Presences
Dufresne, Bethe
lus, the tiny pre-formed little person crouched in a sperm cell which Nicholas Hartsoecker depicted in an infamous drawing of 1694. (ttomunculus was not the term used by these earlier...
...Some sixty years after he first felt God's undeniable presence while making his first confession at seventeen, he is still almost boyishly in love with what he calls "the mystery of being" and thrilled by the adventure, a word he uses again and again, of putting the gospel into practice...
...President, Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Conn...
...Pinto-Correia is by no means confined merely to Christian overlay...
...Although he never patronizes the poor people he lived among during eight years in Jersey City, neither does he underestimate the buoying effect on his own Iife of a large trust fund...
...She concludes: "Nobody said that reproduction was an easy matter during the Scientific Revolution, but the subject has not become any easier today....'" ~ Dennis O'Brien's most recer, t book is All the Essential Half-Truths about Higher Education (University of Chicago Press...
...Bethe Dufresne is a reporter and columnist for The Day in New London, Connecticut...
...Ovists, on the other hand, suffered from what Pinto-Correia labels "the curse of the left testicle...
...Monsters (deformed progeny) in turn were a great problem for all the preformationists...
...With typical underdramatization, he recalls that as he lay near death his thoughts weren't of God or Judgment Day, only that this jungle was a strange place for someone like him to die...
...The terrible experience of killing a Japanese laborer who appeared to be a soldier helped teach Moore how easy it is for a military man, whether he's a U.S...
...But finally this question is grasping at air...
...It would be easy, from afar, to view Moore as an activist first and a bishop second, just as Mother Teresa was often erroneously regarded as a social worker...
...If he had more courage, he writes, he might have given his entire fortune to the poor, as his idol Saint Francis of Assisi did...
...BISHOP WITH TRUST FUND Bethe Dufresne n Episcopal bishop who is a family friend always had a funny quip to allay my fears when l was growing up...
...With his vast wealth, intellectual vigor, and lifelong dedication to empowering the poor, he's been compared to Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
...If there really was a pre-formed human in each sperm, what was the spiritual fate of all the sperm-persons who never connected with an ovum...
...On the question of life after death, he used to say it was foolish to worry about the furniture in heaven or the temperature in hell...
...To make his argument, Giussani quotes not oxdy Aquinas, Kant, and Wittgenstein, but novelists and poets...
...She ranges about the world's creation myths fi'orr, the pyramids to Polynesia, as she demonstrates our fascinating attempts to find some connection between human meaning and the mysteries of nature...
...But while he chastises George Bush for going to war for oil in the Gulf, he never fully articulates a practical or theological strategy for dealing with Saddam I Iussein or another I lifter...
...if God had incapsulated all generations from the beginning, what was the point of such aberrations...
...With a keen appreciation for absurdity, Moore remembers how in 1941 he and a buddy shopped for boots at Abercrombie and Fitch on their way to Marine boot camp...
...His essential presence is felt in the city' parishes he describes so vividly and, finally, as he leads us on a tour of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, that great Gothic space on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where he reveled in making everyone feel not just welcome, but equal...
...McGilI-Queen's edition is in fact a reissue ot this translation, though there is no such acknowledgment in the book's publicity...
...HARD QUESTIONS, SOFT ANSWERS Bernard G. Prusak W onsignor Luigi Giussani is the head of Comunione e Liberazione (CL), an "ecclesial fraternity" officially recognized by Pope John Paul lI in 1982...
...The group's mission, as its sophisticated website attests (www.comunioneliberazione.org), is "education to maturity in the faith...
...All orders must be prepaid...
...Its publication history is also telling...
...If l truly wish to know [an object]," he writes, "I have no choice but to look down and fix my eyes on the object itself...
...What is the meaning of everytb.ing...
...As an infantry leader on Guadalcanal, Moore was shot in the chest...
...As he puts it, "What is the meaning of everything...
...Although somewhat embarrassed by his inherited good fortune, the bishop chose activism for the poor rather than self-flagellation...
...Moore theorizes that if heaven and hell exist, they are the same place...
...One can read that decision as either sensible or self-serving, and Moore seems to have read it both ways himself...
...Vatican I1: The Continuing Agenda Edited by Anthony J. Cernera, Ph.D...
...But is it really that easy...
...That engagement is at once existential and religious...
...Finally, since all these early scientists were determined Christians---the greatest of them, and PintoCorreia's only possible hero, was the priest Spallanzani--there was continual and powerful interplay between theology and biological theory...
...Living life fully leads to religion and to a belief in God...
...After appearing in Italian in 1986, it was published in English in 1990 by Ignatius Press...
...Theology, he saw even before Vatican II, cannot belong only to the theologians...
...He marched for civil rights with Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 and was tear gassed during a peace march in Saigon in 1970...
...At the partially demolished headquarters of voters' rights activists, he conducted Mass with an ironing board as the altar...
...Personal check, money order (U.S...
...men were produced by the right...
...Typically he is satisfied simply to quote, without interCommonweal 2 4 March 13,1998...
...Epigenesis suggests that everyone starts homogenous, equal--an embryology for democracy...
...then the microscope, now the computer with our present temptation to reconstruct human thinking as computation...
...I have seen this thing with my own eyes...
...For better and worse, his focus is narrower...
...It has been the subject of two conferences: the first, last November, attended by some thirty bishops and cardinals in Rome for the Synod of the Americas...
...There is a grave need for what Giussani does: write an invitation to faith...
...There are many reasons for reading this work: a delight in the curiosa which abound in this early science: Jablot's drawing of a microrganism with a mustache, Dalenpantius's little-man-in-the semen who is wearing a hat...
...For example, people often ask "why...
...when they're suffering, or when a loved one is suffering...
...Encountered in high school this rhetoric of either/or may have been thrilling, but finally it is manipulative and reductive in its own way...
...According to Giussani, this existential argument is the most realistic, reasonable, and respectful of human longing...
...Yet, despite having already appeared in English, the "new" book has been greeted as an event...
...The movement, as it is of Len called by its members, developed out of a student association Giussani inspired and led while he was teaching high school in Italy in the 1950s...
...One can learn the lesson that instrumentation not only reveals, it also misleads...
...From communion follows liberation...
...whither...
...In the final chapter, "The Fat Lady Will Not Sing," Pinto-Correia notes the preformationist aura of The Bell Curve (published 1994) which argues that "our mental limits are established at fertilization...
...Marine or a Nazi, to convince himself that the enemy is inhuman...
...The embryology of the seventeenth and eighteenth century offers a compelling case study of the intersection of so-called "pure science" with everything from theology to politics...
...For Giussani, apparently it is...
...Giussani's book is short and its argument correspondingly short on substance...
...Prefonnation was a wonderful prop for the stability of social class, kings produce kings, commoners replicate from generation to generation...
...Folk and some learned lore had it that women were produced when sperm of the left testicle was involved in gestation...
...This background is relevant to understanding Giussani's book...
...But he decided that would be irresponsible toward his nine children and that it wasn't necessary to impoverish himself in order to empower the poor...
...Vatican II 278pp 6x9 hardcover ISBN1-888112-02-6 _ _ copies @ S23.00 Connecticut Residents add 6% sales tax Canadian residents add 7% G S T _ _ _ Shipping & Handling: U.S.: Add $3.00 for first book, $1.00 for each additional book_ _ _ Outside the U.S.: Add $4.50 for first book, $1.50 for each additional book _ _ TOTAL 1221 Payment enclosed El Charge to my Q VISA 121 MasterCard...
...The spermist camp had insuperable theological problems, however, because of the profusion of sperm...
...Moore ultimately became a visible peace activist during the cold war and Vietnam...
...d a t e Account# Phone# Cardholder's Name & Signature Ship To Name Address City, State, Zip Code SACRED HEART UNIVERSITY PRESS 5151 Park Avenue _9 Fairfield, CT 06432-1000 Voice: 203.371.7971 Fax: 203.365.4889 Email mirona@sacredheart, edu Commonweal 2 3 March 13, 1998 the leader of the movements he championed, only a presence within them...
...Moore, known as a compelling preacher, doesn't claim to be a theologian...
...Paul Moore, the retired Episcopal bishop of New York, takes that thought a bit further--some say too far-in the epilogue of his appealing autobiography...
...Strangely, or perhaps not, Moore's high-profile activities around the globe are the least engaging part of Presences...
...Reality calls us on to an Other...
...This renewed attention may be explained by McGillQueen's plan to publish two further books by Giussani that develop the argument of The Religious Sense...
...Like FDR, he's also been called a traitor to his class...
...The human being cannot avoid this alternative: either he is the slave of men or a subject, dependent upon God," Giussani writes...
...ttomunculus was not the term used by these earlier researchers, rather it appears to be a term of opprobrium foisted upon them by self-assured twentieth-century historians...
...Moore recounts stories about his life among the very rich, the very, poor, and the very powerful with an amazing lack Commonweal 2 2 March 13, 1998 of self-consciousness...
...And if there's nothing awaiting him but eternal sleep, he's not terribly worried about that, either...
...Other critics complain that his emphasis on social and political action has helped turn many away from the Episcopal church...
...currency only) payable to Sacred Heart University Press...
...But Paul Moore is committed to the gospel, and finds spiritual inspiration there for all his controversial works, including the ordination of women and homosexuals...
...Charity tends to comfort the giver and humiliate the receiver, Moore argues, therefore it's better to raise taxes on the rich to support a more equal distribution of wealth than to count on the intervention of patrons and saints...
...The left is feminine ( sinister, Lat...
...But a reading of this book suggests a less academic interest, for Giussani's book is no ordinary work of foundational theology...
...But Moore seems never to have had any doubt that politics, inasmuch as it can save or ruin lives, is God's business...
...VISA or MasterCard are accepted...
...Over and against atheistic humanism, Giussani concludes that religion is not a denial of human life, but an affirmation of its deepest tendencies...
...Mostly lay, mostly "youth" between the ages of twenty and forty, CL is now active in sixty-seven countries, including the United States and Canada...
...In that context, dealing with his own personal wealth has always loomed as an important issue for Moore...
...Although it is clear that God has been the unifying force in Moore's life, overall this book is more about the struggle to live according to God's will than the struggle to articulate an explanation of faith...
...Applying this principle, he argues that "the world is a sign...
...Reason, in order to be faithful to its nature and to such a calling, is forced to admit the existence of something other underpinning, explaining everything...
...This "education in freedom" presupposes only a community, the church, to make it happen...
...the second in December at the United Nations...
...The bishop writes frankly but not too revealingly about his personal life, including his ambition, his depressions, and his estrangement from his first wife, who died of cancer in 1973...
...Animated by Giussani's charisma and prolific writing, it has taken a leading role in the pope's "new evangelization...
...One can sense the theological import from difficult issues faced by spermists and ovists respectively...
...As the bishop freely admits, he wasn't Reflect on the spirit of the Second Vatican Council through 12 new essays...
...Refreshingly frank about his own sins and shortcomings, Moore says he'll take his chances on God's mercy if there's such a thing as Judgment Day...
...But however pampered he and his peers were, the ethos of the rich in 1940 demanded total sacrifice for God and country in war...
...sounds like the most radical question one can ask...
...Born in 1919, Moore grew up in palatial mansions in Morristown, New Jersey, and Pahn Beach, Florida, and received a gentleman's education at Saint Paul's School and Yale...
...After all, he'll never know the difference...
...In 1951, he accompanied Thurgood Marshall to Mississippi to protest the false arrest and subsequent murder of three black men...
...The sheer presence of God, he explains, would be heaven or hell, depending on the sins of the beholder...
...Finally, one should not think that the basic issues have been put to rest...
...These and other painful incidents, like the discovery that his daughter was sexually abused by a Jersey City parishioner, make us wonder what anguish he has left off the page...
...Under the general preformationist assumption, various savants championed either the ovum or the sperm as the locus of the prior form...
...For him, this question arises out of "the radical engagement of the self with life...
...Against the positivist reduction of life to mathematical equations or biochemical reactions, Giussani argues for openness to the "ultimate questions"-whence...
...But Giussani's book is an example not of faith seeking understanding, but of faith seeking uncritical--even unearned--affirmation...
...Why would God chose to bundle the human race into the lesser, sinister/emale...
...In a culture where faith is no longer a given of life, where the church is no longer coextensive wiLh society, it is something of a trick, if not self-deception, to be a believer without understanding what one believes...
...For Giussani, "the very existence of the question affirms the existence of an answer...
Vol. 125 • March 1998 • No. 5
