Religious booknotes
Toolan, David
D OMINIQUE LAPIERRE'S The City of Joy is probably the real "inside India" book of this festival-india ),ear. It places you down and out with the unimaginably poor in The City of Joy, by...
...Translated by Kathryn Spink...
...Ill I Ill II Commonweal: 88...
...hambala, $9.95, 214pp...
...Life at the Center, by Bernadette Roberts...
...I mean the business of obedience to God or serving the will of God...
...For every aspect of horror and brutality here, there is some equally stunning revelation of beauty...
...Pearce and Roberts are both talking about what classic ascetical tracts spoke of as the life of "transforming union...
...Roberts is a born writer, sharp, precise, often funny, and not a word wasted...
...Roberts broke through' to something very like the Buddhist "noEdith St#in: a Biography, by Waltraud Herbstrith...
...In more traditional language, but with the tang of first-hand experience standing behind it, this theme receives equally illuminating treatment from Bernadette Roberts in The Path to I Ill I I I No-Self: Life at the center...
...physics, and christology...
...This book is a sequel to The Experience of No-Self (also Shambala, $9.95), wherein she detailed going beyond the level of union Teresa, of Avila and John of the Cross held was the ultimate in this life...
...The second, part of the Twayne author series, John M. Dunaway's Simone Weil -- a fine unscrambling of that complex genius and her writings...
...Athos, Nantucket, Rockport, Mendocino, and reflections on creative mind and modern art...
...Translated by Bernard Bonowitz...
...Finally, biographies of two intellectual saints of our time...
...The journey continu9 The latest update, The Magical Child Matures, attempts to relate Pearce's understanding of his kundalini yoga training under the late Swami Muktananda to Piaget's theory of development, recent neurological theory such as Paul MacLean's triune brain, Rupert Sheldrake's biological "'morphogenetic fields," the new Magical Child MatRres, by Joseph Chilton P earce...
...The first Waltraud Herbstrith's account of the life of Edith Stein...
...Twayne, $18.93, 139 pp...
...Saybrook...
...The preeminent disci$imone Well, by John M. Dunaway...
...Pearce's last chapter explicates that habit of being, about which there is no end of misunderstanding or outright rejection...
...The trouble with those classical tracts is that they made most of us feel that we weren't called to such exalted.,stuff...
...pie of philosopher l~dmund Husserl, Stein entered the Discalced Carmelites only to be re'rested by the Nazis because of her Jewish background, and died at Auschwitz...
...Crossroad, $18.95, 18J pp...
...Rollo May's My Quest for Beauty consists of a series of reminiscences My Quest for Beauty, by Rollo May...
...Doubleday, $17.95, 464 pp...
...18.95, 2,13 pp...
...More important, she conveys what the thing feels like (though feeling has The Path to No-Seg...
...It is a very personal, charming book...
...I I self" -- and the christology that comes out of that is quite something...
...The reflections begin with May's first teaching post in Salonika, Greece, and move on to Mt...
...from life or therapeutic practice which elicit May's reflections on the healing function of beauty, and the central metaphor of artist, in every aspect of building meaning into life...
...We follow Hasari Pal and his family as they, like so many millions of peasants the world over, are dispossessed of ancestral land and forced to derelict life on a piece of city street...
...Calcutta -- behind the traffic jams and starvation diets of teeming millions, beneath the rhetoric of despair or hope...
...IReligious booknotes East & West: beautz, joy, gentus David Toolan Mircea Eiiade's best criticism, essays on art, and comments on his own work as novelist and poet...
...Roberts vigorously disputes this, lets you see that it's (almost) easy, that it comes natural to the Christian life...
...Much here for theologians to grapple with...
...The current book, however, traces the stages of union presuppoged by the condition which goes beyond union...
...The predatory hierarchies, the literal blood-sucking of so much of this great Indian city's life shows up in detail -- and yet, at the very worst, it is a story, of compelling grace and continuing miracle...
...Ill I little to do with it...
...new worlds (Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg, The Magical Child) provide a remarkable testimony to the convergence of Eastern and Western spirituality in our time...
...Harper & Row, $15.95, 127 PP...
...The narrative of Joseph Chilton Pearce's spirited breakthroughs into $ymboiiJm, ~e SmcrM, & the Arts, by Mircea Eliade...
...While on the subject of beauty, we have Diane Apostolos-Cappadona to thank for gathering together some DAV[I') I(X)LAN is an assistant editor of Commonweal...
...The story is riveting...
...Thus we get fascinating essays on ritual masks, Indian art, Marc Chagall, Brancusi, and Eugene Ionesco...
...We also follow Father Stephen Kovalski as he discovers what life in Anand Nagar is like...
...Dutton, $16.95,236pp...
...For such people, movement to a slum like Anand Nagar ("city of joy") would be a step up...
...It places you down and out with the unimaginably poor in The City of Joy, by Dominique Lapierre...
Vol. 113 • February 1986 • No. 3
