God, Country, Notre Dame
Skillin, Edward S.
sionary religions, Christianity and Islam, even in circumstances of slavery? This may have been "the result of an apparently unique West African susceptibility to external religious influences."...
...The atmosphere at the school is warmly human--people feel that they are treated with personal interest and concern...
...their "unique susceptibility" gets the blame...
...Their innovative enterprise gets little credit...
...And there is the case of his hobby of flying in fast planes...
...For all the evils of the enslavers' faiths, West Africans in the American Sruth found ways to do a kind of jiujitsu translation--using the force of the Christian power that was directed at them, against itself, to their advantage...
...And he comes to play a key role in the reaching of an atomic arms agreement and in lessening tensions between our country and the Soviet Union--and there is more...
...God, Country, Notre Dame itseff embodies an obvious refutation of the apathetic notion that"in the modern world one person cannot make a difference...
...It is a story that needs no help from an ideology which, in the end, distracts from the point...
...of Institutional Advancement 9001 New Hampshire Avenue Silver Spring, MD 20903-3699 (301) 439-0551 25January1991:73...
...Special programs in Spirituality, Word and Worship, and Mission and Cross-cultural Studies are examples of imaginative developments in the school...
...Father Hesburgh says that each one of us can do something effective in the cause of a better world...
...Graduate Degrees and Opportunities for Continuing Education • Program of Spirituality • Ministries Development Program • Mission and Cross-cultural Studies WASHINGIION A Roman Catholic School for Ministry "The WTU is a creative response to a real need in the post.Vatican H Church, the need for a theologically educated laity who really are the Christian ministers to the world...
...If only Wood could rewrite his book with confidence in his story and less condescension toward his readers...
...Now for the issues that have so strongly engaged him: First, there is his important role in the starting of the Peace Corps, a prime example of"service to others...
...While many a present-day autobiography is an account of a personal quest, Father Hesburgh presents rather a story of the way he was caught up in the big issues from the sixties on...
...An exception is the way he writes of his love for his priestly vocation and of his devotion to his daily offering of the Mass...
...Michael J. Scanlon, O.SA., S.T.D...
...And then, if only I could review that version of his plot, I could say the good things about it that the violence of his writing here too consistently obscures...
...Then, later in the sixties, Father Hesburgh takes on the student revolt as it strikes his beloved Notre Dame...
...In large part this is an exciting story of the crises of our times...
...If only...
...IN BRIEF GOD, COUNTRY, NOTRE DAME, by Theodore M. Hesburgh, Doubleday, $21.95,274pp...
...With all the salient missions he undertook in this country and overseas and the many executive roles in which he functioned year after year, Father Hesburgh's primary concern and the major part of his activities encompassed the remarkable academic and spiritual development of the University of Notre Dame...
...He was indeed involved in the many-sided social progress he cites with such satisfaction...
...Soon afterward he becomes involved in the civil rights movement at its most precarious stage...
...He rarely tells explicitly of his intimate feelings...
...E.S.S...
...Chairman Department of Systematic Theology For further information contact: WASHINGTON THEOLOGICAL UNION Dept...
...He also finds himself called upon to defend the cause of academic freedom...
...The story is one of horror and terror, too rarely interrupted by nobility and hope...
...Completed just months before the trauma of the Persian Gulf, the book is basically optimistic...
...Such language about "unique susceptibilities" itself verges on culturalism or racism, but any instrument evidently will do to explain away what often turned out to be free choices by slaves...
Vol. 118 • January 1991 • No. 2
