Religious book week critics' choices
Nelson, Gertrud Mueller & SEXTON, JOAN & Grange, Joseph & Zagano, Phyllis & Mitcham, Carl & Sloyan, Gerard S. & Alleva, Richard & Beverly, Elizabeth & Toolan, David
RELIGIOUS BOOK WEEK CRITICS' CHOICES "Religious Books: Critics' Choices" has annually recommended new books in religion. This year we invited our critics to write instead about books, religious or...
...Of her many, slender, rich novels, Lives of a Spirit (Sun and Moon, $ 10.95,74 pp...
...The ordinary is portrayed with strength and wit, with strong, unsentimental faith that renders work holy and the ordinary extraordinary...
...What I recognized even then was the thrill of encountering what seems to be authentic speech, intact and potent...
...Christians who live a sacramental life may find Wyschogrod's observations lacking in understanding of it but never in respect...
...may help...
...If we're not moved spiritually by a well-made, emotional movie, it's not necessarily because it makes us feel nothing...
...In dreams you see through solids...
...Waning winter and struggling spring are times to reflect on whether peace in nature is to have an answering echo in the family of peoples or the human heart...
...Judith Stoughton's sensitive biography of Ade Bethune is an important tribute and a visual triumph published by a small press...
...Field's Daughter (Linden/Simon & Schuster,$18.95,347pp...
...Gertrud Mueller Nelson GERTRUD MUELLER NELSON is an author, artist, and lecturer...
...Her How I Got Him Back (Doubleday, $ 17.95,300 pp...
...Phyllis Zagano PHYLLIS ZAGANO is an associate professor at the Boston University College of Communication...
...At the least we are urged to care for someone whose hopes or opinions we may not readily like or share...
...An assortment of poetry readings, interviews, and an article, all by the poet Robert Bly in A Little Book on the Human Shadow (Harper & Row, $8.95,81 pp...
...before getting back to work with the electric prods...
...is one...
...Now she is dead and the best part of his past is gone...
...provide a revolutionary portrait of the Chinese sage-one that subverts the traditional idea of Confucius as the upholder of the status quo...
...To quote from an article I wrote for Crisis magazine: Foote "affirms the unending menace of being alive in this world...
...The education done a traveler is the recognition that while we don't really exist in relation to this world, we very surely learn who we are in living relatively...
...I thought of him when I realized the books that have touched me most recently are all small, all in paperback, and all under ten dollars...
...This is a reflective, thoroughly researched defense of a controversial movement...
...Both the locales and the interviewees are quite clearly haunted...
...The book is important documentation of early, lay, womanly involvement in the liturgical movement that was precursor to Vatican II...
...McKibben is not afraid to discuss humankind's urge to dominate and control...
...We may be willing to give, but our self-image has its terms...
...He writes on the philosophy of culture, environmental ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of religion...
...We continue to rob nature and fail to consider the lilies of the field...
...He sees Jesus' parables and gnomic sayings in their call to justice as corresponding to the aspirations of an oppressed proletariat...
...Imagination, activity, articulation, creating "the rope of language" is a way out...
...Each frame of Turtle Diary, each gesture of its performers, is placid yet incipient...
...Such is the beginning of "church...
...I cannot think about books without thinking about voices, and many voices are timid these days...
...They show us a lot of life while constantly hinting that only what cannot be seen can touch our spirits deeply...
...Yet there is a stern, almost sinister, aspect to this movie...
...So sometimes the books we read while traveling greet us so deeply we are compelled to give them to our friends...
...his most recent novel, suggests that without an intact voice to tell a people how they live, how they have lived, how they might live, moral survival is impossible...
...I am sure I learned to pray on planes...
...The nitty-gritty of struggling to put the love of Jesus into action and relieving the suffering of our companions is addressed in How Can I Help...
...In both historical cases calm followed on death and destruction, a peace not of human making...
...They turn us toward those metaphysical issues that deconstruction and other postmodern fads have made so unfashionable...
...These voices, willing to report what it feels like to be owned, to be used as property, cast great light and hope...
...Bausch's writing, astringent and accurate, performs slow revelation...
...an examination of what the war did to us, the winners, in the very midst of our winning, suggests that Dorothy Day's "naive pacifism" may not have been so naive...
...Cloud, $19.95,144 pp...
...And nothing shows that better than Annie Dillard's wonderfully intelligent The Writing Life (Harper and Row, $ 15.95,111 pp...
...I feared the certain plunge into lives darkened by such domination...
...Joan Sexton JOAN SEXTON does work in spiritual direction, is a volunteer for People with AIDS, and cofounder of Another Voice, an organization committed to women's rights in the Catholic church...
...Those who want to meet a woman-important for her pioneering contributions in the field of sacred art and architecture-as artist, writer, and liturgical consultant, will feel richly rewarded and certainly enlightened...
...Two more hard-to-find books are Allen B. Chinen's In the Ever After: Fairy Tales and the Second Half of Life (Chiron, $12.95, 203 pp...
...I mean truth, value, spontaneity, and permanence...
...Before her death, Mac had maintained a certain distance from this beloved daughter because he was unwilling to look back on a life that included much of which he was ashamed...
...Coles's tape-recorded conversations with Day present new material in which she reminds us we are all outsiders in this long loneliness of life...
...Even among many sympathetic to pacifism, warfare seemed necessary in the face of the overwhelming evil of Hitler...
...The volume in its entirety may not be for everybody...
...At least that is the only way we can begin to chip away at the charge we received in Genesis, to dress and keep this earth...
...Shoah evoked the horrors of the Holocaust not through the usual assemblage of documentary clips but with new footage of the places where horrors occurred and interviews with the people who survived...
...A blessing, a feast fit for the Kingdom...
...These great generalities loom forth with a force all their own suppressing florid and irrelevant detail...
...Modern Jews, to the contrary, wage the peace of Pesach in the spring and Christians the peace of the resurrected Christ...
...What you are having is a bloody good cry, and, once the movie and the tears have stopped, you may proceed with life exactly as you lived it before...
...Virginia Sloyan, art by Linda Ekstrom (Liturgy Training Publications, $12.95, 160 pp...
...God may love us but God's earth doesn't...
...which I mention for the sheer beauty of its writing...
...To hear her speak of God's grace renews faith in faith itself...
...The notes and bibliography are a treasure...
...and not fear losing God: "Do you suppose that someone who really has him could lose him like a little stone...
...Perhaps the path to my spiritual center has narrowed so that brief, bright, intense insights throw great light and help dissipate the growing cloud of despair that creeps in as violence, cruelty, and suffering erupt in our city...
...is an electric prod...
...His most recent book is Ethical Issues Associated with Scientific and Technological Research for the Military (New York Academy of Sciences...
...Politically, the fall of communism may be a challenge to help them become more like us...
...A Catholic writer, already appreciated in international literary circles but yet to be discovered in Catholic periodicals, is Fanny Howe...
...Mario Vargas Llosa is a novelist who is running for president of Peru...
...This is a book for anyone planning to grow old and for all those already there who'd like to ponder and share these insights together with their peers...
...For Christians, A Triduum Sourcebook, ed...
...I want to be a sober bacchant...
...GERARD S. SLOYAN is a professor of religion at Temple University...
...She possesses an enviable ability to interweave sharp description, tough analysis, and gripping personal narrative...
...Says Judith Stoughton with regard to the vigor of those pre-Vatican II days, "We thought that the problems of sentimentality and inappropriateness in liturgical art and music had been exposed and were on the way to being healed...
...The book is about righteousness and wealth...
...But she meets God outside the hierarchy of human assumptions...
...Goingfurther, we asked film critic, Richard Alleva to do the same for movies...
...The voice is nothing less than cultural memory...
...The feeling of helplessness is authentic but not final...
...Born and raised a slave, as a child she is ripped away from her family...
...Where Neville is at pains to stress the importance of stable and enduring structures for the recovery of a robust philosophy of nature, David Hall and Roger Ames in Thinking through Confucius (State University of New York Press, $16.95,320 pp...
...Schneiders describes this view as theological heresy, for the church has held with Gregory of Nazianzus that "the terms 'Father' and 'Son,' as applied to the persons of the Trinity, were not names of natures or essences but of relations and even in this case the terms are used metaphorically...
...I have a friend with a strong bias against small books...
...Harrison would add cooking) can open or, in its failure, close the gate of heaven...
...Each time I see this great movie, I want to do the impossible: to embrace life and yet be willing to let it go without a regret...
...Consider Old Elizabeth...
...Being brought up as a stubborn daughter of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, I struggle more than ever with this "timeless inquiry of the heart...
...The definitive character of modern consumerism is not, however, simply increased consumption legitimated by a romantic ethic that promotes feeling and autonomous, imaginative pleasure...
...Wanting to be heard...
...Unlike Sanders's understanding that the Gospels tell of an other-worldly kingdom is that of Richard A. Horsley in Jesus and the Spiral of Violence (Harper and Row, $22.95,355 pp...
...Faith is in need of praxis, and the plight of the poor in Latin America is the place for concrete social action...
...A serious book now in a fourth printing is the historical inquiry into why Jesus was sentenced to death by Roman authority, E.P...
...Who of us has heard Elizabeth before...
...The responses, sometimes surprising, follow...
...The decay of Communist totalitarianism confronts the historically sensitive Christian in the West with at least two challenges...
...The End of Nature (Random House, $19.95,226 pp...
...Jesus' teaching, thoroughly this-worldly, challenged it...
...And it's only when you lie down defeated and dream that you experience a love that is frosted with hot lighting and colors, shapes, and textures so transparent they are apparitions of perfection...
...is perhaps the one that best tells her commitment to standing open and alert in a state-of-heart that finds God's mystery as it corners us and then liberates the spirit...
...I would also gladly hand them Grace Mojtabai's Ordinary Time (Doubleday, $17.95, 223 pp...
...Come to think of it, E.T...
...Until now, many scientists have assumed that violence is more natural to humankind than the making of peace...
...Schneiders's clarification of Jesus of the Gospels and Pauline literature as the incarnation of the feminine Old Testament hypothesis of God, Holy Wisdom or Sophia, is brilliant...
...It is through human love that it all eventually makes sense: "And this more human love...
...Sanders's/ems and Judaism (Fortress, $10.95,444 pp...
...These books attest to the power of the necessary and disturbing voice...
...The Storyteller (Farrar Straus Giroux, $17.95, 246 pp...
...It shows the charges hurled at liberation theology, charges of atheism and communism, for what they are-red herrings of the smelliest sort...
...It is directed to the grave problem of the patriarchal insistence on the maleness of God, which uses the human sex of the male Jesus to set in place the attribute of maleness for God...
...Carl Mitcham CARL MITCHAM teaches in the philosophy department at Pennslyvania State University...
...Gerard S. Sloyan REV...
...is newly available in paperback...
...Ever since Visions of Glory (Simon & Schuster, 1978), her remarkable account of the culture of Jehovah's Witnesses, we have known that this writer's sensibility is one we would love to travel with...
...His most recent book is Jesus, Redeemer and Divine Word (Michael Glazier...
...He argues simply that the time has come for us to "choose to remain God's creatures instead of making ourselves gods...
...Tender Mercies, written by Horton Foote and directed by Bruce Beresford, certainly lives up to its title by affirming the mercy of God's love and the power of human love as a conduit for this divine charity...
...Not looking back doesn't stop lightning from striking on the path ahead...
...No one can be a Christian who is not an artist," Blake's view, adapted by Bly...good stuff...
...Around midlife, having arrived in that "ever after," one is shocked to discover a whole new progression of developmental stages to be navigated...
...These anthologies are well-culled collections that cannot wilt...
...Her radical devotion to the church is in stark contrast with her recognition of its uneven fabric...
...What a find...
...Robert Neville argues against the relativism of the day, employing a process of normative thinking that has its roots in Plato, its interpretive tools in American philosophy, and its practical impact in real life...
...Her mysticism has about it a gnostic sensibility...
...As well as we manage, so well does the church progress...
...Real joy, real tragedy, real effort, and real success await our participation in its processes...
...Unafraid of time...
...Against the usual blather one hears from too many pulpits, Lash retrieves the experiential meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity...
...Elizabeth Beverly ELIZABETH BEVERLY is a writer and ethnographer who teaches at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon...
...Three recent books provide an opportunity to redirect our thinking about these issues of ultimate importance...
...This book eases my way out...
...Were I instructing a prospective convert and wanted to convey, concretely, the taste of a Catholic sensibility, I would give them this book...
...As America "greys" we need all the help we can get to discover the final stages of our becoming whole...
...A sample: "Catering to our own needs and expectations, we may be less likely to hear what others really feel they really need...
...for its luminous portrayal of how a Catholic sensibility, in contrast to a fanatic, apocalyptic one, cherishes the present, gives supernatural weight to the pedestrian, honors the most unlikely places-even a greasy spoon in West Texas...
...It is all about achieving the appropriate harmony of past and present, permanence and change...
...Dorothy Day had been her mentor from an early age, and over the years Ade has continued to create hundreds of illustrations for the Catholic Worker...
...Here are three bold books in which the intact voice demands our attention, requires that we consider earnestly the sweet, perpetual human plight: how to care for each other, how to care for the earth...
...offers fresh and provocative reflection on the Jungian concept of shadow and projection, done with the poet's magic and wisdom...
...Interspersed is the wisdom of the two authors, gently stated, lovingly offered...
...In the spring of the year, the time when kings go forth to battle, David besieged Rabbah of the Ammonites...
...But Frans De Waal (Peacemaking among Primates, Harvard, $29.95,294 pp), takes us to visit colonies of our bestial brothers and sisters, the chimpanzees, to observe their patterns of reconciling conflicts...
...Like it in drawing on age-old texts of public prayer and spiritual wisdom is the more recent, An Easter Sourcebook: The Fifty Days, ed...
...It had me blubbering away, anyway...
...It explains to me how it is that art, architecture, and music (and Ms...
...On the strength of Robert Imbelli's stunning review {Commonweal, November 3, 1989, pp...
...Ritual action (li) and signification (yi) are entwined creative moments that combine the revered achievements of the past with the demands of the spontaneous moment...
...Sufficient, however, would be the claim tantamount to kingship embedded in his Jewish restoration escha-tology and his promise of a new or renewed temple...
...Shoah raises ghosts that we should all confront...
...No one else is in charge...
...the story of the tangled love-and forgiveness-between an aging father and a grown daughter from Duluth, Minnesota...
...11 of The Kabir Book: Forty-four Ecstatic Poems of Kabir, Beacon Press, $6.95, 71 pp...
...Each night he sees the neon Bible light the sky, its bright blue cross belying the attitude of the church members who shun him and his family...
...The story, which in many ways is the same old story, reorders once again the definitions of community and of church, and who stands where...
...The rationalism of Maimonides he does reject...
...When I first opened Six Women's Slave Narratives, edited by William L. Andrews, one volume in a remarkable series-The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers-published by Oxford University Press ($19.95, paper, 384 pp...
...This novel raises awkward questions about the meaning of the "good life," about the zeal of just belief, about the righteousness of Christianity...
...Rilke tells his young friend to "look upon it all as a child would...
...When winter settles down on the North Country, elemental perspectives drive themselves into your brain: Endurance, the ice, stability, the wish for change, warmth, life, stillness and activity, creativity and its creator...
...Stephen Mitchell's translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (Random House, $14.95, $6.95 paper, 109 pp...
...We all ought to be as effective as we can," Dorothy Day said...
...All three of these movies have something in common: though visually commanding, they scrape away at the visible world...
...Richard Alleva RICHARD ALLEVA is the film reviewer for Crisis magazine...
...As expressions of perspectives that grant importance to ultimate issues, these fine books evoke the promise of winter's spring...
...and Judith Stoughton's Proud Donkey of Schaerbeek: Ade Bethune, Catholic Worker Artist (North Star Press of St...
...It's just that we may be moved by it in every way but a spiritual one: sensually, viscerally, hysterically, and above all sentimentally...
...Wyschogrod knows well the path of the rabbis interpreting laws of Jewish behavior while not examining God too carefully, and of the kabbalists indulging in a perhaps too great familiarity with deity...
...one is not born that way...
...These heroes and heroines reflect the nature of old age, prescribe solutions, and offer meaning to our ever extended survival...
...To that end I have been feeding myself and gleaning courage from the blooming genre of nature writing where I am pulled down to earth and wooed into change...
...According to Weber's classic study of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the decisive revolution that constitutes modernity is the legitimation of capitalist accumulation and increased material production by Protestant spirituality...
...Nor is it an indictment of science run amok, although McKibben fears the implications of genetic engineering...
...Condemning the effete quality of much present-day European hermeneutics, Neville sees truth as the carry-over of value and therefore actually present in the concrete world...
...is not simply about global warming, although the text efficiently documents current theories concerning the greenhouse effect...
...I have chosen books on vastly differing subjects and style, convinced that thoughtful readers will integrate their messages and be especially pleased for a few great finds, some of them hidden among offbeat publishers...
...To be fully human is to know what is different about each situation and what to do about it...
...We always want to believe that someone else is in charge...
...In his reconstruction the temple priesthood was the agency that imposed a foreign yoke, more economic than political...
...Why not wake up this morning...
...Her sorrow almost overwhelms her...
...The book is bursting with family pictures but also with those strong, timeless woodcuts for which Ade Bethune is best known...
...Stories and Reflections on Service by Ram Dass and Paul Gorman (Alfred A. Knopf, $6.95,243 pp...
...Jew, Christian, and agnostic can find here deep reflection on a great religious and ethnic tradition-including why some notable rejecters of it like Spinoza, Freud, and Marx cannot be understood apart from it...
...Chinen offers fairy tales from around the world but with elderly protagonists: those who have already fought the good fight, who have grown up but now need to grow old and wise and spiritually mature...
...This extended personal essay is a rational yet ardent invitation to think morally about our highly industrialized lives...
...The best part of this vivid, unromantic account of the discipline of her craft is that she could be-and often is-telling you how to haul in a whale, perform surgery, stunt-fly, reach the planet Jupiter, or die well...
...Not only is such a choice morally correct...
...whatever your trade, this book ought to breathe fresh intensity into it...
...Now we can open this book and feel her breath: an elderly, black, ex-slave woman reliving "many glorious meetings, (when) the Lord poured out his Spirit in sweet effusions...
...An infinitely lighter film, Turtle Diary (scripted by Harold Pinter from a book by Russell Hoban and directed by John Irving), lovingly observes the banality of everyday life even as the leading characters, played by Ben Kingsley and Glenda Jackson, try to undermine that banality by performing the small, compassionate rebellion of releasing some turtles from the torpidity of a zoo into the wildness of the ocean...
...A glorious discovery of my childhood lay inside my mother's King James Bible, given to her by her Methodist grandmother in 1913...
...If you find yourself weeping at a movie, believe me, you are not having a spiritual experience...
...John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible (Grove Press, $15.95, 162 pp...
...What will happen to the fourth generation of these poor banished children of Eve-well, that's a loose end...
...The book was bound in buttery leather which had been ripped along the edge, and from the pages, soft and tough as white peony petals, surged the power of Jesus' bright red speech...
...After a drunken slide, country singer Mac Sledge (Robert Duv.all) finds a new place in life for himself when he weds a compassionate fundamentalist Baptist...
...Sometimes with, sometimes without religious reference, A Sourcebook about Christian Death, ed...
...The story of her slavery does not interest Elizabeth nearly so much as the story of her longing to bear witness to God, to preach his word, to feel his light and liveliness...
...Or a better reason to hope that our Redeemer, as medieval iconography had it, descends into cold hell...
...Can't be much there, or it would be bigger...
...The lives are dreadful, but the capacity to speak is transforming...
...He opts for the middle ground of biblical Judaism without rejecting the contributions of the other two...
...Instead we are given a thinker whose major aim in the evocation of intensities...
...The task of life, she tells us, is "to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist...
...After Mac gains a new home and a new handle on his artistic career, his teen-aged daughter (from a previous marriage) dies in a car accident...
...If a movie touches us spiritually, it does to us what the mutilated statue of Apollo did to Rilke: it looks into us as we look at it...
...Not at all afraid of time...
...In Recovery of the Measure (State University of New York Press, $21.95,432 pp...
...First, the internal decay of totalitarianism challenges the widely accepted justification of World War II...
...Spiritually, it is to help them not become too much like us...
...A human being must become a real person...
...Each of these volumes-the last two by new Catholic writers-deepen our perspectives on a major spiritual challenge...
...All modern consumer products, from plastic-encased electronic toys to precooked fast food, tend to reflect the device paradigm...
...Perhaps none has lived this notion quite so publicly as Dorothy Day, who is rein-troduced to those who know her by Robert Coles in Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion (Addison-Wesley, $17.95, $8.95 paper, 182 pp...
...In Sollicitudo rei socialis (United States Catholic Conference, $3.95,104 pp...
...We are...
...Whatever we successfully live in relation to-and we measure our success by the way in which we define it-we must find that relation in solitude...
...This year we invited our critics to write instead about books, religious or not, that had a surprising or unexpected effect on their religious thought or sensibilities...
...is a gem of clarity, scholarship, and imagination...
...Toole's comedic novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, earned him a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1981, twelve years after his suicide at thirty-two...
...It is church dues and Sunday morality that separate David and that community...
...In their very lack of character, devices facilitate the projection of romantically advertised sexuality and self-aggrandizement...
...narrates the interwoven stories of three couples whipped about by the romantic ethic of love and the attempt to consume one another and the world in search of one's own imagined pleasure...
...If we believe Bill McKibben, we shall have to change our lives in order to save them...
...But is it not possible that Nazi Germany, too, would have decayed internally, at less cost than on the battlefields...
...Her works include To Dance with God {Paulist), Clip-Art for Feasts and Seasons, and Clip-Art for Celebrations and Service (both Pueblo...
...Again Bly enters...
...Colin Campbell's The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Basil Blackwell, $16.95, paper, 301 pp...
...By filling in a missing piece in my theology, she restores hope that the feminine divine energies repressed by the patriarchal church will break through as women experience our self-image as healed and whole and an honored part of the Body of Christ...
...But, argues Campbell, without a corresponding revolution in attitudes toward consumption, greater production would be wholly counterproductive...
...It is a rich resource to assist in praying the three days of the Paschal Feast (a noun in the singular...
...God may give and forgive but God sure knows how to take away, too...
...Now available in paperback is Michael Wyschogrod's thoughtful book, The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel (Harper and Row, $14.95, 265 pp...
...The scene today proves us wrong...
...and here, in a bricolage ramble (meal-by-meal, piazza-by-piazza), she takes us first to Milan, then Venice and Florence, on to Rome (by this time she is in love-with the city-and so are we), and eventually to Naples, and family reunions in the Abruzzi and Calabria...
...This American scholar finds the teachings of Jesus, difficult as they are to identify exactly, no cause for his condemnation...
...It may happen that in the 1990s we will come to recognize that we are headed into an environmental catastrophe...
...In those days liturgy was less the "specialty" it is today, separate from social concern...
...The human duty is to achieve personhood in a social world that depends upon a sense of tact, beauty, and deference for its survival...
...Ade Bethune proclaimed the Gospel in her simple pictures, where the people of God tend and care for one another in humble daily acts of love...
...596-98), I took on George Steiner's brilliant argument against nihilistic "deconstructionist" critics in Real Presences (Chicago, $19.95, 236 pp...
...Young David, the narrator, views his small Southern world from a poor porch on a poor hill...
...Second, what of our own internal decay...
...Mary's College, Notre Dame, Women and the Wordby Sandra Schneiders, I.H.M...
...It's a celebration of the unpredictability of people who are supposed to be buttoned-down, desiccated, finished...
...South American torturers probably have a good cry at E.T...
...I have never seen a better case made for the thesis that Freudian analysis does not suffice for those who sin or sacrifice boldly (the grandparents here), but will do nicely for the second and third generations who do not...
...Chinen cracks open each tale with wisdom, humor, compassion, and an astonishing imagination...
...Joseph Grange JOSEPH GRANGE is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine, Portland, Maine...
...Wanting to be heard...
...Paul Fussell's Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Oxford, $ 19.95,330 pp...
...She writes about the meaning of experience and the acceptance of mystery in the context of her Catholic religion...
...Its author is an academic philosopher who knows the tensions between the intelligence of the storytelling Jew and the reason that originated with the pagan, often the religious, Greek...
...First, this delicious, sumptuous, luxuriant book-Barbara Grizzuti Harrison returning to her roots, the source of her sure instincts, tart wit, and utterly catholic mind in Italian Days (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, $22.95, 479 pp...
...The claim to the church, she said, belongs not "only to officials and bureaucrats," but to every strand of life within it...
...John Paul II criticizes the East for its lack of democracy and the West for its consumerism...
...Gabe Huck, Gail Ramshaw, Gordon Lathrop, Barbara Schmich (Liturgy Training Publications, $12.95, 173 pp...
...Movements" may have helped change our words, but we have yet to change our lives...
...Newman, and Friedrich von Hiigel in Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God (University Press of Virginia, $29.95, 313 pp...
...is a collection of terrible beauty and sober reality on the end of all seasons for all...
...Work is redemptive, I often tell myself...
...our willingness to limit our desires, to quell our arrogance, is the only way to offer our grandchildren any life at all...
...The book can serve as an introduction to twenty-five nature writers (among them Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, Barry Lopez, Leslie Marmon Silko) and to those books which they, in turn, love and share in a lengthy annotated bibliography...
...Every utterance was set apart boldly, slightly misaligned with the rest of the black text, but, as far as I knew, straight from God's mouth...
...These primates demonstrate highly developed strategies for consolation and reconciliation which are part of our very biological heritage...
...His translation is strong, blunt, spare and, for me, empowers mystical images with everyday words...
...You have slept for millions and millions of years...
...From these claims the community called church developed logically...
...It's Papa's way of showing you how to know G-d: with all your parts abandoned, cast down, while your spirit is free to move about...
...provides necessary orientation for this task...
...Turtle Diary is a bracing reprimand for any occasion when you've looked into a plain-as-pudding face, mentally yawned, and decided, "Well, I guess I know what he's all about...
...No matter, she refused to criticize the contradiction of political power within the church...
...The danger lurking when the black bag of repressed pieces of ourselves never gets unpacked can be dissipated by unpacking the bag, reclaiming the energies we've projected onto others, and welcoming our darker side home...
...With the apparent desire on the part of the socialist-block countries to imitate capitalist-consumer countries, now there is an even greater need to assess consumerism as a spiritual problem...
...Living "happily ever after" is the dream of youth...
...In these essays we know nature to be the place we live out our lives, the ground of our being, the container of our spirits...
...While ultimately the solutions may be global, they begin as private and small, local and personal...
...Originally given as the Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality at St...
...But what a surprise...
...Finally, an explicitly theological book from 1988 that I continue to chew on, Nicholas Lash's ruminations on William James, Schleiermacher, J.H...
...The tortured history of the manuscript of The Neon Bible from his death until its publication is as careful a comment on the role of money in human relations as one will ever need...
...To name merely three films that have done that to me, I have to look back over the past decade rather than the past year...
...Against Derida, Rorty, and others who see the world as a text we interpret, Neville demonstrates that the world itself is the measure of our interpretations...
...The immediacy of such a voice demands effort from a reader...
...Vargas Llosa's novel cares about the earth itself in the way McKibben does...
...Denial of this concrete fact is eschatological escapism...
...For the cultural anthropology of four generations of an Irish-American family in Queens, New York, try Mary Gordon's The Other Side (Viking, $19.95,386 pp...
...Chinen's book, despite its unattractive format, is a gift to the aging...
...Christian social responsibility in the twentieth century is the central topic of Richardo Planas's Liberation Theology (Sheed & Ward, $12.95,289 pp...
...McKibben asks us to recognize the inherent value of the natural world we have already ravaged...
...Gabe Huck and Mary Ann Simcoe (Liturgy Training Publications, $12.95, 168 pp...
...Her books include Religion and Public Policy (The Rockford Institute...
...And for his understanding of the many sides of the human heart, its cumbersome gestures, its pain and madness, I recommend Richard Bausch's Mr...
...Metaphysics is a type of common sense that derives its critical power from the truth of the normative measures it uncovers in the universe...
...And we must change our lives...
...In this graceful and thoroughly engaging book, De Waal uses political and contemporary human issues to make his point that peacemaking is not only desirable, but required for our human survival and evolution...
...calls "devices...
...consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other...
...A lovely discovery has been the poetry of Kabir, fifteenth-century Indian, son of a Moslem weaver in Benares, influenced by Sufi mysticism...
...David Toolan DAVID TOOLAN, S.J., is associate editor of America magazine...
...The consumerist-influenced lives people lead in the West is also the implicit theme of a remarkable second novel by Valerie Sayers...
...These personal experiences, all verbatim, are honest and compelling, from both sides of the helping situation...
...Indeed, the junky religious hardware that is madly proliferating again and being sold without a tweak of conscience to unwary catechists at Catholic conventions makes me urge readers to take up Ade Bethune's mission to tell the gospel truth, boldly, lovingly, and strongly...
...Life is no crusty formularized court liturgy...
...This is a poet to be reckoned with...
...This is not talk about God, but direct report of divine excess, superabundant and brimming over, here and now-in the landscape, the pasta, the art and architecture, the carnival of people...
...It is also characterized by a new kind of consumable, what Albert Borgmann in Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, (Umversity of Chicago Press, $ 14.95 paper, 302 pp...
...Daniel Halpern edits a fat collection of essays on landscape and natural history (On Nature, North Point Press, $9.95,317 pp...
...I can see I have been caught in what they call the "helping prison...
...And the plural gods are important because Vargas Llosa casts his novel partly as a chronicle of the Machiguenga, a traditional people whose lives have been utterly changed by their contact with the "civilizing" world...
...For me, the common effect of these readings has been one of hope returning, reversal that illuminates the disturbing reality with something new, different, fresh....as if, as the Zen koan says: "The sun rises in the West...
...humankind's intentions are paltry compared to those of the gods...
...Elegantly written, it is hard going-and definitely worth the effort...
...Unlike traditional "things," worldly particularities that call forth human engagement, devices embody little particularity and require minimal human knowledge or skill...
...Paulist Press, $3.50, 81 pp...
Vol. 117 • March 1990 • No. 5
