a refreshingly high standard...
...Books which have influenced me deeply in the past year include two by Laurens Van der Post, A Story Like the Wind (Harcourt, Brace, $3.95, 370 pp...
...Unmarried women in Colonial America "often faced starvation unless the town would support them...
...Disjointedness is the word that comes to mind to describe the lives of the great writers remembered in Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir by Eileen Simpson (Random House, $15.50, 256 pp...
...I doubt this optimistic rule always works, but solid data from the past can certainly confute myth and assuage anxiety...
...Avery Dulles is always clear, always balanced', always systematic, and always constructive...
...For those who have been led to believe that Rahner's theology is always safely abstract, speculative, academic, and obscure, this book is absolutely required reading...
...She replies, "That's a quotation:" Laura writes entertaining novels about middle-class English life, and Walking Naked (St...
...Blessed Simplicity, by Raimundo Pan-nikar (Seabury, $17.95, 202 pp...
...The basic reasons for the different views of God lie more with the diversity of human culture than with the nature of God itself...
...Homage must be paid to Farrar, Straus & Giroux and its "division" Hill and Wang as a publishing enterprise- one of the very few houses in the country, and perhaps the exemplary instance among them, to remain in this age of conglomerate hustle and the iron rule of the lipreading accountant consistently faithful to the nobel ideal of publishing books as if only quality mattered...
...Marilyn Hacker MARILYN HACKER's most recent collection of poetry is Taking Notice (Knopf...
...This book, already widely reviewed, needs little further comment from me, except to say that the negative reviews, which have not been few, suggest the extent to which Maclntyre is really opposing "the self-image of the age...
...Thus, it serves to deepen and enlarge the scriptural model of the self so well identified and clarified by Richard Hauser...
...Tipton, a master of the tape-recorded interview, talked to members of three exotic groups-a Zen Buddhist meditation center, a millennial Christian sect and est-in order to see why ordinary middle-class young people whose lives were disrupted by the cultural confusions of the sixties were attracted to them and how they changed as a result...
...providing useful contributions from Karl Rahner, Avery Dulles, Yves Congar, Raymond Brown, and the editors themselves...
...As the title indicates, Chaisson suggests we are still at the beginning of the universe...
...His grounding in metaphysics gives his analysis a substance I seldom encounter...
...what few parties we went to were most often composed of other young office workers as square as ourselves...
...His books include What Do We Really Believe...
...Benedict's Monastery in Colorado...
...One gets strained, feels guilty, sad and bad...
...There might be mote enterprise in it...
...Groome's is the first real attempt to develop a coherent statement on the meaning and task of religious education in light of some of the most important theological, biblical, philosophical, and social scientific findings of the last several decades...
...it comes of his own seif-destructiveness...
...Herself the embodiment of "civilization" and, at the same time, in her turbans and hunter's garb, something wild, untamed, half-barbaric-Isak Dinesen lasted through many incarnations...
...Sullivan, a social philosopher with an excellent grasp of social science, reviews some of the ablest current writing on social policy and on the philosophical and ethical basis of social policy, discerning therein the liberal individualism that is such an important strand of our culture...
...First, Fernand Braudel's The Structure of Everyday Life, first volume in a series on Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century (Harper & Row, $28.85,623 pp...
...As in her "Appendix of Predecessors," her work is an ongoing dialogue with the past and with the future...
...Blum and the other authoritative contributors ignore neither the feasts nor the famines, the peasants' labor nor the nobles' elegant indulgence, neither the support a dose community offers nor its constricting peer pressure...
...makes apparent is Dinesen's multifaceted personality, the hall of mirrors she could call into play...
...Wholeness isn't just an aspiration...
...and we, who are children of the universe, have a significant role to play in its future evolution on our planet...
...Harper & Row, $11.95, 164 pp...
...Some have found fault with one aspect or another of this massive effort, ox may even have been suspicious of the whole project...
...The first is Steven M. Tip-ton's Getting Saved from the Sixties (University of California Press, $19,95, 364 pp...
...the magna mater who nourishes and endures is found within...
...Inescapably, her Kenyan period was the chronological and more significantly the spiritual center of her long life, and in a very moving way her later years "back home" in Europe have the flavor of an extended elegy to a sharper, stronger, more challenging past...
...They cannot fall to fashion because they never heeded fashion: they unfold themselves as stories did in the old days, in the ancient manner...
...The book's last section, in contemporary voices, often "has for landscape the poet's native "Southern California...
...Panniker challenges cloistered monks and nuns of.our time to evaluate their place in the contemporary church not in view of radically changing it, but of making the essence of monastic tradition more available to the .present and arising generation...
...The volume contains some of Rahner's most pointed theological essays on current pastoral problems: faith, magisterium, women in the church, individual freedom, the abiding importance of Vatican II, ecclesiastical structures, and spirituality...
...I think others will do the same: The Collected Poems Of Muriel Rukeyser (McGraw Hill, $17.95, hardcover, $9.95 paper, 588 pp...
...All these concerns were reflected in her work, from the book-length serial poem written in her twenties, in the voices of men and women workers in a West Virginia mining town, imprisoned by starvation wages and doomed by silicosis, to "The Gates," title poem of her last book, telling of the vigil of a writer in her sixties outside the prison where a Korean poet is incarcerated by his government for political dissidence...
...and in the great distance, powerfully recalled, Chicago throbs with energy, violence, corruption-no city upon a hill or light unto the nations, God knows, but of an immense roiling democratic vitality...
...which shows no Signs of diminished imaginative vigor or post-Nobel blues, the cities are two-his and the Dean's Chicago and Bucharest, the Dean's wife's native city...
...Finally, special mention should also be made of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, Series II: The Black Military Experience, edited by Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy and Leslie S. Rowland (Cambridge University Press, $37.50, 896 pp...
...brings "the world we have lost" down almost to the present day: witness the grinning Swedish peasant beaming slyly out of the early twentieth century...
...Miss Beauman may have an advantage on other journalists here-her husband is longtime RSC actor Alan Howard, currently starring in "Good" on Broadway-but the results are first-rate...
...but it is for his unworldly side that I read every book he writes...
...It is far from that...
...John Keats, a Dominican curandera, the philosopher Susanne K. Langer, and the story-teller Perreault are merely some of Ponsot's subjects...
...celebrities such as Olivier, Leigh, Gielgud, and Richardson testing the Stratford waters...
...For two hundred years authors have been filling libraries with books on Asia as seen by the West...
...There are superb anecdotes: London critics attack the very idea of a major theater in Stratford-on-Avon ("110 miles from London . . . verges on the ridiculous...
...Steven Lawson STEVEN LAWSON adapted The Elephant Man for television and is currently working on his first full-length play NEAR the end of Chekhov's The Sea Gull, the heroine Nina scarred by personal anguish, yet still intent on a theatrical career-asserts that life "isn't about the fame, or the glory-it's how to endure...
...Elizabeth Janeway ELIZABETH JANEWAY's books include Man's World, Woman's Place, Between Myth and Morning, Powers of the Weak, and, most recently, Cross Sections (Morrow) a collection of reviews, essays, and speeches from the past decade...
...It is a major work...
...Many of them marry illustrations to exceptional texts so that each illuminates the other...
...Eric Foner ERIC FONER is professor of history at Columbia University...
...Good writers quicken our senses, preparing us to hear the glad tidings, even if they fail to do as much for themselves...
...unremitting financial crises...
...arrives, just in time to take its place at the square's center...
...A wise old woman judges the years and events that a brilliant young woman lived through before they were history...
...Donald Nicholl's Holiness (The Sea-bury Press, $7.95,158 pp...
...Whether this is a subtle commentary on the pallid state of fiction these days, I don't know: suffice it to say that the power of these two real-life narratives far outstripped any "imaginative" efforts of the past year...
...What we have here is pure Rahner, drawing out the practical conclusions of his fundamental theological method and vi-sion...
...It not only sheds new light on the intellectual roots of modern feminism, but advances an irrefutable indictment of an academic world that systematically excluded talented women from teaching posts while allowing their male mentors to lay claim to their pioneering scholarship...
...A series of outstanding works combining graceful style, careful research, and provocative conclusions exemplified the new concerns (such as, the historical experience of blacks, women, and labor) and new methods that transformed the study of history during the past decade...
...All accomplished in the face of critical jeering, public bafflement, and always-money problems...
...No one knows whether such sharing will strengthen or impoverish the tradition...
...speaks in tongues z and sings in many voices...
...Thomas Keating THOMAS KEATING, Abbot of St...
...And: "In the middle of every morning I leave the kitchen and have a glass of sherry with Aunt...
...His A Church to Believe in: Discipleship and the Dynamics of Freedom (Crossroad, $14.95, 200 pp...
...Given the hunger for wholeness in us all, the striking feature of this book is the extent to which a ranking physicist sees his field as validating that impulse...
...His place won't be adequately taken by anyone...
...This is sociology combined with ethics and history and it is, as Daniel Bell says, "a lovely book...
...It's excitement, though, that's the real reward for reading history, a sense of past life that enlarges the present...
...As our traditions have been eroded by the bureaucracy Weber so well described, virtues have lost their former centrality hence the book's somber title...
...that it's arguably the best theater troupe in the world is extraordinary, and a process Beauman recounts affectionately and with vigor...
...Forcefully argued and gracefully written, this work explores the achievements of the first generation of women social scientists, who challenged inherited ideas about innate sexual differences and identities around the turn of the century...
...It is the first study successfully to relate Jacksonian politics to the expansion of commercial capitalism and its disruptive impact on traditional values, thus providing the basis for a long-awaited reinterpretation of the Age of Jackson...
...For the layman half of it is unreadable physics, but the other half throws bridges to life as we directly experience it...
...Not only does this biography replace Ray Ginger's earlier study as the standard life of Debs, but, drawing upon the most recent work in labor and social history it demonstrates how Debs's socialism rested on ideals of independent manhood and republicanism that late nineteenth-century corporate capitalism was fatally undermining...
...It is a rare talent that he commands here...
...can also be concise and, blessedly, witty...
...With a different perspective, the poet re-examines family, history, and the interstices between...
...How does one make theological sense of the plurality of cultural traditions and how can one theologically use the insights of modern science...
...And I was given courage...
...He can be uproariously funny not much of that in The Dean's December (Harper & Row, $13.95, 312 pp...
...I do not think morality requires the rational justification Maclntyre is looking for, but his deeper point, that morality is grounded in sociology, is importantly right...
...The two best books I read in 1982 focus, admittedly in very different ways, on endurance: its span, its many insidious forms, its ultimate exhaustions and glories...
...The book is largely a stunning critique of current moral philosophy and moral practice...
...The body of the book deals with these essential values or dispositions...
...Saul Bellow is at once the most worldly and unworldly writer in America...
...Nasr being the first oriental to have been invited to deliver those lectures...
Vol. 109 • December 1982 • No. 21
