Signposts in a Strange Land
Kramer, Victor A.
physician, who is known for concerning himself with basic issues that have to do with the medical profession. And the basic one in this case is trust. Dare I enter a kind of covenantal relatio~l...
...Here, Percy outlines the dilemma of a novelist whose job is to report "that the modem world has ended, the world.., informed by the optimism of the scientific revolution, rational humanism, and that Western cultural entity which...it has been more or less accurate to describe as Christendom...
...Brian Wren A unique opportunity to join a small ecumenical group and study with these distinguished scholars in the intimate setting of historic Lincoln College, Oxford...
...Percy's nonfiction pieces, which document a thirty-odd-year search for answers by a bemused questioner, can be described as his songs in a strange land: "The Psalmist said sing a new song, and, for a fact, the old ones are pretty well worn-out...
...and an epilogue, interview, and self-interview...
...God writes straight.., if the shrinkage of social intercourse to patio and barbecue pit serves no other purpose, it might yet provide a truly public zone where people are free to move about in a secure anonymity until the time comes when they might wish to be friends...
...nor E1 Salvador, though its eleven-year-old conflict also is the subject of serious, if slow-moving, peace efforts...
...The country in question is not Nicaragua, where the eight-year contra war ended last year...
...His diagnosis of our spiritual homelessness frequently parallels Christopher Lasch's, who argues that our modem dependence on the therapeutic or so-called "helping profession" is symptomatic of our shrunken or "minimal self...
...Tom) Wright Dr...
...Percy's point is that the abstract moral distancing associated with Enlightenment rationalism no longer works: We somehow live and explore the mysteries of ourselves as we are embedded in a particular historical and existential context...
...acerbic...
...They and those who follow them will now have to develop their own argument further to show how it, in the end, may be more humane than are the increasingly casual policies of support for physician-assisted death, for active euthanasia...
...How like him to go into Chancellorsville, or the Argonne, with Epictetus in his pocket...
...For the moment, Gomez is content to let the cases in the Netherlands speak largely for themselves...
...Gomez finds reason to support the "slippery slope" school of thought: start on a course of casually defined "passive euthanasia" and soon there is a move toward mild "active euthanasia...
...cranky...
...insightful...
...hopeful, yet sometimes pessimistic, these essays point the way for the pilgrim, "Marcel's Homo viator, to explore further traditional notions" such as "falling prey to the worldliness of the world, and man as pilgrim seeking his salvation" through the mystery of signs, sacrament, and information...
...Paul Kantz R ecent reports from Central America indicate the Western Hemisphere's longest-running guerrilla conflict may finally be coming to an end...
...This is why he loves Flannery O'Connor and thus perceives "the Christian culture of the South as, on the whole, a literary asset...
...Yet history is also full of counter-pulls, as if against the force of gravity...
...TAKING SIDES IN GUATEMALA SHATTERED HOPE The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954 Piero Gleijeses Princeton University Press, $29.95,430 pp...
...Percy's argument with modem culture is linked to what he thought was humankind's ontological loss of self in a world where distractions (everything from myriads of theories to overwhelming quantities of consumer goods) increasingly compel people to in some sense forget about themselves...
...Contact: Norma Christensen 820 Park Avenue, Box B Worland, Wyoming 82401 Phone: (307) 347-3836 Fax: (307) 347-2133 or Fernand Beck, Box B Fordham Preparatory School The Bronx, New York 10458 Phone/Fax: (212) 884-6261 8 November 1991:667...
...In the lead essay of part 2, "Is a Theory of Man Possible...
...Percy's description of the morally paralyzed Southern gentleman of the past who "did live in a Christian edifice" might serve as commentary for today's lost wayfarers...
...Will all my declarations be indeed "voluntary," my "unbearable" sighs be misheard, my signals misread...
...Sue Gillingham Dr...
...Many of the essays explore Percy's conviction that we must celebrate where we choose to be...
...They might pull more minds than one toward the "no" pole in a time when the "yes" has begun to look increasingly acceptable on both sides of the Atlantic...
...By our misapprehensions, or as Percy says, our "idolatry," we have become spiritually impoverished...
...Percy's appreciation of particular places (Covington, New Orleans, Georgia, Mississippi) is far from quaint, but rather affectionate and idiosyncratic...
...Kass and Gomez, unless they are mere pessimists, must believe that their voices, raised at this stage, might counter the trends in an erosive time...
...Already in 1957 he sur666: Commonweal mised that "the growing depersonalization of Southern life may not be such a bad thing...
...Percy analyzes what seems to be so wrong, buthe also hopes that through art, literature, reading, even the imaginative use of television, we might find our way out of the desert...
...Kass asks this with and for us...
...Percy answers "yes...
...Sometimes people raise standards, inconvenience themselves, put the common good ahead of private comfort...
...Next comes a more aggressive sort of killing...
...However, his real question is: Does such a question make sense when the two traditional Western modes of thought, "GrecoJudeo-Christian and the scientific-organismic," may conceal more than they reveal...
...This book collects forty-four pieces and is arranged in four sections: Life in the South...
...Should physicians ever, under any circumstances or in any terms, be in the killing business...
...Percy announces that humankind has surrendered the sovereignty of the soul for the pottage of the modem "personality...
...Conservative president Jorge Serrano, who chaired semiofficial talks with the guerrillas prior to his January 1991 election, has pledged that negotiations will soon bring RELIGIOUS STUDIES Tuesday 11 AugustMonday 24 August 1992 LINCOLN COLLEGE OXFORD Lecturers: Professor John Macquarrie Bishop Kallistos T. Ware Professor Rowan Williams Bishop Kenneth Cragg Dr...
...Percy, who died last year, had long been fascinated by questions about language and its relation to the mystery of human existence (see The Message in the Bottle, Lost in the Cosmos...
...The slippery slope notion may reveal a philosophy of history which implies a relentless pull away from concern for human life...
...He lived "there in the strange fashion Chesterton spoke of, that of a man who will neither go inside nor put it [Christianity] entirely behind him as he stands forever grumbling on the porch...
...The Southern gentleman, like us, knew of "the Decalogue, the Beatitudes, the doctrine of the Mystical Body" yet, curiously, he could not embrace what he knew...
...Witty...
...Diagnosing the Modern Malaise" is, in part, about the parallels between the literary-diagnostic method Chekhov used almost a hundred years ago and the strategy of the contemporary novelist who knows something is radically wrong in "a society...overtaken...by fragmentation rather than wholeness...
...Throughout these meditations, Percy reminds us that"one's self is always a leftover from one's theory...
...In "Culture, the Church, and Evangelization," written for a 1988 Vatican symposium, he argues that "the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished" and the church, "guarding the sacred deposit of the faith amid the tumultuous crosscurrents of culture and history," must serve "as the yeast which leavens the cultural lump...
...Victor A. Kramer p ercy's"signposts" guide the modem wayfarer through an arid post-Christian world, one saturated with epistemological theories that this diagnostician-novelist is convinced are radically incoherent...
...Dillistone Bishop Richard Holloway Canon John Fenton Dr...
...In a group of three essays about the novel he surveys the possibilities and challenges for the artist "to humanize the life around him, to formulate it for someone else, to render the interstates...
...The essays build on that fascination...
...Such atrocities, never punished, still occur...
...These essays are both lamentation and celebration...
...These initially disconnected pieces, superbly edited by Patrick Samway, add significantly to Percy's total accomplishment...
...Carlos Gomez took such questioning with him into the clinics of the Netherlands and came back with empirical evidence-not the last word, to be sure, but an important word--suggesting that trust breaks down, terms lose their meaning, and, in the name of dignity and autonomy, something important to the community and integral to definitions of human dignity tends to be lost in the blur of Netherlandish practices...
...ARGUING WITH MODERNITY SIGNPOSTS IN A STRANGE LAND Walker Percy Edit~l with an introduction by Patrick Samway Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 428 pp...
...Morality and Religion...
...how unlike him to have had the Psalms...
...His queries about the Civil War, racism, and integration are ultimately not limited to peculiarities of the South, for he sees in these regional questions metaphors for how all might live...
...These varied essays provide a clearer picture of the Louisiana doctor-writer fascinated with facts about the eternal verities as well as the epistemological necessity of regional and particular attachments...
...These essays will assist readers of Percy's fiction in understanding the novels, and draw new readers to his work...
...Science, Language, Literature...
...Dare I enter a kind of covenantal relatio~l with a physician if there is the hazard that she is to become the agent of my death...
...The country is Guatemala, Central America's most populous (9 million people) but oft-forgotten republic, where fighting between the ruthless military and Marxist-led rebels has flared and sputtered for some thirty years...
...Human rights groups have documented the murders or "disappearances" of 140,000 civilians during this period, mostly Maya Indians massacred by the armed forces or fight-wing death squads...
Vol. 118 • November 1991 • No. 19
