The Word According to Eve

...He is very clear that the Bible constitutes an unusually "open" text: It can be read in a very great number of ways, as well as approached through a great number of methods...

...MurCommonweal 2 5 November 6, 1998 phy obviously has a real desire to come to terms with this impossible, demanding, impelling, and aggressively tricky text...

...George's interest in photography informs the structure of these chapters...

...The material is dense and complicated...

...And since Marcuse's essay was the intellectual inspiration for current university speech codes and stabs at political correctness, Foner also never mentions these exercises in unfreedom, even though he does carry his story up to the 1990s...

...The Word According to Eve is highly engaging and readable, regardless of your degree of knowledge...

...Alan Wolfe is University Professor and Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Boston University...

...Master Georgie takes us back some six decades to the Crimean War, a scandalously mismanaged campaign which squandered troops to disease and mud and had its most conspicuous folly, the charge of the Light Brigade, burnished into another chivalric myth by Lord Tennyson...

...The charge impinges obliquely on the action of Master Georgie...

...And nearly half of the capacity of the Titanic's lifeboats went unused because there were no precautionary boat drills...

...Perhaps "not in the United States" is the answer, but from a European standpoint that seems interesting in itself...

...The reasons why people arrive at certain sets of ideas will form part of those ideas...

...Sara Maitland is a novelist and theologian...

...A key element in feminist theory is that it is impossible to write without a personal agenda-there is no abstract author, or abstract truth...

...Murphy is extremely smart...

...We have a lot to thank Cullen Murphy for here...

...The subtitle--Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own--summarizes his approach...

...This may be because I know more about the New Testament material and the New Testament scholars, and consequently became more conscious of what seemed to me like omissions...

...Compared with, say, feminism's encounter with classical Marxism or feminism's encounter with theories of representation, its influence on religion has not been that significant...

...In short, it is not "special pleading," "emotionalism," or "bad scholarship" to study something of the scholar along with the scholarly handling of the scholar's subject matter...

...Broadly, Murphy divides his book by methodologies, by ways of coming into relationship with the Bible...

...These disasters were celebrated in England for their displays of chivalry in extremis, the attractive, manly imprudence and amateurism which, to the disenchanted and postimperial eye, were largely responsible for bringing them about...

...While literary theory would now insist that there are multiple readings for any text, this is both more true and more obvious of the Bible (because of the long period over which it was constructed in its present form, because it has been a key text for three different, and frequently contesting religions, because it is not clearly genre-coded, and for other reasons...

...It is not a series of biographical sketches of feminist biblical scholars...

...This sort of book would simply be unimaginable without feminist theological methodology...

...Each of these tells two of the novel's six chapters, starting in Liverpool in 1846 and ending outside Sebastopol in 1854...

...And it is not "Bible stories for grown-ups...

...Murphy's book is a crafty combination of all three and therefore something new...

...Where are the "imaginative," recreative biblicists who use both literary and classical preaching genres...

...His most recent book is One Nation, After All (Viking Penguin...

...This makes sense and makes for a well-paced and variegated read...

...The writer (or any other subject) is inevitably structured by a personal history, including gender...

...But can I really be sure that the Reagan adrninistration--or, for that matter, the Thatcher administration--did not serve the cause of freedom...

...Scott's expedition failed, after all, because it lacked the prosaic professionalism of the Norwegian team that reached the Pole with no casualties...

...But just as international politics were morally problematic, so were domestic politics in ways Foner never acknowledges...

...He discusses the influence of Herbert Marcuse on the New Left, but never mentions Marcuse's notorious essay "Repressive Tolerance," which argued against free speech--at least as that term is traditionally understood by civil libertarians...

...Among her more recent books is Angel Matter: The Collected Stories (Henry Holt...

...Where were the liberation theologians, the Socialist politicized readings of the Bible...

...One of the reasons Foner can be so clear and compelling when dealing with the nineteenth century is that we now have enough perspective to know which side advanced the cause of freedom and which did not...

...With a pretty discreet courtesy, he brings these contemporary scholars--and they are all academics, incidentally, which is interesting--into a human relationship with their readers, so as to bring their readers into a human relationship both with the women of the Bible and with the ways in which we might read that text...

...At one point he quotes the political philosopher Jean Cohen's important assertion that respect for privacy is the linchpin of freedom, but he fails to acknowledge the role that the New Left's slogan "The Personal is the Political" might have contributed to the abrogation of privacy...

...On the miserable periphery of battle, one of its three narrators takes some comfort in being "at least better off as far as transport is concerned...

...I personally found the archaeological chapters the most interesting...

...Potter, a pompous and touchingly uxorious amateur scholar who is married to George's sister Beatrice...

...The religious intervention is simply a part of this larger phenomenon...

...Some day we may discover that contemporary conservatives used the language of freedom to justify unequal distributions of income which left all too many Americans unable to control their lives...

...In his discussion of contemporary events, Foner drops the rich appreciation of nuance that characterizes his treatment of earlier struggles over wages and family life...

...He buys at auction a "mare so shocked by its recent subjection to bombardment as to have passed beyond nervousness into a state bordering on imbecility, and therefore manageable...

...That obliqueness characterizes the whole novel The central character, George Hardy, is visible to us only in the cracked mirror of the accounts of three dependents...

...But this incompetence was the felix culpa that gave a premise to heroism and models for England's young men...

...There has been an explosion of approaches to the Bible over the last century, and these include not just traditional theological explorations but also anthropological, sociological, archaeological, historical, and literary (to name but a few) critical methods...

...Freedom is too important a term to be reduced to one side in political or ideological debate...

...Pompey Jones, a child of the streets who learns photography from him...

...WORTH READING TWICE Daniel M. Murtaugh eryl Bainbridge's Master Georg/e pursues the interests and, to some extent, the methods of her two previous historical novels, The Birthday Boys (1995) and Every Man for Himself (1996...

...But can we really know that for the present time...

...it could not have been written ten years ago...

...But its principles were alien to American ideals of freedom, a point that at the very least ought to be mentioned in a book celebrating the story of freedom...

...It seems irrelevant to him that, in its internal structure, the Communist party denied dissent and organized itself in a highly authoritarian manner...

...But we might also discover that the bureaucratic state had overreached itself and that unleashing more entrepreneurial activity also unleashed unexpected cultural and personal freedom...

...I suspect that some of the grace of this book--a grace which manifests itself, incidentally, in a considerable degree of both humor and self-revelation---comes from a genuine affection (if that is not too light a word) for the Bible itself...

...Murphy therefore looks at the development of feminist hermeneutics (or Bible reading) through the lens of the women who are doing it...

...But these are quibbles...

...He is, in different ways, a beloved central concern of Myrtle, a foundling servant girl who bears his children...

...Foner never mentions the fact that the American Communist party avidly supported the Red Scare, defending the use of the Smith Act against Trotskyites...

...However, Murphy's case is strongly endorsed by the structure and style, as well as the conCommonweal 2 4 November6,1998 tent, of his book...

...To admit this, to relate one's agenda to the matter at hand, is not only a question of honesty: it is the only way forward ("the personal is the political" was the classical formulation...

...Foner celebrates the contributions these critics made to American freedom as he speaks with disdain of the establishment...

...Those two novels dealt with memorable events of 1912: the fatal expedition to the South Pole led by Robert Falcon Scott and the sinking of the Titanic...

...The medium that gives its very name to an ideal of Commonweal 2 6 November 6, 1998...

...three days ago over two hundred cavalry horses of the Light Brigade stampeded into the camp, their riders having perished in a charge along the north valley...

...To locate these women scholars he gives us thumbnail sketches of place, from university quads to Middle Eastern mountain tops...

...The Word According to Eve is not a history of ideas--the sort of book that traces the evolution of a particular way of reading the Bible...

...It is generous in spirit and open-minded, and it gives a valuable access to an important area of scholarship that is too often presented as inflammatory or trivial...

...The story of freedom, in short, never ends and does not contain clear-cut political conclusions...

...The writer wants to know, he wants to engage, he wants me, the reader, to engage...

...The cold war, Foner writes, "helped to legitimize a serious assault on civil liberties at home," noting that "the tiny Communist party hardly posed a threat to American security and many of the victims of the Red Scare had little or nothing to do with communism...

...Careful quotation gives these women domestic voices as well as professional ones, and Murphy's own knowledge is displayed in such a way as to give the reader confidence in his selection rather than to overawe...

...Foner is right that the Communist party was no threat to American security...

...But to engage, not to submit...

...I rather doubt this myself: If there is indeed a true intellectual revolution afoot (or rather ahead, in both senses) it springs not from feminism's encounter with religion but from feminism itself...

...He is a restless, attractive bisexual, heir to a Liverpool fortune, a surgeon and amateur photographer who feels "that the war would at last provide him with the prop he needed...

...Not in the academies is probably the answer...

...Each chapter moves toward the exposure of one of these plates and the production of the captioned picture...

...So the narrative action resolves itself into a pictorial summary, which, as it turns out, falsifies what we have been told...

...Unfortunately, The Story American of Freedom--for all its breadth, energy, and insight--does both...

...OPENING THE BIBLE Sara Maitland ~ epeatedly throughout this excellent book, Cullen Murphy argues that "feminism's encounter with religion" is profoundly radical and that the changes that it has wrought upon biblical studies constitute nothing less than "the next intellectual revolution...

...and Dr...

...Each is called a "Plate," dated, and given a title which is actually a caption: "Girl in the Presence of Death," "A Veil Lifted," "Funeral Procession Shadowed by Beatrice," and so on...

...I am no great fan of Ronald Reagan and I find myself persistently at odds with the conservative ideas on which he rode to power...

...and over all found the Old Testament section more fascinating than the New Testament...

...Murphy does not so much pick his way through this dense forest as dance through it...

...I am making this sound complicated, and it is probably vital to add that not only could this book not have been written ten years ago but that it could only have been written by a skillful journalist (Murphy is managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly), someone with an eye both for the story and for the humaninterest touches that illuminate the story...