God

...David DeLaura is professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania...

...C. Michael Curtis, in his thoughtful introduction, speaks of his own religious reawakening in 1977...

...But that mild divinity— when he does put in an appearance— seems close to the gentle Jesus of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Liberal Protestantism...

...This fact helps the reader see that the widely noted recent lifting of the taboo against religion in the mainstream press is less a sympathetic response to spiritual longings than a recognition of the highly politicized issues that fracture the denominations, long in decline and facing alternative spiritual options, ranging from a revitalized Evangelicalism on the one side to postbiblical self-improvement programs on the other...

...The book conveys, as few theologians and sociologists have done, the emotional texture of some unsettling encounters with God...

...But a surprising number of these women remain alienated and haunting figures, lost in this twilight period...

...But the comedy and anguish of young Catholics regarding birth control, in David Lodge's novels of the 1960s, would be scarcely comprehensible to young Catholics in the 1990s...

...This collection, in contrast, is replete with the keen pleasures of language and trope and subtle self-questioning of a form perfected in the era of Henry James and Anton Chekhov...

...The book, then, is unintentionally a good index of immense and irreversible recent changes, both in church and society...

...not surprisingly, a number of the stories gathered here first appeared in the Atlantic, where Curtis has been a senior editor for many years...

...But in no story here— not even in Eileen Pollack's splendid the "Rabbi in the Attic"—is that ancient and distant figure given the final word...

...In stories by Alice Munro and Joe Ashby Porter, hot-gospelers terrorize and enthrall their followers and others...

...But in any case the religious experience of Evangelicals, here and in the past, has rarely if ever been viewed by serious writers from the inside, and with sympathy...

...The protagonist in a story by Mary Ward Brown does successfully defy the manipulative assault of an Evangelical preacher (a blond Jesus, with the eyes of a true believer Commonweal 22 March 12,1999 blessed or cursed with certainty) and his congregation—and experiences her own silent, private spiritual recovery...

...For me the most compelling theme throughout is that of the fate of women in religious circumstances, and before latterday feminism could inflect their lives and self-understanding...

...Near the end of his life, Karl Rahner was concerned that belief in God might not remain a compelling option in a world dominated by skeptical relativism and rampant pluralism...

...A young girl in the South, in a sketch by Elizabeth Spencer, relishes the small taste of freedom that will allow her later to break from her parents' literalistic religion altogether...

...The devil has his moments in this very American collection, but plainly we can never again imagine (or perhaps even comprehend) the high baroque drama of flesh and spirit, sin and salvation, that marked the early twentieth-century fictions of Bernanos and Mauriac...

...Catholicism, variously present in at least six stories, is a decidedly indistinct phenomenon...

...Joyce Carol Oates recently sounded a familiar theme: We have no literary culture now...

...The literary riches of the book reflect the editor's personal interest in the chemistry between pastor and congregation, or with one or another strain of Christian belief...

...The form was the appropriate vehicle for both a fading bourgeois religion and an educated sensibility, itself consciously ironic and reflexive...

...The stories of Jewish life and identity by Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, and a young Philip Roth make the reader sigh for a now expired age of fiction that explored the serious comedy of ethnic and religious identity in America...

...Probably the most notable recent dissent in the churches has centered around sexual morality and reproductive biology...

...Paradoxically, the churches—while steadily losing influence in an even more fragmented and individualistic society— find themselves entangled in many more public and divisive arguments (for example, religion in the schools and the public square) simply absent in these period pieces...

...The other, the morality and social status of homosexuality, is alluded to in four stories...

...For example, Richard Bausch beautifully delineates the mutually supportive relationship of a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister—an example of genuine spiritual friendship, a rich and now forgotten phrase and concept...

...Still, the editor, most of these writers, and the putative reader are implicitly drawn to a God who is not in wind, or earthquake, or fire—but after the fire, a still small voice (1 Kings 19.11...

...Not with a bang...

...Commonweal 23 March 11,1999...

...He did not foresee that a host of "marginal" and so-called dissenting Catholics, unwilling to renounce their church affliation—and not wholly unlike the spiritual sleepwalkers in this volume— would remain an important feature of our postconfessional society...

...The other God is the Old Testament and Calvinist figure—patriarchal, intrusive, the stern God of Judgment: The law is the law, says a character in the Malamud story...

...The best of these stories, with only occasional rumblings of larger cultural shifts, succeed in registering the interior lives of their protagonists...

...David J. DeLaura Hhe blunt title of this collection mirrors the even bolder God: A Biography, Jack Miles's 1995 bestseller...

...This cast of mind, and its appropriate form—of simultaneous birth—are, unsurprisingly, declining together...

...The clergyman in a story by William Hoffman stiffly resists offering the prayer for rain demanded by his congregants, only to yield, finally, to the human instinct "to go to one's Father"—and plead their case before God...

...The scope of this collection is thus defined by its conspicuous absences...

...The larger structure of the volume is, in fact, provided by a contest for authenticity between two versions of biblical values...

...His congregation remains largely uncomprehending...

...but there are no calls to extraordinary virtue, or to a Franciscan ecstasy of union and self-emptying, little sense of the awesome older Mysterium Tremendum and the Dies Irae, and nothing of the more demanding parts of the Sermon on the Mount...

...Although some of these stories were written in the past couple of decades, the volume as a whole captures a distinct period, now past, though the spiritual condition it captures is by no means merely historical...

...Evangelical preachers, in a number of stories, in effect offer dramatic contrast, one that helps us assess the strengths and weaknesses of educated Christianity...

...Of the two most vexed religious/political issues of our day, one— Commonweal 21 March 12,1999 abortion—has simply not risen above the horizon here...

...This is the older Evangelicalism of the ill-eduCommonweal 20 March 12,1999 cated in small towns—ranging from the American South to Ontario, Canada, and South Dakota—and before the coming of high-tech televangelism, the suburban New South, and militant fundamentalism as a global political threat...

...The extremes—an Evangelicalism blessed or cursed with certainty and an unself-critical New Age spirituality—are utterly incapable of framing their understanding, of self or God or the world, by drawing on the fulness of the resources of the older, now marginalized high culture...

...As a nineteenth-century writer once said to a friend, only half-jokingly: There is a God, but he is not well-conceived of by all...

...but Andre Dubus's finely meditative story of a divorced Catholic man coming to terms with loneliness, with the help of a Catholic priest friend, offers only a glancing sense of his specifically Catholic sensibility...

...Of the twenty-five writers represented here, only three were born after 1945...

...but fascinatingly, only one, the subtle J. F. Powers story, treats it thematically, associating it—in the resonant but strangely distant terms of the older French Catholic novelists—with the mystery of evil...

...James Joyce's "Grace" is a pleasure to reread, as is J. F. Powers's equally masterful "Zeal"—first published in Commonweal in 1956...

...The suburban variety assumes in effect that God is an Englishman, reasonable, reticent—an ethos already deeply mined by lukewarmness and irrelevance...

...Certainly, the narcissistic and retaliatory personal memoir and the prying biography are the perfect symbolic genres for the celebrity culture of our time...

...To be sure, a finely wrought story by Peggy Payne presents a well-educated minister, a man of cool reason who sets narrow margins for himself, who is deeply shaken by hearing the voice of God utter reassuring phrases—and who finally submits to a wave of love...

...Girls and women are sometimes bullied into submission, and even sexually abused, by charismatic male preacher figures—for example, in unsettling narratives by Joe Ashby Porter and Louise Erdrich...

...Rahner predicted a small church "in the diaspora," limited to the fully committed and active...

...As a result, these short stories— many written by masters of that subtly suggestive form—will be most engaging for readers old enough, and literate enough, to have had personal experience of that interim culture, when the mainstream Protestant churches remained largely central, unchallenged realities of American life...

...These stories, many set in the decades after World War II, and written by and for—and usually about—solidly middleclass North Americans, sometimes present a God of faint presence as well as loving concern...

...He speculated—as John Henry Newman had at the end of his career—that even the notion of God could no longer be assumed to be comprehensible...

...A typically confused and adrift heroine of Bobbie Ann Mason's struggles ineffectually against her mismatched marriage to a narrow-minded preacher and against other complacent church women, and ends in blank and chilling surrender to her duty...