Critics' choices for Christmas:
Cook, John W. & Cahill, Susan & Smith, Karen Sue & Steinfels, Peter & Wimsatt, Margaret & Schroth, Raymond A. & Elshtain, Jean Bethke & Neuhaus, Richard John & Sleeper, Jim
BOOKS Critics' choices lor Christinas lean Bethke Elshtain JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN is the Centennial Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. Her most recent book is Women and War...
...Remember that many Nazis read the right books and the Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor would have had high SATs...
...as a hedge against moral responsibility and discipline...
...received more attention...
...The treatments of Augustine's understanding of the "reflexive self and of Romanticism's kinship with current nihilisms are not to be missed...
...While Camille studies images and anti-images of the Gothic era, his thesis extends to observations of the Renaissance, Reformation, and "postModernity...
...both translated by Paul Wilson...
...is the next best thing...
...is idolatry...
...Nonetheless, it is beautiful thinking about beauty, inviting contemplation as much as cogitation...
...the last, "Murmur," is elegant-and sad...
...The radiant sanity and vision of the Catholic church's authentic tradition suffuse the second volume of Peacemaking: Day by Day (Pax Christi, $5,149 pp...
...does indeed carry the sense of time, long times, deteriorating...
...Eliot and Yeats...
...His reports for the Spectator in England and the New York Review of Books have been essential reading, and lose none of their power in the two collections, The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (Random House, $19.95,335 pp...
...Gracefully written, this is a splendid read that brings one, after almost six-hundred pages, to the edge of the inescapable question of God...
...For readers hungry for theologia, this is the real stuff, thinking with God about God...
...Congress, a body far more adept at speaking the language of "interest" and "power" than of "living in truth...
...His books are gems, minus all dross, without a trace of bathos...
...This book should be the last, unless some astonishing new cache turns up...
...It is a pleasure to find so sensitive a critic with no Catherian axe to grind...
...See, however, Robert P. Imbelli's review in Commonweal, November 3,1989-The Editors.] Charles Taylor of McGill provides what I believe to be one of the most seminal works in moral philosophy to appear in years...
...Tibet's Dalai Lama seems competent in both, though happier in the second...
...He tracked Yetis, skeptical yet half-believing...
...Havel managed to turn his letters into a philosophical treatise...
...if you get bogged down midway by the syndrome information, jump toward the end, reading especially the final chapter, Adam's story...
...See Naples and Die," describing the breakup of a marriage: Marriages come to grief in many ways./Our own was, I suppose, a common one, /Without dramatics, a slow stiffening...
...It lacks the scope and setting that some biographies provide...
...also introduced and edited by Father Ker...
...Finally, although it is unquestionably trying to be married to someone madly in love with Vaclav Havel, I must include in this list the Czech prisoner-playwright-president's Letters to Olga (Henry Holt Owl paperback, $16.95, 397 pp...
...In 1932, caught unwittingly in some internal Jesuit politics in China, he was yanked home...
...His classroom anecdotes reveal his wit and common sense: all moves with the appropriate rhythm- hard and driving at times, especially at the end of the chapter, "The Gospel of Unfairness," which concerns a class of "losers"-remedial English-producing the school newspaper, with excellence and by deadline...
...travel books" is to trivialize or, alternatively, to lift that genre to poignant new heights...
...Margaret Wimsatt MARGARET WIMSATT, a frequent reviewer for Commonweal, teaches at Yale University and the University of New Mexico...
...is lively reading, tinged with a kind of righteous indignation...
...wouldn't be noteworthy had it come from yet another back bencher on the left...
...His moral fervor animates a compelling point of view...
...which every priest, religious and seminarian should read as an insightful history of Western spirituality...
...Marquez does not simply create another epic of an anti-hero...
...It is important less as a vindication of the authors than as a public record of dealings within a religious community and with the Vatican...
...And only at their extreme peril can black leaders (and followers) cry "Racism...
...Great Plains emerges out of a quintessentially American phenomenon-hit the open road and keep driving until you see the mountains, or reach the ocean, or decide, somehow, to settle-that defies the standard terms of such narratives by offering us history as the present past...
...Hall & Co., $8.95,412 pp...
...He is the liberator who, following his political crucifixion, descends into hell, not to redeem or free it and be resurrected to glory, but to face oblivion...
...denying he's a conservative...
...Ian Ker 's biography-John Henry Newman (Oxford, $24.95, 784 pp...
...Quite the contrary...
...is a memoir conducted through a clandestine interrogation of Havel by a Czech journalist-in-exile in West Germany...
...We speak with the maudlin fraternity of drunks about how much we "care about kids...
...But as a reporter on religion I kept thinking how much easier my job would be if everyone read this book...
...Idolatry is once again a vital theoretical issue in today's Western culture supersaturated with representations," Camille writes...
...David Rice's Shattered Vows: Priests Who Leave (William Morrow, $18.95, 288 pp...
...He begins by discussing idols of the pagans, the Saracens, and the Jews, before moving on to the church and medieval culture...
...Richard John Neuhaus RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS is editor-in-chief of First Things, a monthly journal of religion and public life...
...This examination of art and idolatry in Europe has interesting parallels with Marquez's fallen idol and Gaylin's false idols...
...From the sublime to the ridiculous: Why Catholics Can't Sing by Thomas Day (Crossroad, $19.95, 183 pp...
...on the invincible secularity of Michael Dukakis and his handlers ("God was not in their computer...
...My novel needs a moral center, an old fighter whose bruises have given him authority...
...she is the sympathetic chronicler...
...Jackpot...
...We are still engaged in the "beautiful but terrible tyranny" of the never-ending juxtaposition of faith and image making...
...He loves literature as much as he does teaching and he's good, you can tell, at both...
...Genesis establishes for Gaylin the norm of what it means to be human, while Pinocchio suggests how it is that one becomes human...
...The priests at my St...
...W. Norton, $19.95, 308 pp...
...Would that my book-or my life-could achieve as much as his...
...Creator as contender-in the ring duking it out with C. P. Snow, Mary McCarthy, and David Lodge...
...It was not always so, as he magnificently demonstrates by drawing on his luxuriant acquaintance with patristic and medieval thought...
...For this reader, the story of the struggle is the most engrossing part of the book...
...The combination of tenacity and defeat is unrelieved, and age and suffering are seen as the measure of life...
...For those of us who felt like Cassandras of economic doom during the Reagan years, Phillips, an advisor to former president Nixon, has gathered overwhelming data to plot the growing gap between rich and poor...
...written under the stringent conditions imposed on Havel as a political prisoner in Husak's Czechoslovakia, is a striking example of the mind of the disciplined ethicist, a dissident who has accepted his fate as a sober (but never serf-important) responsibility...
...Those familiar with Greeley's central theme of God as lover of humanity will find Neusner's way of explaining a text, such as the near sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, and his way of looking at biblical figures refreshingly different from the Catholic view...
...Finally, two powerful works by one of the most intriguing public figures of our time, Czechoslovakia's playwright-president, Vaclav Havel...
...Real Presences by George Steiner (Chicago, $19.95, 236 pp...
...She is particularly strong on the dark novels: A Lost Lady, The Professor's House, and My Mortal Enemy, but the whole book is intelligent and careful...
...The book is packed with historical accounts, including the aftereffects of the Civil War, the laying of the railroads, the growth of Wall Street, World War I, the League of Nations, and the world on the brink of World War II...
...To see what I "had to beat...
...Perhaps if he could have read Henry Rosovsky's The University: An Owner's Manual (W...
...The Book of Yolek" recaptures the human cruelty Hecht has poetized so horrifyingly before...
...There has been no better interpreter in English of Eastern Europe's miseries and glories than Timothy Garton Ash...
...But care that does not seek to be effectual is dishonest and cheap...
...He ranges from the most immediate concerns (vitamin pills, fresh oranges) to questions of human identity, for becoming oneself, for sustaining hope, for avoiding cynicism...
...on Lolita and a "theology of erotica...
...A modern story of a descent into hell, meticulously tracing the pilgrimage of a great victor-liberator, is braided together by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in The General in His Labyrinth (Knopf, $19.95,285 pp...
...Anthony Hecht's new collection, The Transparent Man (Knopf, $18.95, 75 pp...
...John W. Cook JOHN W. COOK is professor of religion and the arts at Yale Divinity School, and director of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music...
...Martin's Press, $15.95,175 pp...
...In later years the author has become a public figure, visiting the pope, the archbishop of Canterbury, Mother Teresa-even speaking to our own Congress in 1987- winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989...
...Chosen at the age of three to be the fourteenth Dalai Lama, at a time when China was already invading Tibet's borders, he spent five of his teenage years under the wing of Chairman Mao, only to return to Tibet and find it abused and overrun by its enormous eastern neighbor...
...Paul, Thoreau, and Jim Wallis...
...by an Englishwoman, Hermione Lee, who teaches at the University of York and has also written on Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf...
...In Hollywood, when he spoke up for the Conference of Studio Unions and took on Ronald Reagan and the Screen Actors Guild, as Reagan tells it, "someone else began to teach political science (at Loyola) and he was on the other side of the country...
...How ironic, how refreshing, that just when sclerotic Communist economies are biting the dust, a man with a sure grasp of American political culture rises up to dampen right-wing gloating and tap our finest wellsprings of popular rebellion...
...In C. P. Snow's The Masters, the faculty of an English college discover that their dean is dying of cancer before the poor fellow knows it himself and begin jockeying for his chair not only before the corpse is cold but before it is even a corpse...
...Several individuals are particularly well drawn, including one or two opposed to the actions of the organized women's movement...
...Keizer teaches high school English and lives in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, a paradisial landscape for tourists, an impoverished back-o-beyond for many native families of farmers and factory workers...
...In the present atmosphere of fear of another war to burn out the twentieth century, it is good to read Julia Ward Howe's antiwar original Mother's Day Proclamation of 1870: Hallmark wouldn't touch it...
...Chatwin's persona, happily, always intrudes...
...Since most people who review serious books are paid to engage in-the "elevated chit chat" that Steiner so devastat-ingly critiques, Real Presences has not received the careful attention it deserves...
...A fine companion volume, consisting of essential excerpts from Newman's published works, is Newman the Theologian (Notre Dame, $9.95,288 pp...
...Peter Steiniels PETER STEINFELS is senior religion correspondent for the New York Times...
...Lesser known events such as the Chautauqua movement and the history of several now defunct magazines- Scribner's and McClure's-are equally engrossing...
...Another brave scrambler of old political categories is Alan Wolfe, a dean at the New School for Social Research and author of Whose Keeper...
...Within Mariology-the author calls it "anti-Mariology"-the Jewish woman Miriam has been driven underground and replaced with the sexless, shadowy, blond Madonna...
...Virginal Christianity condemned carnal Judaism...
...Louis, where a fading religious order, the Society of Saint Jude, is foundering in its search for direction-I spent the afternoons reading novels and tracts about universities and priests...
...Human beings are moral agents who make choices, live in community, and risk loving...
...the "churching" of women after childbirth, for instance, follows from a conception of impregnation as defilement, birth as animalistic, the afterbirth itself as sordes (filth), and maternity, according to one German theologian, as a sign of the curse of original sin...
...It has been a remarkable year and reading these two works helps us to appreciate at least one of the extraordinary human beings who helped to make the events we have witnessed possible...
...Even more astounding is that so many of those who should be unflinchingly diagnosing this situation are occupied, like the worst kind of conservatives, in dismissing criticism and protecting their psychological stake in post-Vatican II developments...
...His encouraging thesis is that the time is ripe for political change...
...Chatwin's latest (and, alas, final) book is a marvel of exploration...
...Augustine's language on a subject having nothing to do with sex...
...Wills seems to promise a Grand Theory about religion and politics that ultimately isn't there...
...From all this, Rice has written a compassionate and rational critique, rather than an angry and sensational report...
...A collection of her essays, Power Trips and Other Journeys will soon be published...
...Marquez's story follows Simon Bolivar at the end of his life on a tortuous journey down the Magdalena River to the sea in 1830...
...There are now major Tibetan settlements there where, after enormous difficulties (the climate being one), these immigrants live something of a normal life, schools and hospitals having been established, and new ways of farming learned...
...and Ian Frazier's Great Plains (Penguin, $9.95,283 pp...
...Errors of biology as well as misreadings and mistranslations of Scripture abound in these sexual dogmatics, and though much of the mythology about a woman's body strikes an American woman in 1990 as comical, Heinemann does not trivialize the damage...
...It is about the pain of an abused and dying body, the pain of victory remembered, and a consciousness of unrelieved suffering that recreates the universe in its own image...
...This book has plenty of faults along with its many virtues...
...But how you size up this broadside will depend largely on how you evaluate the current condition of the liturgy...
...While Tarbell is best known for her expose of the Standard Oil Company and her writings on Lincoln, it is her personal integrity as a rather private woman in public life and as a journalist that impresses me...
...is essential reading...
...Because Keizer has a poet's eye for precise and odd detail, the humanity of this book is firm...
...In Pinocchio, the development of human consciousness is explored...
...A Love for Four Voices," the other central piece, has the lovers of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" represented by a string quartet, with a subtitle referring to Haydn...
...In 1945, when he stood up to the president of St...
...Norton...
...Their value varies...
...and Kenneth L. Woodward's Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn't, and Why (Simon and Schuster, $21.95, 438 pp...
...Life, for Havel, is riddled with paradox...
...It deftly synthesizes a great deal of faith with a critical "outside" view, and ranges from Islam's formative history and the developed forms of its beliefs and practices to the shifting fortunes of its modern revivals...
...Is there, all in all, a better telling of the story that is at the heart of our national self-understanding...
...Her most recent book is Women and War (Basic Books...
...Various leaders of India have supported the establishment of Tibetan refuges on their subcontinent...
...But there remains the evanescent chance that "even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance...
...Shelby Steele has spent months since the publication of his The Content of Our Character: A Vision of Race in America (St...
...Miller is never the voyeur...
...Celibate theologians cooked up the erroneous casuistry surrounding contraception with an eye on woman's libido, highest, according to an apologist for Humanae vitae, during her fertile days, though science has shifted the fertile phase since Soranus of Ephesus-a second-century physician and the most important source of knowledge about contraception for the Roman Empire and for medieval Europe-clocked libido's peak as immediately after menstruation...
...As I struggled to advance much the same argument with greater political specificity in The Closest of Strangers, Steele brought that rarest of gifts to the public arena: a moral compass with an unforgettable voice...
...There is irony in the fact that Willa Cather, the most private of writers, where her personal life is concerned, should after her death have prompted such a string of biographies...
...After eleven years as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, Rosovsky now shares his how-to secrets, including: learn the value of being vague, do not separate yourself from the community, and avoid doing anything that you would not wish to see published in a newspaper...
...He bears the responsibility of being both a deeply spiritual religious leader (Buddhist), and the temporal head of a ravaged country...
...The book inscribes a detailed and exhaustively documented record of historical heresy-in the area of sexuality, Christianity embraced rather than repudiated certain aspects of Gnosticism and Manichaeism...
...I am convinced that we cannot care about kids without caring about the economic, social, and polit-ical world from which they come and to which they go...
...Marquez's portrait of Bolivar is especially interesting in relation to the double themes of Willard Gaylin's Adam and Eve and Pinocchio: On Being and Becoming Human (Viking Penguin, $ 18.95,292 pp...
...Radical individuality is, among other things, anti-human...
...She maintained that anything worth knowing about her could be found in her books, and did her best to have her letters destroyed...
...In my own first draft, my dean is a weak man-an innovative leader in his first year who has made himself a mere caretaker in his fifth, rather than tempt the faculty to batter him to death...
...John L. Esposito's Islam: The Straight Path (Oxford, $19.95,272 pp...
...If Day's firecracker makes a lot of us jump, good...
...Disturbing the Peace (Knopf, $19.95,228 pp...
...he interviewed the rich and famous and the poor and obscure...
...The wisdom of Ram Dass, for instance, inscribes the same page as the words of St...
...At its center are two long poems...
...The author, a German theologian and professor of theology and the history of religion at the University of Essen, refuses to take seriously what should not be taken seriously: the centuries of patristic, scholastic, and papal pronouncements about the nature of woman, the dangers of sexual pleasure, the ideal of virginity, the lesser status of marriage...
...Miller is on her way to becoming our preeminent observer of postmodern family life in all its perplexing, even nutty, complexity...
...Perhaps because she is a visitor here, she has managed to see the whole picture, without feeling impelled to push any particular theorem...
...And though he has written an unabashedly positive book, he also concludes what the guiding spirits of all the Catholic colleges are slow to grant-that "the relation between character and education is weak...
...The scene is strewn with pilgrims plodding like ants toward a shrine, above the stench of swamps filled with the bilge of the slaughterhouse, and at the center hangs the burned carcass of a mad dog...
...Reluctantly, he decided he could do more for his people by leaving for the outside world...
...Bolivar's memories, triggered by events and faces, leave the reader suspended between biography and metaphors of meaning...
...He also knows that "great" professors are not always nice persons and that faculty are often irresponsible, childish, eaten alive by their own delusions, bitterness, and envy...
...Sources of the Se//(Harvard, $37.50, 608 pp...
...Two warnings: skip the introduction until after you've read the book...
...It helps to read the poetic and mystical beauty of St...
...Gaylin walks the reader through many dimensions of contemporary behaviorist and psychoanalytic thought, and he writes with candor and compassion...
...His method engages us in a careful and surprisingly refreshing reading of the Genesis account and the story of the puppet who became a boy...
...it documents the type of radical personal change experienced by many women religious after the sixties...
...Social Science and Moral Obligation (University of California, $25, 355 pp...
...Jim Sleeper JIM SLEEPER, an editorial writer at New York Newsday, is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (W.W...
...must be incapable of critical thought...
...Catholic moral theology, she concludes, is today "facing the ash heap...
...The general's entrance into Cartagena reads like a view into a hell-mouth conjured by Hieronymous Bosch...
...It is to Marquez's great credit that the story is not simply a tragedy broken with flashbacks...
...Anyone who thinks the floor plan of the French Chamber of Deputies (with its benches on the "left" and "right") remains an adequate diagram for our politics should read three recent books that wade fearlessly into the rubble left by the collapse of the Reagan Revolution and the Berlin Wall...
...Of the three transcendentals-the good, the true, and the beautiful-Balthasar convincingly argues that the last has been unjustly neglected...
...It begins with a sunny Neopolitan day in April and ends on "a vacant wilderness of weeds" called the Elysian Fields...
...is a scholarly study of the hierarchical Catholic church's politics of sexuality, women, and celibacy that engages this complex territory with a historical eye, a clear style, and not a few jokes...
...Also, Neusner's approach to faith is consistently mature...
...Written by a father about his adopted son, this award-winning book has scenes of warm humor (baking a train-shaped birthday cake for the day care center) and parental delight as well as ultimate tragedy...
...I find that condition not quite as bad as in the days of Father Smith's fifteen-minute Tridentine specials-but almost...
...If you can, it's more than worth the wild punches and occasional bloody nose...
...One of the most impoverishing consequences of this problematic historicization of sexual morality was the loss of the Jewish heritage of sexual health: As theology increasingly became the business of bachelors, sin was more and more placed in the realm of sex...
...and Disturbing the Peace (Knopf, $19.95,228 pp...
...Louis University who was putting the brakes on the university's racial integration, Dunne was bounced out...
...Both the palpable concern for the common good and the civility evident in the book make a reader mourn for what our society has lost so quickly...
...The musical structure is correct, and the poetry is witty and graceful, but their combination may puzzle the reader...
...I reviewed recently for New York Newsday three superb books on priests and holiness: Paul Wilkes's In Mysterious Ways (Random House, $19.95, 233 pp), an expansion of his beautiful New Yorker portrait of Boston's Father Joe Greer...
...The elegiac tone is broken occasionally by comic or plain touristic episodes-the money lost to a swindler, the artistic arrangement of seafood on a platter, and a terrifying reconstruction of the devastating eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii, as described by the elder Pliny...
...No Turning Back: Two Nuns' Battle with the Vatican over Women's Right to Choose by Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey, with Jane O'Reilly (Poseidon Press, $19.95,332 pp...
...What's exciting about Wolfe's book is his insistence that the traditionally posi-tivist, purportedly "objective" social sciences can and must be suffused with concern for the role of moral obligation in social life...
...Susan Cahill SUSAN CAHILL, author of the novel Earth Angels and editor of the Women & Fiction series, teaches English in New York City...
...Insistently, Chatwin tagged his journeys as works of fiction, crafted and composed texts...
...Karen Sue Smith KAREN SUE SMITH, a former associate editor of Commonweal, is the editor o/Church magAfter choosing a stack of possible books for a flight to New York, I decided to buy All in the Day's Work by Ida M. Tarbell (G.K...
...He, remember, is the man who argued that "consciousness precedes being" before the U.S...
...The commentary and visual sources provide the reader with a unique view into another culture and another time, but one that continues to influence and resonate in our world of imagery today...
...My favorite chapter, "Souls in Prison," is as relevant to urban teachers as to rural communities...
...Yet, Rice, an Irish ex-Dominican priest, has studied the latest research, interviewed over 500 people, including 442 former priests in twenty countries, traced the history of celibacy, and told some appalling tales of men abused and broken by religious superiors, of excruciating loneliness, of double-life priests who exploit women and abandon them, of third-world countries where the great majority of priests keep women on the side and father children...
...He unmasks the demise of a genuine hero, all of whose laurels have been taken away...
...is a quick and delightful read by a feminist historian with a sense of fair play...
...His hope to achieve one nation in South America is dashed as he emerges in the last days as a naked general on a journey to nowhere...
...Ker provides sensitive insights into Newman's personality and helpful analyses of his thinking and writing, but it is his extensive selection of Newman's own words that make the book so pleasurable and invaluable...
...The Broken Cord: A Family's Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome by Michael Dorris (Harper & Row, $18.95, 300 pp...
...The writer "should have read everything," Ernest Hemingway told the young man in 1933 who had hitch-hiked from Minnesota to his Key West front door to ask for the master's advice, "so he knows what he has to beat...
...The topic of Michael Camille's The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge University, $59,448 pp...
...Freedom in Exile: The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama (HarperCollins, $22.95, 288 pp...
...The heights of his astonishing military career and the tragic despondency of his last days are vividly imagined...
...I don't claim to be an expert on the subject but, if there is, I don't know about it...
...The best book I have read about teaching (and parents and children) in a decade, No Place But Here is a compelling and compassionate literary treasure...
...is an introduction that is more than an introduction...
...But Phillips, prophet of The Emerging Republican Majority (his first book), was the architect of Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential victory and a seer to conservatives, until he became appalled by Reagan's effort to finance delusions of imperial grandeur by mortgaging our economic destiny to foreign investors...
...Meanwhile, at my own university, our college dean has resigned, and the faculty now look at one another differently as their eyes meet at the mailboxes, sizing one another up for deanly qualities or aspirations...
...It reminds the reader of what religion is not...
...Many of the shorter poems are memorial, and all are aware of history...
...is a biting, irreverent, opinionated assault on the forlorn congregational singing in many or most Catholic parishes and, beyond that, on the state of liturgical renewal in general...
...But anyone who doesn't find this one of the last decade's most useful and stimulating books on American Catholicism must be incapable of thought altogether...
...the chapter "Parents" begins with a poem by Sappho: "I have a small/daughter called/Cleis...
...Largely written by Walter Kasper, and endorsed by the German bishops' conference and the Vatican, this catechism engages the intelligent searcher in a manner that has thoroughly internalized the dialectic between Rome and the Reformation traditions...
...But he reminds us that while only groups can pass civil rights laws, only individuals can improve their reading levels or open businesses...
...Frankly elitist in his insistence on top-down decision making and on giving the strongest say to professors with the longest tenure and most knowledge, his strongest message is on the necessary connection between teaching excellence and "by far the healthiest and most efficient method of fighting burnout"-research...
...my own complaint is that its jaunty tone sometimes resembles the folksy tastelessness that the author exposes in much contemporary hymnody...
...Raymond A. Schroth RAYMOND A. SCHROTH, S.J., author of Books for Believers (Paulist Press), is a professor of communications at Loyola University of New Orleans...
...has an elegiac tone even when the poems are not openly memorial, reminding the reader in their musicality of T.S...
...where he actually names the Jesuit authorities who have treated him badly, that he must still be waiting for an ominous knock on his infirmary door at Loyola-Marymount in Los Angeles...
...Authentic religion and earthiness, the author insists, make good bedfellows, especially at Christmas, the double celebration of motherhood and childbirth...
...A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Gaylin extracts a moral thesis from the two stories named in the title...
...and The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of'89 (Random House, $17.95,156 pp...
...Embedded in this traditional bachelor-boy theology are errors of fact engendering odd and oppressive practices...
...Sources of the Self is so good that one hopes Mr...
...We learn more about this remarkable man who sustained through terrible times the significance of the moral act...
...Through art (primarily illuminated manuscripts, stained-glass windows, and low-relief carving), Camille reveals "a culture in which the visible was still tied to the supernatural and consequently more powerful than it is even in today's image-saturated culture...
...If you can't stand the brawling, stay out of the barroom...
...on the Scopes trial...
...The latest is Willa Cather: Double Vision (Pantheon, $29.95, 410 pp...
...Human beings are not just a higher order of the animal kingdom, and not angels of the heavenly kingdom, but "something special...
...With the growth of its sexual neurosis,...Christianity distanced itself from its Jewish roots in the Old Testament and from Jewish life in general...
...Bolivar's "radiance of greatness" is smothered in despair...
...While not neglecting biography, she has put her emphasis on the work, illuminating a number of facets we had not much noticed before...
...Through her characters and her female narrator, the Eberhardt family of Chicago lives and breathes and we are inside its being...
...It is a folly that poses as religion and invokes the name of God, but has distorted the consciences of countless people...
...It's a complex, invaluable discussion...
...on Jesse Jackson and Lincoln's "black theology...
...Instead, it virtually locks one into Newman's mind, following the course of his life and thought almost day by day...
...He was a modern pilgrim open to the strangeness and wonder, the beauty and horror, around him whether caught up in a coup in a "third-world" country or captured by the rich claustrophobia of the life of a pre-glasnost art collector in the Soviet Union...
...The bewilderments, mysterious passions, unyielding commitments and terrible betrayals that characterize families are here on display...
...The brief texts for each day of the year reflect a global richness that makes this small book wonderfully appropriate for the birthday of the Prince of Peace...
...To call Bruce Chatwin's What Am 1 Doing Here (Viking Penguin, $19.95, 367 pp...
...Phillips is still a capitalist, but he's also a patriot who resents our increasingly rigid inequities between rich and poor, and he's not above calling for strong government fiscal and monetary policies to curb them...
...Where Genesis clarifies our natural endowment, Pinocchio explores how development influences the expression of those potentials...
...What's challenging and problematic is Wolfe's contention that we can't roll back the clock to embrace the old strictures and scriptures: the market and the rights-based, constitutional state advanced such causes as racial integration and feminism, even as they brought economic and political abuses...
...The Gothic Idol is packed with illustrations, many of which are relatively unknown and previously unpublished...
...Now Dunne is back at Loyola...
...Uta Ranke-Heinemann's Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church (Doubleday, $21.95,360 pp...
...Anyone who could possibly agree with everything Andrew M. Greeley says in The Catholic Myth: The Behavior and Beliefs of American Catholics (Scribner's, $21.95,309 pp...
...Kevin Phillips's The Politics of Rich and Poor (Random House, $19.95, 262 pp...
...What underlies the horror of the story and makes it such a good book is the human dream and crippled nobility of the characters...
...Jude's College are either struggling with celibacy or have repressed the issue...
...Adam and Eve illuminate the birth of morality, and Gaylin can write about the Fall as though it were a victory...
...Commonweal readers will appreciate Wolfe's analysis of how the private market and the modem state have been gobbling up civil society-that network of religious institutions, neighborhoods, and other communities of faith whose survival depends on an elusive, indispensable trust...
...But a great many of them survived, in libraries from Harvard to the Huntington, and have been worked over by the authors of many books and articles...
...Hans Urs von Balthasar's The Glory of the Lord (Crossroad/Ignatius), as the late thinker insisted, is not an aesthetic theology but a theology of aesthetics...
...is a sweepingly ambitious examination of the history of ideas about the self that used to be the soul...
...The History of American Catholic Women by James K. Kenneally (Crossroad, $24.95,286 pp...
...For him, the Buddhist religion, though capable of having friendly relations with other religions, is indeed the ground of his life...
...is the most moving book I read all year...
...The title piece proposes a novel view of the human anatomy...
...Of the three, Shattered Vows is the most likely to be overlooked...
...Even if we had access to what will eventually be thirty-one volumes of John Henry Newman's diaries and letters, only a few of us would have the time to read them...
...The superb PBS series on the Civil War prompted me to go back to James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom (Oxford, $35,928 pp...
...Taylor knows he has obligated himself to continue the argument...
...Kevin Phillips's excoriation of Reaganism for selling out America's productive capacity in The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath (Random House, $19.95,262 pp...
...is a thick, rich, demanding, and immensely rewarding reflection on the nature of language, beauty, and truth...
...With all the talk about the forthcoming guidelines for a universal catechism, why hasn't The Church's Confession of Faith: A Catholic Catechism for Adults (Ignatius, $ 14.95,380 pp...
...While Gaylin does not profess to be a religious person, his metaphors and perspective reflect religious teachings, and he finds in the Bible a rich resource of wisdom and moral truths with which to counter the pervasive cynicism and determinism of this age...
...is not exactly the debate its authors promise (they tend to bypass each other's arguments), it still makes fascinating reading...
...The hero's poignant humanity remains in spite, or perhaps because of it all...
...For all who are interested in the role of art and imagery in any age, this book offers a wealth of information and insight...
...With the help of these writers, the metaphorical Chamber itself may fall next...
...The chapter on school discipline, entitled "Courtesy," begins with a quote about the "exquisite courtesy" of God from Dame Julian of Norwich...
...The dispirited singing, the trivialization of ritual, the transformation of presiders into emcees, as Day says, signals "a religious, social, and cultural breakdown of astounding proportions...
...It addresses the actual context of contemporary education-in-crisis: We in education talk all the time about how we "care about kids...
...The cast of historical characters is representative of women in literature, politics, church, and cultural affairs...
...it deserves to be...
...Letters to Olga, (Henry Holt, $16.95,397 pp...
...reveals a life lived in two worlds, one practical, workaday, the other mystical...
...Tarbell wrote her autobiography in 1938 at the age of eighty-one...
...These honors have not changed his outlook...
...This is about as powerful an answer to the deconstructionists and other epigones of Nietzsche as any available...
...The eighty-five-year-old activist, writer, and irritant, George H. Dunne, S.J., must have been so sure that religious superiors would never let him publish his memoirs, King's Pawn (Loyola University Press, $19.95,502 pp...
...Garry Wills serves up one brilliant set piece after another-on Gary Hart's desperate attempts to invent a new moral language to justify his marital infidelity...
...So, as I spent summer mornings sweating out the first chapters of my own novel -set at a small Catholic college somewhere equidistant between Des Moines, Cleveland, and St...
...For the literate layperson and, I expect, for many clergy, there is not currently available a more accessible, comprehensive, and persuasive presentation of the faith...
...Not surprisingly, Keizer is also a lay Episcopal minister: a sacramental sense of his students' worth and their world animates his prose-"what we see that's precious beyond all conceiving...
...Although The Bible and Us: A Priest and a Rabbi Read Scripture Together by Andrew M. Greeley and Jacob Neusner (Warner Books, $24.95, 288 pp...
...As his brilliant rejoinder to a critic in the fall issue of Dissent makes clear, Steele, a black essayist and English professor, honors the necessity of collective action against discrimination...
...In Under God: Religion and American Politics (Simon and Schuster, $24.95,445 pp...
...Frazier searches knowingly for America, or that America captured in the Great Plains, and comes up with a riveting tale of tragedy, betrayal, high hopes, strong spirits, and wild contradictions...
...Teaching members of academic communities at all levels-as well as parents-will bless the makers of No Place But Here: ATeacher's Vocation in a Rural Community by Garret Keizer (Viking Penguin, $6.95,164 pp...
...he would have approached his job more realistically...
...His chapter on Crazy Horse is so full of honor and tragedy it will bring tears to all but the coldest hearted -surely none of them readers of Commonweall The novel which most gripped me and wouldn't let me put it down was Sue Miller's Family Pictures (Harper & Row, $24.95, 389 pp...
...He fiercely counters psychic determinism and stresses "the magnificent potential of the human being to become something between animal and God...
...While the idea of a dialogue book is not unique, at this level of discourse it is rare...
Vol. 117 • December 1990 • No. 21
