The Call to Conversion
Cassidy, Richard J.
work, has been thus far living by nonfiction; she may be a novelist-to-be. I do not know. But anyone who has written a, novel will not entirely laugh off some aspects of Gardner's description...
...However, biblical material which provided a foundation for the earlier analysis is sometimes repeated in the later chapters...
...Leading pro-life speakers were denied permission to appear on TV -- American pro-lifers thus silenced included Dr...
...The medium speed is the tone of the uppercrust snob, a preppy dismissiveness...
...Thomas's novel The White Hotel, it is discomforting to realize that even when one (here and there) agrees with him, his prose remains insufferable, and so too the attitudes that infest it...
...The anti-amendment faction, which included practically all of the news and information media, fought an all-out battle in which no holds were barred...
...I fear his book will have the same, effect on the literary celebrated he takes potshots at as did mad Hinckley's attack on Reagan -- it will bring them only sympathy...
...But anyone who has written a, novel will not entirely laugh off some aspects of Gardner's description -- even if it is ridiculous as instruction...
...and one may even think Griffin right, but for the wrong reasons, about D.M...
...I enjoy Davids attacking Goliaths...
...Nancy Jo Mann, and Congressmen Henry Hyde and Chris Smith...
...There most of the straight advice is doled out: "Neatness counts," and so forth...
...A seasoned author, therefore, will look in vain for some irony through the book, especially in the second half, which is, in many ways, embarrassing...
...If it happens to be a person of startling output, his name is prefaced with the most everyday of his accomplishments: "a fifty-year-old professor of creative writing named John Barth...
...The hugely successful should be made to endure a few knocks on their well padded reputations...
...In a chapter on cultural seduction, he inveighs against the pattern he describes as "evangelical nationalism...
...And so Mr...
...The radio network was not much less restrictive than the TV network and was equally pro-abortion, perhaps even more SO...
...Griffin's raspberries, but if Mr...
...The seven chapters effectively delineate seven important dimensions of conversion...
...And on and on...
...one asks, when Gardner does a shilrs soft shoe for Bread Loaf-like writers conferences, complete with an adman's puffery: intense "love affairs" shaking the bushes...
...Griffin is not the sort of charismatic fellow you'd pick to head your crusade, despite his rhetorical similarity to Rev...
...RICHARD J. CASSIDY Correspondence (Continued from page 2) "Justice in Irish Society" did not elicit such passionate controversy...
...Wallis does an excellent job of describing the challenges that the arms race and the surrounding arms culture pose for Christian faith...
...Letters of not more than 250 or 300 words naturally have a better chance of being published...
...But Gardner's pages on how-to-get-published can be had from anyone...
...DESMOND O'GRADY is an Australian journalist who has lived and worked in Rome for many years...
...He encourages culturebound Christians of all denominations to recognize the betrayal that political and economic conformity ultimately involves...
...The media gurus assured the public that the 1861 law already prohibited abortion and the courts could be trusted to uphold the law...
...MARTIN RAFFERTY, C.M Irish bamboozlement Quebec, Canada To the Editobs: In his article "A Pyrrhic Victory" [Oct...
...FATHER RICHARD J, CASSIDY directs the Ofrice of Justice and Peace in the Detroit Archdiocese...
...giggled David Ansen of Newsweek," "sighed young David," "sobbed Mr...
...His writing has, like a cheap appliance, three settings, low, medium, and high...
...Raymond Carver's memoir, of Gardner as professor and Carver as student, which serves as a foreword to the book, is more to the point of how to become a novelist...
...Barbara Willkie, Mrs...
...covering people "walking out of church" in protest against unpalatable pulpit invective, he is a trifle naive to construe this as a "new" phenomenon: it has a long history in Ireland...
...Griffin has actually read Irving's book he must know that violence overwhelms the sex in it -- as is the usual case these days...
...You do not want to learn how to get rich from someone who is poor...
...13 January 1984:25 and pornography...
...What Gardner would need to reveal to explain his own success -- well deserved though it was -- is how to be at the right place at the right moment, and in front of the right person, which, of course, is impossible to learn...
...Everyone he quotes either "giggles," or "sighs," or "sobs...
...what he desires is a return to gentility, to the world before 1917 (his date), to a world whose hypocritical but dignified surface is restored...
...WILLIAM O'ROURKE, author of The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, teaches ar the University of Notre Dame...
...Jerry Falwell...
...What fills out the bulk of Panic Among the Philistines is what Mr...
...If the referendum was "a last final salute to traditional Catholicism" then it is a Catholicism of " l i b e r a l " imaginings irredeemably tied to a nineteenth century model...
...everyone who is not a household word is introduced by a demeaning label: "someone named Earl Ubell...
...That brings us to his third and last voice, the high, the hortatory: "In practical terms, it is the battle between those who would use the tools of civilization -- education and knowledge and liberty and peace -- to savage those v a l u e s . . . It is the everlasting battle in which there are no truces, the battle between the smile and the leer, between innocence and sophistication, beauty and lust, truth and cynicism, love REVIEWERS JOHN SPRAGENS, JR., is a journalist on the staff of the Indochina Project of the Center for International Policy in Washington...
...A little sex, a lot of violence...
...Kirby's amazement at disCommonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...
...But, alas, he has set back the whole noble cause of the kamikaze attack...
...10016 [] One year, $24 [] Two years, $43 [] 1 l-issue trial, $9 Sanle Address City, State Zip 1/13/84 Jim Wallis and the Sojourners Community have been involved in probing the implications of Christian conversion for the last fifteen years and they are well qualified to address the various aspects of this subject...
...Bernard Nathanson, Mrs...
...I don't think the author most spat upon in his long diatribe would disagree with that notion entirely...
...Again, even with a sympathetic ear for so,~,: ~ of his complaints, one still must say that Mr...
...In brief THE CALL TO CONVERSION by Jim Wallis, Harper & Row, $9.95 190 pp...
...7] Peadar Kirby treats you and your readers to a pretty fair sample of the kind of journalistic shell game used by the anti-abortion amendment campaign writers to confuse and hoodwink the Irish electorate in the recent constitutional amendment campaign...
...REV...
...Griffin...
...One aspect of Gardner's book, that needs noting: it is a success story...
...In the present context of increasing Christian peace witness and a flowering of grass roots Christian communities, The Call to Conversion is a sensitive and helpful book...
...His reports on Vietnam have appeared in the Boston Globe, the St...
...it's the same advice someone who has never been published but who has tried will give you...
...Indeed, he barely stops short of calling out for lynch-mob justice against the lewd scribblers he sees hogging the arena of popular culture...
...The disinformation campaign was at first directed toward trying to convince the public that an amendment was not necessary, or at least not necessary now...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Christian Science Monitor...
...Griffin's wielding his chain saw on the grotesquely overpraised...
...They have learned that authentic conversion "has everything to do with community" and Wallis's book presents many valuable insights about the economic and political consequence of a Christian commitment to live in community...
...One minor weakness of the book is its slightly repetitive character...
...The chapter on Christian witness against the nuclear arms race is perhaps the finest in the book...
...Throughout the book, Wallis intersperses descriptions of his own efforts to follow his evangelical heritage into the communitarian and social dimensions of conversion...
...Griffin seems woefully ig[norant of recent literary history...
...The kindest and most sympathetic reading of Griffin's Panic Among the Philistines (his first book) will turn up at least one point: there were more good books written in the last twenty-five centuries than in the last twenty-five years...
...He writes with passion and conviction of the need for the Christian churches to see the Bomb as a countersign to the Cross and to resist all of the Bomb's many manifestations...
...But, on most other things, people will disagree...
...Griffin calls, typically capitalized, The Important Subject: sex, and its depiction in various forms in print...
...I looked forward to reading this material...
...He does not seem to have grasped that the literature of earlier centuries appears purer than ours because time has already blown the chaff from the wheat (and along with it, alas, some of the best wheat...
...Griffin is not overly distressed about violence...
...That the technique was successful up to a point is evident from the fact that even such a clear-thinking person as Malcolm Muggeridge was bamboozled -- together with one-third of my compatriots...
...Griffin's arguments bring to mind the picture of the backwoods judge who views all the pornographic films three times before issuing an injunction against them...
...John Irving and his Garp come in for a lot of Mr...
...Lord knows there is a lot wrong with the literary community these days, but Mr...
...Griffin has the sort of style That Gives One A Headache (to adopt his manner of enlivening every third sentence with the stuttering capital...
...Though one may tolerate Jerzy Kosinsky's getting kicked around yet again, this time for his pornography collection...
...But when I hear it complained that sex and violence have increased in our visible culture, I wonder why it is not more generally observed that violence has carded the day...
...to subscribe to COMMONWEAL simply complete this coupon or send a facsimile to COMMONWEAL 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...The reasons for this would make an interesting subject to pursue, hut Mr...
...Where is his tongue in cheek...
...Low is a sort of antifan magazine diction: no one "said" anything...
...But, even after dwelling too long on the material that disgusts him, what he cries out for is not its banishment, but that an offender like Christopher Isherwood be "reprimanded" for "reminiscing in public about the dear dead days when he used to cavort with German p r o s t i t u t e s . . . " It's the in public that really seems to bother Mr...
...Griffin stands like a small boy in a duststorm, not knowing why his eyes smart, but standing there stubbornly, rubbing them all the same...
...He does think his side, the "intellectually militant people," have been winning the battle...
...Who has a heart so kind that he wouldn't enjoy Mr...
...They did not mention that the Commonweal: 26...
...Griffin has a good deal of scorn for professors -- he only uses the label as an insult -- but his book would have had some mischievous value for future literary historians if it had been outfitted with some scholarly apparatus, citation of sources, and an index...
...As to Mr...
...Sex exercises him mightily...
...Ansen" -- and that's just one paragraph...
...In some ways I am rather glad that we as a people can engage in passionate controversy on serious matters and still contain our passion within the constraints of the democratic process...
Vol. 111 • January 1984 • No. 1
