Under God
O'Brien, Dennis
are properly their own possessions, and the two of them lose possession of them- selves, and of their personal lives. The adherence to traditional forms of plotting and revealing makes all of these...
...And not the least of these is John Nelson Darby...
...This book proposes that the old vocabulary may be the gold that we have abandoned prema- turely...
...Bush is viewed as unprincipled in his willingness to exploit any sacred symbol for office: the flag or the "theology of Willy Horton"--to use Wills's phrase for the suppressed "Satanism" of that despicable campaign tactic...
...Ash seems to be modeled most- ly on Wordsworth...
...His absorption in philosophies of nature and spirit are beau- tifully transcribed and explored...
...But if Bush was unprincipled in waving sacred sym- bols, he at least knew their power...
...Ostensibly the book seems to be about the most recent presi- dential election and the religious back- grounds and foregrounds of the principal candidates...
...What this novel does is valuable: it shows us the outcome of curios- ity...
...The book begins as satire, from which only Roland is exempt...
...Byatt's sense of humor returns as a sense of taste...
...Under God is quite delectable if ulti- mately indigestible...
...George Bush courted Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye and while not quite "born again" was willing to aver "Jesus Christ is my personal savior" for the benefit of Bible-belt voters...
...he stands, like the painters of the Hudson Valley school, at a pinnacle in history, looking onto an untrammeled landscape, where smoke rises in the dis- tance as a threat...
...Ash, like Roland, is exempted from satire...
...His most recent book is God and the New Haven Railway (Beacon...
...A former seminarian: Gary Hart, and two finalists desperately seeking salvation at the polls by rediscovering reli- gion...
...What you call an experience really decides how you live with it...
...REMBERT G. WEAKLAND, O.S.B., is a graduate of Juilliard School of Music and Columbia University and was appointed arch- bishop of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1977, by Pope Paul V1...
...THEOLOGY OF SOUND BITES UNDER GOD Religion and American Politics Garry Wills Simon & Schuster, $24.95,445 pp...
...The two poets, Ash and LaMotte, share visions of a transcendent creation, begin- ning with nymphs and water (~ la Hans Christian Andersen and Social Darwinism) and ending with the insistence on emotion and necessity (i.e., sex) as being at the heart of all forward motion...
...Michael Dukakis sur- prised the nation (and himself) by being the first presidential candidate who was Greek Orthodox...
...I enjoyed every chapter and would gladly reread it from beginning to end or end to beginning-- it would make no great difference...
...The Inner Life of America's Jews (Harper & Row...
...He is the author of Where Are We...
...The contemporary world--with its sec- ular aborted love affairs and career suspi- cions, the prices of liberated minds and bodies won at a great cost--seems gross and noxious indeed compared with the nineteenth-century landscape, both as fact and as language...
...It is a tossup in Wills's account who comes off worse among the front runners on the use and abuse of religion in the late campaign...
...FANNY HOWE teaches at the University of California in San Diego...
...Dukakis, on the other hand, emerges as a pitiful fig- ure--as awkward in the dense religious world of American aspirations as in a tank helmet...
...Dukakis is, in Wills's view, the consummate modernist figure, an ascetic rationalist, a fixer of problems who sells competence in office when the electorate seeks transcendence...
...The whole vocabulary of the Victorian world is restored and given to us as a kind REVIEWERS LEONARD FEIN, a veteran observer of Israel, is a leader of the "peace camp" within the American Jewish community...
...LaMotte is clearly a composite (and some- times irritating) portrait of Emily Dickinson...
...Thereby hangs whatever there is of, a tale in Wills's treatment of whatever it is that he is after in his current work...
...70: Commonweal of paradise of speech...
...MARTIN E. MARTY is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, senior editor of the Christian Century, and author of many books on American religion and culture...
...The adherence to traditional forms of plotting and revealing makes all of these genres (including many pages of poems by LaMotte-Ash-Byatt) into pleasurable indulgences...
...In ways the novel is reactionary in its contempt for feminism and, too, in its fundamental desire to recov- er that lost and well-loved world ("dear old England") that we have come to asso- ciate, here, with colonialism and snobbery...
...They act out their visions on each other, with tragic results...
...As Ash pokes around the rivers and forests, he stands for the imminent destruction of nature, thanks to such curiosity...
...DENNIS O'BRIEN is president of the University of Rochester...
...There were two up-front preachers in the lists: Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson...
...ROBERT P. IMBELLI, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, is director of the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry at Boston College...
...Given the range of tongues, the attention to each sentence and image and idea, this is a great read, and a book to return to, after your curiosity has been satisfied by the unfolding dramas...
...Dennis O'Brien hat do Plutarch, Pocahontas, Dan Quayle, and John Nelson Darby all have in common...
...these two men are taken more seriously than any other characters in the story...
...But their sacrifice nonetheless has in it the nobility of a belief system that elevates its own self-definition to the realm of the ecstatic...
...they are propelled by plot...
...Those unwritten bedroom scenes between Victorian couples are here exposed and explored, but without prurience...
...Answer: they are all featured players in Garry Wills's wide-screen saga of religion in and out of American politics...
Vol. 118 • January 1991 • No. 2
