Critics' choices for Christmas
Norris, Kathleen
Kathleen Morris Kathleen Norris's most recent book is Cloister Walk (Riverhead). She lives in Lemmon, South Dakota. In our cerebral and ideological age, in which even churches seem in danger of...
...This is why the scholar Roberta Bondi seems like a miracle to me...
...As for Hebrews, she writes, "I see that there is more to the epistle...
...Speaking briefly of other books I have given as gifts this year, and will continue to pass on to friends, I'd have to mention Oscar Hijuelos's novel, Mr...
...Many of the essays in an anthology edited by the poet David Rosenberg (Communion: Contemporary Writers Reveal the Bible in Their Lives, Anchor Books, $30, 547 pp...
...Scott Russell Sanders on Amos and James...
...Also the novelist Laura Furman, a Jew, in an essay on the Epistle to the Hebrews, tells of being uncomfortable attending Mass with her husband's family, until at one funeral Mass she begins to comprehend what the Eucharist means for Catholics...
...Other standouts: Robert Coles on Ecclesiastes...
...I confess to an un-Presbyterian affection for an early poem, "Brother Peter Considers Mulroy Drunk under the Rosebush," with its evocation of God's "strange fierce love...
...It is a moving articulation of faith and wonder at the sacrificial gift of Christ...
...in "The Shortest Days," which begins, "Hold out your hands, God my Father,/Because I want to give you my old age," she speaks of "tiny maple leaves...
...I have been able to share the books with intelligent high school graduates who are vaguely interested in religion, as well as well-educated, self-described "former Christians" who had lost sight of the fact that, as Bondi puts it, "theology is about saving lives...
...Her In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems (Johns Hopkins University Press, $29.95,258 pp...
...Our whole being must receive the good news-our eyes and other senses as well as our thoughts...
...No small part of the book's power is that Mr...
...Anne Porter and Josephine Jacobsen are rare birds-that is, great Catholic poets who have won the respect of their peers in the secular, literary world...
...in which a senseless act of violence straight out of today's headlines becomes a compelling tale of grief, forgiveness, and redemption...
...Ives' Christmas (HarperCollins, $23,248 pp...
...A book I read years ago, Margaret Miles's Image as Insight, helped me to return to church as an adult and find a home there...
...Generous and healing words for Jew and Christian alike.stian alike...
...These splendid drawings and meditations on such images as creation, the ark of the covenant, altars, bread, candles, the Mother of God, the Transfiguration, the Cross, the empty tomb, and Word of God would have been good nourishment...
...Bewildered by Christianity as I was being taught it, comprehending my role as an intellectual to be that of cutting God's miracles and mysteries down to size, I would have welcomed the deeply incarnational Christianity exemplified in Philibert's comment that "God's revelation is eloquent not only in words, but in the extended silence of the burning bush, the smoking mountain, the hovering dove, the descending tongue of flame, and the bread broken and shared...
...my fellow Christmas critic, Valerie Sayers, who teaches writing at Notre Dame, has a brilliant and funny reflection on her childhood image of biblical women...
...is a welcome addition to American letters...
...Good religious autobiography, writing that is never self-aggrandizing but manages to be self-revelatory in a useful, theological way, is a difficult art...
...In our cerebral and ideological age, in which even churches seem in danger of becoming just one more place for conservatives and liberals to do battle, Christian poetry that is fully in-carnational, firmly grounded in the five senses but also wonderfully transcendent, offers true refreshment...
...Grounded in the patristic era-her academic degree, from Oxford, is in the wild Christological controversies of the fifth century-she has, in two recent books (Memories of God, $14.95, 205 pp., and In Ordinary Time, $6.95, 205 pp., both Abingdon), turned toward plain speech and great storytelling...
...have proved inspiring to my literary friends, many of whom haven't been to church in years and have lost their sense of what is in the Bible...
...Both of Bondi's books offer engaging and often humorous accounts of how she was "healed theologically" from the scarifying revivalism of her childhood, as well as the "abstract, logical, propo-sitional, and systematic" God she encountered in graduate school, a God, and a theology, deeply suspicious of the subjective and personal...
...curling like birds' feet round the frost...
...The nuns would describe them as both "beautiful and good," which Sayers thought must mean they were something like "Miss Alabama in her white evening gown...
...than exhortations to conversion...
...Bharati Mukherjee on Hagar...
...is one I wish I'd had access to when I was young...
...A new book, Seeing and Believing: Images of Christian Faith (drawings by Frank Kacmarcik, prose by Paul Philibert, O.P., Liturgical Press, $49.95, 204 pp...
...More importantly, it would have given me a healthy alternative to the "de-mythologizing" of the Christian mysteries that was in vogue during the 1960s, when I was a young adult...
...Both are not as well known as they deserve to be- Porter because she only recently published her first book, a collection of sixty years' worth of verse (An Altogether Different Language, Zoland Books, $10.95, 116 pp., and a National Book Award finalist), Jacobsen because she has, to quote one reviewer, written "only when she has had something significant to say...
...Her chapter on God the Father, in Memories of God, strikes me as a true blessing for our times: the often moving story of how a feminist woman began praying to God the Father in private prayer, and ended up not only better appreciating this metaphor in the Christian tradition, but also reconciling with her own father, a man with whom she had long had a fearful and strained relationship...
...The novelist Bradford Morrow, near death in an ambulance, finds to his surprise that the only thing in his mind is Psalm 23...
...Ives sees himself as an ordinary Catholic, an ordinary Christian...
...Its catechism of Christian images and symbols would have been of much greater use to me than the material I had to memorize for confirmation class (and then promptly forgot...
...I find Anne Porter's exactitude breathtaking...
...In other poems, she offers prayers, psalmic praises, wonderment over the Eucharist brought at dawn to hospital patients, and reflections on child-rearing, marriage, and widowhood that are both sobering and joyful...
Vol. 123 • December 1996 • No. 21
