Living with apocalypse:
Toolan, David
with four U.S. administrations, and has seen vacillations in waiver in our opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship, that we U.S. policy. Lest he or his backers assume they are merely ...
...I thought that would make a big difference...
...Even MOTTABAI: Well, they know...
...was why people take Pantex so casually...
...the ends of the earth and welcoming as neighbors all the But I don't think fundamentalist readers fail to recognize inhabitants of the earth...
...When the book comes out, I thought, that will be the end...
...My worldly possesfamiliar with what's being taught at Second Baptist...
...It's very sharp for you - and ominous...
...and stockpiling of nuclear bombs to consider Who are these townspeople...
...In fact, they would say they haven't abandoned the cape from political responsibility or abandoning the earth to world...
...But for various reasons, partly because there are the stereotypical New Yorker going down t re ?xhiitking...
...for people in Amarillo to see themselves, and to listen to themselves...
...history and earthly history, is it not...
...I've had some very nice letters, but that one the Amarillo business people with their bland assurance of touched me most...
...I've allowed people to speak for themselves wher- ready written [in the Book of Revelation...
...People TOOLAN: You make some hard judgments in the book...
...As you say, it's close to Jesus as your personal savior, and then you're freed...
...I really did acfrom First Baptist...
...sharp in these churches...
...Of course, what works as a play doesn't always Certain matters could only be clarified by being there...
...There was no other way I could have been Partly this results from changes made in Mark Medoff's convinced...
...One of my responses was, who wants anything to do with this place...
...I had no hearsay report for which no one will take responsibility - but notion of why, but filed it away...
...In fact, one of the original editorial comments from my publisher was, TOOLAN: For one thing, you've moved to Amarillo...
...She said she read the book at one sitting...
...They interested...
...avoid stealing any of her thunder...
...Mojtabai found, is "an ever-deepening despair of Stopping Place, and Autumn - she was just starting to write a human possibilities...
...And the fact that there was a bishops' pastoral letter on the I was very upset about it, and tried to get an Op-Ed in the subject [ The Challenge of Peace] showed that he was not New York Times...
...they're involved in all sorts Sunday school teacher at First Baptist picked up the book and apparently read it...
...I can't document this - it's a inviting workers to resign from the Pantex plant...
...Hispanic and Pantex is a good employer...
...And on second sight...
...Often, these days," writes Ms...
...Amazingly, a Yes, they are socially concerned...
...Transparent, not hidden...
...But Haines minute I moved to Amarillo and became a home-renter - not a makes their love stand too much alone, leaving a thin feel...
...lowest-common-denominator plot, reduced list of characters, and pro forma happy end...
...memorized from-the 1960s...
...The bishop has been heard...
...But the other part of Rev...
...But I lead a much more distraction-free life there...
...tivities, and to seek employment in peaceful pursuits...
...United Pentecostal Church and its local pastor, Reverend Royce Elms...
...It's also Moral Amarillo, Texas, addressed that exhortation to workers at the Majority, Bible-belt territory, where "God Said It, Jesus Did Pantex nuclear assembly plant outside Amarillo...
...What MOJTABAI: Yes, that was part of the point...
...I won't say a conversion...
...I didn't have to make up projects for play require a strong, rich story, and it is unfortunate that myself...
...interesting precision...
...I thought it was an extremely vicious person has resigned from the plant...
...It was, after all, the Then I had to go back to Harvard to fulfill a prior teaching first affirmative action employer there...
...I don't harp on the dangers have singles ministers, prison ministers, and there is an active but I do come in, do speak of them...
...That's what's different...
...Mojtabai's book is concerned to cross a holocaust consuming millions of human beings can never be Commonweal: 494 an abstraction to a Jew," I take it that this is one of the keys to imagined...
...No, his response was extremely thoughtful...
...contribute to the United Negro College Fund...
...Because here you have all those teacher (William Hurt) determined to get her to speak...
...Have you had any reaction from him or his TOOLAN: But you also imply that the company may have had congregation to your book...
...screenwriter...
...The the caller said, there's a new book about Amarillo - and way I am placed makes it look to me as if their cross is finally the salesperson said that's not about Amarillo, that's one-sidedly vertical, or at least with a very short horizontal about Pantex...
...ever "entertained" very much, but at least I had the furniture that allowed me to...
...Pantex...
...Eventually it led to the But the reader, who does not live in Amarillo, is not left off making of a remarkable book, Blessed Assurance: At Home the hook...
...with deaf students, when he tries to coax them from negativism Not the same kind of friends I used to have in New York or via an idealism that Hurt, both by age and look, seems to have Cambridge - occupationally alike or like-minded...
...With my pots and pans I look pews...
...In any event, my selection and orchestration is editorial commentary...
...It's econom- sity of Tulsa, 368 miles away, which was as close as I could ically sound, cushioned...
...Amarillo...
...And yes, I TOOLAN: You mention that people in Amarillo claim not to went down there as the provincial eastern-urban int6lttictual...
...And I said, "Well, no...
...move...
...She also uses her thick black boots for punctuation and mean here I could theoretically, but I don't...
...For our part - and from their viewpoint sions you've drawn...
...That despair is anesthetized by two fifth...
...I went back for his liefs are very different from mine...
...means business, that we will not now is resolve and convincing action...
...former self and my friends and associates to take this seriously and give it weight...
...I Directed by Randa Haines, whose television experience went all over Amarillo asking people, "Why do you have such includes Hill Street Blues and the film about incest, fences...
...sationalist" vision of history - a tale of repeated human failure to pass God's tests...
...But would only talk when questioned by reporters, not amongst your own position is not in the foreground...
...People in the book rescued from the coming holocaust...
...I wanted rawness, and hard-earned optimism not just of its source, but to be there when the book came out, and not run away...
...As with his on...
...we build them so that we don't have to use them, and so politics...
...And that there's nothing much you can do about churches...
...This year Doctor Winfred Moore [of First 26 September 1986: 499 Baptist in Amarillo] challenged the right-wing candidate for York - strangely enough, I mingle and make friends with the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention...
...call his "final solution," was really almost Gnostic...
...I don't story, they said...
...The fact that I've written the book the - we're distracting ourselves from essential business and way I have makes it possible for her to read it...
...This earthly history she senses something, conclusions that are possibly not com- doesn't count...
...perhaps, disproportionate weight was that it came to me- with such a revelation that this was vitally important...
...more seriously than I did...
...That's the TOOLAN: What I wondered, though, was whether, say for the hope if not the expressed intention...
...y n xn I 26 September 1986: 497 the insiders of this doctrine, recognize themselves in your which is all that matters...
...On the other hand, there say how...
...preachers Charles Jones and Royce Elms...
...It play - changes which he presumably approved as cowas that simple...
...They car pool, donate The unblessed assurance blood, have that wonderful Christmas card fund where the TOOLAN: In reading your book, I was fascinated with the First money people would spend on cards is given to the needy...
...Is it the constant theme of the preaching...
...Of course I had an article and more...
...I don't know that that's typical, but it's an arm directed almost exclusively to the proselytizing mission...
...MOJTABAI: Well, they're not dropping out of salvation history, Commonweal: 498 of charitable work...
...strategy as you sought to understand how Amarilloans could live so peacefully next to the country's sole final assembly TOOLAN: What was your background...
...funds...
...I do care about the community...
...juxtaposition of earthiness and other-worldliness was very striking...
...There was a sudden silence in the room...
...Are the Catholics there talking about it...
...Still puzzled, I came back to New York...
...So it seems to me that this allows questions to come out of the reader's own reflection...
...TOOLAN: It would take only a slight shift and Rev...
...He's much more astute - at least I find him so - than MOJTABAI: Yes...
...I thought there was something deeper at work here, and story about an angry young deaf woman (Marlee Martin) and a devious, even demonic...
...Somehow that friction and homecoming when he lost...
...And I don't want to rest...
...I have never seen an instance in which a powerful corporation in a town was able to exercise MOITABAI: I started going out after Catholics, but I haven't such influence...
...They follow one another...
...But that's all right - if they are thinking about it...
...chinks between the slats...
...Well, that's new...
...He also has a hard task to master: since Marlee Martin won't speak, he has to interpret her rapid TooLAN: So concretely, it's more ecumenical or pluralistic for (often tempestuous) sign language in a deadpan fashion to you than New York or Cambridge...
...I haven't gone after commitment...
...Someone called perhaps giving the Gospel flesh that way - or just living the and asked the bookstore, have you got that book about Gospel that way...
...varieties of American exceptionalism, one the pseudoShe kept going back to it, increasingly curious to discover how religious faith in steady technological progress, the other "the the bishop's summons was being heard - or "how people of conviction of blessed assurance, the promise, for true believconscience, loving parents, thoughtful neighbors, and devoted ers, of exemption and safety from the suffering that might churchgoers lived calmly with the prospect of nuclear destruc- befall others...
...For instance, for a long time it was MINOR MIRACLE WORKER a puzzle to me that the houses were built close together...
...portrait...
...Not that I locally that you have seen...
...Elms's parishioners, apocalypticism actually entails es- them...
...On the one hand they are the largest single Christian...
...And this from the man who led me to the book on the fundamentalist doctrine of biblical inerrancy...
...Then the Times decided to give it a news fellow citizens...
...These are not credal faiths, A MOTHER RESULT of the move is that I take religion much so there's a certain freedom within limits...
...The reaction was typical...
...I have a lot of friends there...
...It was a necessary move - simply been adapted, not into a film, but into television film, with a from the standpoint of the book I wanted to write...
...They would give me answers and I wouldn't believe Something About Amelia, Children provides a bare-bones them...
...TOOLAN: But will the fundamentalist parishioner assent to the logic you see in his extreme end-time thinking: that it means it's futile to do anything to prevent nuclear war, that we'd best drop out of politics altogether...
...I take it you've lived in plant for nuclear weapons...
...I never have denied Pantex, but I have become fundamentalism in Amarillo seriously was that, once I heard habituated to its presence and even the strangeness of it...
...I love the Oscar-winning role in Kiss of the Spider Woman, Hurt took a landscape...
...I've heard more anti-Catholic diatribes point it became very clear that Pantex was behind the cut-off in there than anti-Jewish diatribes...
...the City University of New York...
...I live in one small room, to the readers of your book...
...part of the scene there, habituated to the plant myself, the analogy doesn't really work...
...To make it possible effect has writing this book had on you...
...The cows were this resurgence...
...something at a party...
...I Way funding...
...Has there been any sequel to their initial lack of Anyway, United Way's suspension of funding really galresponse to Bishop Matthiesen's opposition to the plant's vanized me...
...The woman said no...
...But it because I wanted to give it weight, maybe disproportionate by the tenth or fifteenth or fiftieth time something does hap- weight...
...I like it...
...Or has it ally with Amarillo, calling United Way, calling Family Servsimply dropped off the face of the map...
...And that was a real turning point for me...
...And there is this complete social life...
...Amarillo is both host and hostage to Pantex...
...But the intent I find narrow...
...But somehow I felt it was absolutely necessary for my pen...
...pay more attention than I did - in my own fashion...
...For the young and the elderly it's wonderful...
...magically removed from the holocaust...
...So, within their worldview, they're Christian" who writes me says, "I don't know what conclu- doing all that matters...
...I want to reach the people in the where I now teach half the year...
...is camps in Europe and the presence of the final assembly plant the doctrine of "the Rapture," whereby true believers will be for nuclear weapons outside Amarillo...
...sounded at times very much like Father Daniel Berrigan's...
...to keep the wind out...
...I bones...
...It was strange at first sight...
...So it's of town...
...themselves in my account, or miss my point...
...came from a secular society and stepped off into something very unfamiliar...
...Mojtabai, "I find with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas (Houghton Mifflin, $16.95, myself staring at the United States through Amarillo, indeed, 255 pp...
...Then he became 'a cultural ogy, their religious background, that counted more than you attache and we moved to Pakistan...
...They couldn't just live among the Moslems, Amarillo, and the salesperson said "what book...
...they were harvesting wheat right up to the bunkers - happening here...
...But I'm not sure that at First Baptist they are cumulate books...
...assumption is that we are powerless to build ajustandpeaceful I haven't played it up...
...The something about my intellectual baggage, or what I came with...
...I understand only one ice, calling the diocese...
...Amarillo's story is parable...
...But it's likely that people would MoJTABAI: Yes...
...I think one of the reasons- I took separate...
...It may be that she's moving from recognition to recognition as if saying to herself, yes, I know that person, I TOOLAN: The neuralgic point is the juncture between salvation recognize that teaching...
...I mean I felt that I should say have failed to escape disaster, and so it will always be...
...Elms's message, what you stopping them from going off...
...year, but particularly on August 6 and during Lent, however, the city is invaded by anti-nuclear activists who climb over T OOLAN: When you say early on in the introduction to Pantex's barbed wire and netted steel fences to protest, pray, Blessed Assurance, "I am a Jew," and "the prospect of a and get arrested...
...and more In EVERY Six months for $9 for new subscribers issue of COMMONWEAL 15 Dutch St., New York, N.Y...
...It's built into some fundamen- world converged on Amarillo...
...So I went back and spent the rest of the year to provoke, not to become too visible...
...A play has to be opened up...
...Yes, that was very all that propelled me to make that move, to decide to go and deliberately done...
...I thought to myself, I'll go to Amarillo and write an article about it to get it out of my system...
...He said we all have to read this book and think about it...
...It was the Univermean in some sense it is a good corporate citizen...
...In across as too pure a hero...
...On This is high prairie, windy, big sky country, virtually off the August 23, 1982, Bishop Leroy Theodore Matthiesen of U.S...
...MOJTABAI: Well, first of all I felt I couldn't . understand Amarillo unless I were there on a day-to-day basis and satu- ADAPTATION LOSS rated, steeped in daily life...
...Even though credal conformity isn't expected...
...facing another passing storm of criticism, it must be made The time for flexibility has passed...
...He was very well received by his that mingling are very important to me...
...Since that time, only one person, Elroy synagogue...
...Second Baptist was formed as a mission church the essential furniture...
...I continue The book was a chance to bring them into a very large living going to Masses even though I don't have to...
...Between her and Hurt some real heat happen...
...Mostly they know...
...down there questioning them...
...It's slow and progressively MOJTABAI: Our earthly history is doomed...
...TOOLAN: You mean that the true believers are all going to be MOJTABAI: Yes, that's it...
...So they do have a sense MOYFABAI: It's possible they won't...
...dialogue simplified, Living there, I knew what required deep probing and what was scenes added, etc...
...The bare essentials...
...A necessary move TooLAN: You spoke before of your "former self...
...The university fourteen miles away was actively not industries fail...
...That they wouldn't see the political implications, out with his harangue about our living "deliciously" in a for instance, of "the Rapture" - that, as you understand it, it world of want, and our never having experienced the devasta- means doing nothing to stop the nuclear arms race...
...Baptist did not entail this narrow focus on saving one's own soul...
...Now I have a folding bridge table, a bridge MOJTABAI: I hope that there will be, if not some discussion, at chair, and a lamp, which I fold up and take with me to Tulsa, least some soul searching...
...As a result, it lacks the ambition, BUT THEN, why stay there after the book is written...
...What is most needed clear this time the U.S...
...Incidentally, I think that, quietly, numbers of followed through systematically...
...views - regarded in Amarillo as "sinful" - used religious assumptions to support so many of their other views...
...Without some smart aleck from the east coming in MOJTABAI: It's completely changed my life...
...They prefer But I have lived in Iran, and I look at Israel and 'I have not to dwell on it...
...They're also a minority and it's painfully story...
...the core of the international order which will help bring the I finally decided I had to go back to Amarillo...
...The home-owner - I realized that those fences are necessary just movie never delivers what it promises...
...plimentary...
...But it was MOJTABAI: Well, politics and economics undeniably figure in...
...And then there are those fences, very tight...
...Tulsa has worked out well...
...I even continue to go O NE OF THE reactions that I have already heard about was back to some of the Protestant churches...
...The result, which Back in Cambridge, Massachusetts that August, however, fleshes out the pervasive influence of fundamentalist Grace Mojtabai clipped and filed a newspaper report of the apocalypticism, is both disturbing and illuminating...
...You know, without proselytizing, as certain Catholic missionaries do...
...Even though certainly part of made in this country...
...And also because I miss keeping up with- what read the book and not be willing to say anything about it - in people are thinking...
...They are privacy fences, I thought...
...and overvoicing everything - summarizing it all...
...people canceled their contributions to United Way as a result...
...ent...
...Elms and it port workers who wanted to leave Pantex...
...A Southern Baptist MOJTABAI: Well, doesn't it go back to Elms's indictment of feels very little is asked of you: just to be born again, to confess contemporary American society...
...Say it in your own words...
...too much religion" and, well, "summarize it...
...I'm moving towards a certain realiza- TOOLAN: But one of my fellow editors at Commonweal, who tion in the reader, a sense of unease - even though I let it grew up a Baptist, tells me that her experience of being a develop more slowly than it developed in myself...
...The MOJTABAI: Exactly...
...The case in point being the fundamentalist `dispenthe motive behind your book...
...Someone from the Dallas Morning News wanted to know TOOLAN: What would you like to see happen to Amarilloans, what difference it's made physically...
...surprised me...
...not a little to do with cutting off funding for Catholic Family Services when Bishop Matthiesen established a fund to sup- MOJTABAI: I got a reaction from a cousin of Rev...
...But she wants to continue the dialogue...
...Somehow the book disturbed her...
...certain assumptions - that if you understood the geography, the history, and the economics of the place, that would explain MOTTABAI: In the Sixties I lived in Iran and in Pakistan...
...So I gets generated, especially in one scene of angry lovemaking know people and they know me...
...upwards and onwards, of steady progress and beneficent She's not really sure how, but the book speaks to her in a technology...
...Is it equally much closer to the Catholic Worker...
...social dimension...
...They are not dangerously passive...
...amazed me...
...But when I don't want to be inward and feel I shouldn't be, I But they are limited by the thinness of the plot...
...When Rev...
...Amarillo has more than two final assembly plant of all nuclear weapons manufactured in hundred churches - 191 Protestant, 10 Catholic, 1 the United States...
...Catholics share many of the attitudes of their gave it a full page...
...From there I went to the is a strong possibility that the fact that the manager of Pantex, Radcliffe Institute for Independent Studies as a fellow, and Charles Poole, was on the board of United Way and demanded that led to a lectureship at Harvard...
...The bishop's statement just pledges made by Pantex workers to the United Way...
...my question concerned the response to Bishop Leroy Matth iesen - how do you hear him if you're an Amarilloan...
...Yet I've had to they all know what's going on in the churches on the other side decide that even books I collected were impediments...
...Eventually I-came -back: to this country and took up graduate philosophy at Columbia.' For FATHER DAVID TOOLAN, S.J.'s book on the consciousness movement, a time, I was teaching philosophy at Hunter College, and later, Facing West from California's Shores, will be published in the spring after going to library school, for six years I was' a librarian at by Crossroad...
...something that passed through my mind when I became in- But one of the reasons I focused on the religious°and gave' It terested in going there and seeing for myself...
...AMARILLO, WE LIKE WHO WE what they are doing, to resign from such ac- ARE," says the Chamber of Commerce sign at the city limit...
...I opened my door a crack and everything blew in...
...It was frightening...
...At times I get room - which I don't possess, you know - and to let them nothing out of it...
...the constant theme...
...Many of them are there...
...Elms's MOJTABAI: Yes, instantly...
...I felt that Amarillo was important to each TooLAN: I thought that one of the most interesting things about and every American - and the book tries to convey some of Blessed Assurance was the transition that occurred in your own that conviction...
...Yet even without the Liturgy of the Word, the symbolism of the Eucharist is very meaningful to me...
...It's his solutions that worry me...
...And the company does some good things...
...God, I thought, we could use some of that in Catholic bombs...
...bring it up - they don't want their city to be the Buchenwald When you first arrived in Texas, though, yow'seetned.to be of America...
...And the people in Amarillo who aren't in the pews...
...Not its sound often enough there, I was already tuned in, alert to long ago I was taking a reporter out to Pantex...
...What was that Screen about...
...Mojtabai lets these people speak, lets them Ramos, father of seven, has responded by resigning from the have faces beyond stereotypical ones - from corporate-raider company...
...I can be very inward there...
...bookstore, waiting for something else than my book - but they were talking about Pantex...
...Back in New York, I was on the phone continubusiness...
...into ideological conformity, make them like themselves...
...Martin can rely on no more than Amarillo - though you don't have the variety of attitudes, petulant perfectionism (or as she explains in sign language, "I ethnic groups, and religious groups you would have in New won't do anything I don't do well") to explain her refusal to Commonweal: 500...
...Or what has already happened and it's all working space - not entertaining space...
...Is that still true today...
...work as film...
...It was so earthy and they read the Book of Revelations - that it refers to nuclear physical...
...I its prototype, The Miracle Worker...
...I put don't know what's going on in the poorer churches on the other all the trappings of my trade aside...
...More, I'm sions are at a minimum...
...Commonweal: 496 ToOLAN: Isn't that gratifying...
...Time and time again in the past we MoTTABAI: Well, it's there...
...She's troubled...
...But this might also distract from the fact Hindu - the whole idea is to bring you into the club...
...Of course if I were a born-again Christian, I wouldn't see the Again, I heard recently that people were standing in line at a narrowness...
...ever possible...
...You came at the project with Cambridge (Massachusetts), and in New York...
...Just as suddenly, the whole country and parts of the Catholics and Protestants there...
...I focused on about it...
...Your descrip- TOOLAN: I take it you also find danger in the literalistic way tion of the church service was wonderful...
...not sure that the pastor of First Baptist knows what his 525 .Sunday school teachers are saying...
...Lest he or his backers assume they are merely stand, above all else, for democracy in Chile...
...GRACE MOJTABAI' ON BOMBS & BIBLES IN AMARILLO Living with apoca1ypse DAVID TOOLAN third fence, "the barrier of incomprehension which continues to separate the demonstrators from the people working inside low E URGE individuals involved in the production and from the townspeople of Amarillo...
...But it took me a long time to believe that it was grazing...
...There have been so many people with that, however, I discounted the religious dimension...
...You know, sometimes the homily is indifferlisten to one another...
...we're losing our place in salvation history...
...It's from someone searching, struggling...
...Hurt's can also be out in the world - with others and for them...
...I how close I could get and have an income...
...So like a peddler...
...Because it public...
...It's too early for necessary, but stood back wherever I could, so that it would be me to really assess or understand all that has happened or even possible for Amarilloans to read and listen...
...Bringing them in, saving Rev...
...we won't talk again...
...But at a certain point you married then and part of the time my husband was associated seem to have suddenly realized that it was the people's theol- with the University of Teheran...
...where she vehemently overwhelms him...
...Those in the pews of the richer churches, you see, been a stripping-down process...
...To some extent I follow Elms sympathetically - that I might disarm the reader because I want a certain NONETHELESS, if you're an outsider - a Moslem, Jew, or amount of disarming...
...But there, though it's a city, it's a small town...
...and kept picking it out of Poole also stated that there would be a cancellation of the my file system and looking at it...
...people can count on it when other come...
...And I did where I felt it was absolutely MOJTABAI: It's completely changed my life...
...When she describes all the social activities and works of TOOLAN: The question is the weight you give to the end-time mercy her church's youth ministry involved her in, it sounds thinking...
...recessed...
...I wouldn't say I am closer The people in my book live in the same town, close by each institutionally, that I am exactly more at home anywhere...
...Well, the pain of their "dialogue" through sign language...
...The two are everywhere in the world...
...I didn't play it up...
...She said it very much concerned her and that she was a "thoughtful MOITABAI: Yes...
...I went there and TOOLAN: Is Catholic Family Service still cut off from United stayed a couple of weeks...
...know what the local Pantex plant does...
...The title comes from an old Protestant hymn, "Bles- the longer I look at this city, as Flannery O'Connor liked to say sed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine...
...felt it was important to say, I'm here...
...But she couldn't put the bishop's call out of her mind...
...And of course some books...
...TOOLAN: Is there a possibility, though, that the people in those Baptist and Pentecostal churches would not recognize at all MOJTABAI: His diagnosis of some of our ills, I think, is so your emphasis on the "end time" - or the central significance sympathetic...
...ance...
...But another was, no, no, I have to go back to W RICH MEANS that Catholics are anxious not to offend, not see this through...
...He advocates abandoning earth, leaving it to its nuclear fate...
...10038 Please send the next 6 months of Commonweal to: commonweal Name Address City, State, Zip_ I 0 I prefer a full year's subscription at $28...
...Daniel Berrigan's...
...Some have asked whether there were future, powerless to avert the nuclear destruction to torn: associations for me between the presence of concentration What they rely on, then, what delivers them from-despair...
...Then I got a Guggenheim "quick action" on the Solidarity Peace Fund [for workers who - and at the start of that year off, in the summer, I picked up might heed Bishop Matthiesen's call for resignations] had a lot this newspaper article about Bishop Matthiesen of Amarillo to do with cutting off funds...
...They all sang "Sweet, Sweet Spirit...
...They do further the higher education of their employees...
...And I TOOLAN: The Reverend Elms's critique of American society find it very dangerous...
...Finally the Washington Post caught it and know that it has...
...Not in egoism is introduced, but never explored, so that he comes a little pocket as one often is in New York or Cambridge...
...there are no CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD both moves and disappoints...
...Throughout every with Grace Mojtabai in New York City...
...I must say that there is a process of relatives there...
...Will they, 40 ^ lr r ;P~, ('} C-' ISSUES, 4 J 1 1 ANSWERS...
...Nevertheless, both stage play and screensimply a fact of life...
...The that when I settle on Elms's solution, which I discuss at length way I am placed, this does not look to me like reaching out to and critically, the reader may miss how appalled I am by it...
...other ways of looking at the plant - it's for defensive pur- well, as we all know, religion doesn't have much tbdo with poses...
...It's not restful, but I congregation...
...It concerns her cousin [Rev...
...That they feign igno- You know, on-the-loose, at-large in America, and really puzrance that it's the final assembly plant for all nuclear weapons zled, really uncomprehending...
...But the fact is that their intentions are to bring people inevitable nuclear holocaust...
...message would be very political, full of hope for what we might do to dampen the arms race, for instance...
...As one ranking federal officer at Pantex put it, the Boone Pickens of Mesa Oil to Sunday school teachers and overall reaction to the bishop's letter has been " a great None...
...But it's the solution proposed that is devastatingly different...
...The Catholic Worker was talist "salvation history" that the Catholic church will form finally the only place that would take my editorial...
...He was the people whose occupations, religious beliefs, and political bemore moderate conservative candidate...
...isn't simply helping to help, or expressing neighborliness and Another reaction occurred at a bookstore...
...The author of four critically acclaimed What keeps Amarilloans impervious to the nuclear arms novels - Mundome, The 400 Eels of Sigmund Freud, A race, Ms...
...Or that people with very moderate religious and he said, "This is eerie...
...That's why I'm staying Hurt and Martin make the film worth seeing...
...I'm told one woman went up to another woman and asked, "Have you read Blessed Assur- TOOLAN: Perhaps because you want to hear better sermons...
...Suddenly it was not a local visible...
...Everyone was listening...
...26 September 1986: 495 Then I began writing novels...
...Elms says that our heads and our personal way...
...The script is alrevealing...
...Just a short A very large living room while ago there wasn't much talk of Pantex in town...
...Their close-knit houses - as if they wanted to be close to each other romance is compelling, especially because of the verve and - and yet they're divided sharply by those fences...
...MOJTABAI: Well, after reapplying in vain, finally Catholic Family Service decided to break with United Way and go it TOOLAN: I'm wondering about the Catholic community in alone...
...D.T...
...Pantex is the It, I Believe It, That Ends It...
...But while I was at Harvard I began taking out Catholics systematically, but I think many of them feel that maps and drawing circles around Amarillo, trying to figure out Pantex is a good corporate citizen for a variety of reasons...
...It just doesn't to embody frustration...
...hands have outgrown our hearts, I really agree with him...
...I am still wondering that maybe for one of these parishioners, the logic would not run that way at all...
...Her curiosity became insistent...
...A 1982 study of local attitudes toward the plant re- Two days before the centennial celebration of the Statue of vealed that " not one respondent pointed to a moral position as Lady Liberty last July, I conducted the following interview the cause for stress resulting from Pantex...
...Elms...
...For at that anti-Christ to power...
...TOOLAN: But what brought you to move there...
...All of it, however, is aimed at bringing people in...
...bishop's statement...
...They are working actively in their missionary activities to bring people into this life of salvation...
...It is...
...If I don't impose a quick ideological fix, still I have an agenda...
...I mean this "thoughtful of social responsibility...
...joined in this time, holding hands...
...I keep the essential books, side of town...
...When he starts you give it...
...Indeed it looks very different to me...
...MOJTABAI: It's eerie now, when I'm in New York thinking I don't say the religious factor is the only thing...
...tion that the nations of Europe have experienced, he is right on target...
...There's been a lot of bad blood in the past between story...
...about absolutely anything, `the more of the whole world I see First and foremost, Blessed Assurance addresses a severe in it.' " In some sense, "every American is host and hostage to communication problem...
...Moreover, wherever I was, I could start talking casu- Medoff succumbed to pressures to simplify his, which has ally and learn something...
...Yes, I TOOLAN: It had been eerie to you when you first went there...
...And I see the fundamentalist resurgence habituation to it - and a process of denial...
...map in the western Texas Panhandle...
...she can't quite corporate contributor to United Way...
...This is a local alone...
...But I other, but they haven't met, haven't spoken to one another...
...MoTTABAI: Okay, they are involved in certain charitable activities, always...
...He is at his best in classroom scenes certain way which is congenial...
...Or religion is a mere mask for other factors, Then you on - and partly because I don't want to demonize the people discovered religion was central - and your assumptions had in Amarillo, and don't want to denounce them because I am to be radically revised...
...The place has made it possible for me to live in a pay cut to make this film...
...to a great extent it's themselves...
...It seems silly to me now, but I spent more time on this "problem...
...Martin has remarkably severe black and white coloring, and taut, expressive cheekMoJrABAI: Yes, I cross boundaries more easily in Amarillo...
...live there...
...They MoTTABAI...
...had about two hundred pages of notes...
Vol. 113 • September 1986 • No. 16
