To Be a Revolutionary
Appleyard, J.A.
close modified the realism considerably. In Life Before Man (1980), Atwood experimented even more: the novel has three narrators, one a man, and begins with a suicide, moving the focus...
...It is a',jo~"ney in roughly three stages, The first deals with young Jim Carney's sense of identity and religious vocation...
...The Bible's good news about liberation needs the Marxist-Leninist analysis of social reality to make it efficacious...
...Previous management experience, good business sense required...
...Carney's step-by-step account of how his understanding of the campesinos's situation changed will help readers picture some of the realities behind the headlines and rhetoric of current discussion about Central America...
...The Handmaid's Tale is a nightmarish exclusion of its possibility...
...Ranly says it is, then there is a primary necessity for oneness in the...
...it has to become real in the structures of society, too, and he will not be satisfied with anything less than the whole thing, realized here and now, in Honduras...
...r~l~ .~ <, , ,, ~ ,~ ,~ ~,~;,~', ~ ;. ,:~, , , ~ ,, ,~ , ,, ~ ,,,~,, ',~ ,.,,~,,:~ ~, ,, ,~,, ~ ~.~ ,r ,_ ,~ ~,~ ~ Reqt;irements for the Air lorce ~),lcsl...
...Sacred Scripture 19th Annual Institute on Sacred Scripture August 3-8, 1986...
...Faculty: Donald Senior, Carolyn Osiek, Roland Murphy, Bruce Metzger, Reginald Fuller, Joseph Cunneen...
...Carney is not an eloquent writer, but he tells his story with some detachment and in enough detail so that readers can judge for themselves how far they would follow him through the stages of his "metamorphosis" as a revolutionary...
...The commitment of the writer is a challenge, but the debate will go on...
...A Marxist revolution is a very plausible response to this kind of theology...
...Yet the book is an immensely detailed and even documented account of his life, and especially of the twenty-plus years he worked in Central America...
...His family could obtain no satisfactory account of his imprisonment or death...
...Carolyn Osiek, RSCJ...
...Henceforth, his work goes along two paths: developing small "basic Christian communities," with lay leaders, in the rural villages...
...The choices are not victimization or villainy, Atwood suggests...
...Steven Davies, Ph.D...
...This immense journey TO BE A REVOLUTIONAIY Padre J. Guad~upe Carney Harper & Row, 473 pp...
...Carroll Stuhlmueller, CP...
...Appleyard T , HIS IS a remarkable book, not least because of the circumstances in which it came into existence...
...Even the successful cooperatives end up being coopted by the capitalist system: the campesinos are content to work their own small plots of land, and nothing happens to change the larger unjust structures of ownership and production which control their lives...
...Carney, an American priest and for most of his life a Jesuit, tells us that he wrote it by candlelight, during bouts of insomnia and vigils of prayer, in a shack outside a remote Nicaraguan village where he spent the last two years of his life as a political exile from his beloved Honduras...
...He is by now a controversial figure in the eyes of church and government...
...But I remember reading the line and being stunned by its aptness...
...Hewsletter Computer Newsletter for Ministry...
...wrestled with the basic question of how a Christian lives in this world: what kind of reality ought "the kingdom of God" to have...
...To the Editors: I was moved by the profound insight of Fr...
...For brochure contact Sr...
...The voice that tells this story is passionate, uncompromising, full of love and anger, the voice of a man struggling to be faithful while incapable of being satisfied by anything less than commitments which are total...
...I Even the idea of the book is itself a paradox...
...From now on Carney begins to distinguish the truly "liberating" faith communities from those which focus only on the religious experience of their members and therefore in a political sense "alienate" them from full human experience...
...Louis slums than in his philosophical studies), but with no real political understanding of the institutional structures he was reacting against...
...Our Responsibility Workshop: June 22-27, 1986...
...Delineating that wisdom has been Atwood's life work...
...If the real need is a reconciling presence, and if this is the right role for the church as Fr...
...person of Christ, the kind of union with him and with each other-that comes through prayer and sacrament...
...In his sleepless hours of prayer he REVIEWERS NELL GIFFORD-MARTIN studies art history at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Graduate School...
...Ability to create hospitable environment a must...
...Manager Wanted Manager for non-for-profit, Catholic Worker-inspired bookshop...
...Ninth Annual Workshop for those working in programs for the aging in religious communities...
...Restless because there is no injustice to fight, he asks his Jesuit superiors for permission to return to Honduras with a guerrilla band...
...Augustine...
...201 W. Laflin Waukesha, Wl 53186...
...Write: Sister Miriam Ward...
...Carney's answer is that it cannot be realized only in the hearts of men and women...
...An international communion of prayer, work and study dedicated to the organic union in diversity of the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches...
...J.A...
...Three years of high-school teaching as a scholastic in Belize confirmed his love for the poor and his desire to work in Central America, but even after he arrived in ..5,1~?:~ . . . . . . . . . . am Ilmm U l l d ~ U...
...Benedict T. Viviano, OP...
...In Life Before Man (1980), Atwood experimented even more: the novel has three narrators, one a man, and begins with a suicide, moving the focus away from realistic character study to more explosive action...
...This difficult, controversial, frustrating work goes on for years...
...MICHAEL R. BECKER Classified Aging Religious...
...APPLEYARD, S.J, teaches literature at Boston College...
...12208...
...bookbusiness strongly preferred...
...It is one work, not two, as Carney gradually comes to see...
...In the farming towns of the fertile Sula valley, he asks...
...For brochure contact: Thomas O'Neill, Institute of Gerontology, College Misericordia, Dallas, PA 18612...
...TOM O'BRIEN is Commonweai's film critic...
...himself why the campesinos are so poor (they don't own the land they farm), who owns the land (a few Honduran families, multinational corporations), who profits from their work (mainly U.S...
...Unique chance to use your organizational gifts in ministry of evangelization -- inviting people ~ to deeper discipleship through personal wholeness, justice, peace...
...it matches one apocalyptic vision with another...
...investors), and how peasants can be organized...
...Resumds to Simple Gifts, Inc., 813 Madison Ave., Albany, N.Y...
...But she is also concerned about self-victimization, about the denial of self that she feels makes good people easy prey for bad...
...Yet at what he correctly guesses will probably be the end of his life, before he crosses back into Honduras as a guerrilla, he engages in the most self-conscious of twentieth-century expressive forms, autobiography, and produces not simply a memoir to be xeroxed and passed around among family members and friends, but a full-scal~ book, an apologia, a message to North Americans whose culture he says he hates, about how bourgeois Christianity has failed and why only the overthrow, violent if necessary, of their capitalist system will make possible the true kingdom Christ preached...
...Ranly's assessment of the real need in the Peruvian situation ["Under the Peruvian Volcano," February 14] for the church to be a reconciling presence, a process that begins in Christ: "In other words, the first need is not military nor social nor political: it is mystical...
...Louis University just as World War lI began, served in the Army in Europe, went back to school after his discharge, and entered the long years of traditional Jesuit training in 1948, Looking back, he finds himself somewhat of a rebel even then (refusing officers' training, befriending German war prisoners against orders, getting into trouble with religious superiors because he was more interested in the juvenile courts and the St...
...Correspondence (Continued from page 226) forget to spell out is the mode of that transformation...
...In Bodily Harm (1983), Atwood went further, positioning her heroine, a journalist on vacation, in the middle of a Caribbean coup d'6tat...
...Within two months he appears to have been captured or killed in fighting by U.S.-assisted Honduran troops (his chalice and other possessions were recovered...
...Write Fr...
...Most Christians down through history have tried to realize the kingdom of God in less radical ways...
...His family tells us in an epilogue that in July 1983 he crossed into Honduras with a small group of guerrillas...
...It demeans a part of God's creation that we must respect -- if not, how can we honestly respect anything else...
...Free sample...
...The turning point to the third stage comes when Carney realizes that reform is an illusory ideal, and that nothing less than revolution will do...
...Or perhaps Atwood has not yet found the way to apply such wisdom beyond interpersonal relations and on the broader stage of politics...
...FATHER J.A...
...less than 42 years I of age at the time of appointment...
...Robert, Incamation Priory, 2210 Cedar St., Berkeley, CA 94709...
...goodness and strength might be near allies...
...this is what Ranly is beginning to do for us...
...He grew up in various midwestern cities as the family moved, started St...
...9 Call Father Eugene Gasparowc e co!!ect at 202-767-1485...
...This above all," she resolves about her future life, "to refuse to be a victim...
...Pelagianism is not dead...
...Atwood is above all a moralist, albeit of a novel kind...
...Such wisdom is difficult to put into practice...
...Gregory and St...
...It doesn't," for example, neatly square with a tone in traditional moral teaching, particularly Christian...
...But selfdepreciating, or self-destructive niceness is immoral...
...The following year he returns, to a small village in Nicaragua, where the Sandinista revolution has brought about much of what Carney had dreamed of for Honduras...
...Reconciliation in Peru Philadelphia, Pa...
...But it is a version of the Exercises we might not all recognize, where the call of Christ becomes an appeal to transform an unjust capitalist society into his kingdom by means of a liberating revolution...
...By a sad process of psychological elision we often equate, or are encouraged to equate, goodness and niceness...
...But, more importantly, like any good story of a life, his book demands that we think about our own lives: this was his journey, what does it say about mine...
...Receive ecclesiastical permission of Bishop/Religious Superior...
...A cdizer: ,.)l .. the United States of America...
...The Handmaid's Tale fulfills this pattern of development and feeds on Atwood's strong political interests...
...n e e n Air Force Chaplaincy Exciting Fulfilling Relevant ! Necessary ii @, } Global Ministry ., 9' Parlsh Orle...
...This book is testimony about a life lived out of the conviction that most Christians are wrong...
...Church Bytes, Inc...
...The second stage of the journey is the years of the "metamorphosis" of his political consciousness...
...Or call (717) 675-3862...
...he says that perhaps the thing he did best was give the Spiritual Exercises to the campesino leaders...
...though he has become a Honduran citizen, in 1979 he is arrested and put on a Commonweal: 254plane to Miami, permanently exiled...
...we are always trying to achieve salvation, our own or someone else's, on our own...
...DAVID BURRELL, C.S.C...
...and working with ANACH, one of the national agrarianreform movements, to establish cooperatives among the campesinos...
...Perhaps that is what most makes me uncomfortable...
...It is certainly the work of a man who did not know fatigue: he wrote it in four versions, one for campesinos, another for more literate readers, and both in English and in Spanish...
...REV...
...No intellectual or writer, a Jesuit who disliked and even resented his studies, a pragmatic organizer of banana-workers' cooperatives, Carney wanted nothing more than to live the life of the poorest Honduran peasant out of love for Christ...
...Toward the end of Surfacing, her heroine realizes that she has too long accepted bullying from others, most often in the subtle form of inculcations to humility and passivity...
...This is where the book ends, with the words: "To be a Christian is to be a revolutionary...
...When he is refused, he formally leaves the Society "for a time...
...But for me, The Handmaid's Tale just doesn't match Atwood's ambition...
...So I now see why I am never disappointed in what he writes...
...For further information and an application form, please write: The American College Theological Institute Naamsestraat 100 3000 Leuven, BELGIUM 25 April 1986:253The theme is~*the transformation of a middle-class Americad boy into a revolutionary...
...ous about deepening their understanding of theology, who are concerned about the direction of the Me of faith in the Church and who wish to renew themselves for the Important ministries they fuIffil...
...Distinguished Faculty...
...The American College Sabbatical Program can provide a unique experience of theological renewal, enhanced by the prayerful atmosphere of the College and the cultural setting of Europe...
...What a provocative image for contemporary Americans to come to terms with...
...Jesus himself once said that this kind of demonic possession which nowadays seems to afflict so much of our world can be overcome only by prayer...
...o~ ~.~" ' ..~ ~ ~ ' ~ ~.~.2~.~.,..~ a'- K . - - 7 . . _ _ -- i b . i ~ r ~ . i . ~ iBm,film am ~ - Honduras as a priest in 1962 (renamed "Guadalupe" as a symbol of his commitment) he still considered himself very much a conventional, middle-class, anti-Communist "gringo...
...The idea of writing a political novel and fusing rich character presentation and real action is compelling -- almost a Promethean defiance of conventional vapid definitions of high art...
...Or call (717) 675-3862...
...Global V,s, n...
...In the end what the reader will remember may not be the final version of Carney's political and theological message so much as the example of his life...
...Fellowship Fellowship of St...
...Atwood hates villainy, to be sure, and vividly protests it...
...Biblical Institute 21 st Biblical Institute, Trinity College, Burlington, VT 05401, June 15-20, 1986...
...Noel Keller, RSM, Institute on Sacred Scripture, College Misericordia, Dallas, PA 18612...
...25 April 1986:255...
...The American College CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF LOUVAIN THE SABBATICAL PROGRAM The Sabbatical Program is designed for priests who are seri...
Vol. 113 • April 1986 • No. 8
