Summer reading
Terris, Daniel
Daniel Terris Honest insights into the contemporary Church Donald S....
...These are "counterculturverge to try to save them...
...in a Divided Church k'ltiill 'With skill and sympathy, Father Rausch A"i-' R - I. ?N Michael Ignatieff's Virtual War (Henry sorts out and explains the conflicts that Holt, $23, 246 pp...
...Marilynne Robinson's during Love (Anchor, $12,262 pp...
...will be arguing for a long time about Although its subject is fundamental whether military intervention exacer- to vi r-tually all other issues relating to sixteenth- and seventeenthbated the conflict or provided an im- century Europe...
...brings a reflective W rage in the American Church...
...A challenge the most sophisticated reader...
...Supporters markable guide to the intellectual of human rights, Ignatieff tells us, need and historical developments behind to get over their skittishness about mil- the concepts of Catholic reform, itary power...
...Bulgakov's Master has authored exactly such a work, under the inspiration of his mistress, Margarita, and to the peril of his sanity...
...train, I've met three emphatically intelthe sacrifice...
...Kosovo involved a new kind of war- McEwan's narrator, Joe Rose, finds In a story rich with elements of journey, fare: it required little mobilization or himself torn between pride and guilt...
...But they are also out found in books, for what feels like sacred ing analysis of the way bloodless modern of step with the life he has lived...
...there is no other book like this in any language...
...citizenries operate...
...Joe's actions tude...
...gakov's The Master and Margarita (Grove, novelists as well...
...Visions of the good are set against one ligent companions, forthwith forwarded The costs and consequences of our im- another in deadly competition in an ex- for your summer pleasure: Mikhail Bulpulses to do good are a favorite topic of traordinary series by Philip Pullman...
...Virtual War contains admiring profiles of diplomat Richard Holbrooke, NATO ••AND ALL THAT commander Wesley Clark, and UN prosecutor Louise Arbour-people, in Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era Ignatieff's view, willing to take a hard John O'MalIey works aut a reline against Serbian violence...
...comfort, a luxury of the powerful...
...Ig- into ever deeper wells of irrationality as natieff himself would have preferred a the aftermath of the incident unfolds...
...military ends...
...Daniel Terris Honest insights into the contemporary Church Donald S. Cozzens RE r fANart~n FMf as rise The Changing Face PRIESTHOOD Daniel Terris is director of the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at of the Priesthood Brandeis University...
...Caught in a web Daria Donnelly is Commonweal's associate Virtual war is a product of cultures of of feeling and confusion, Joe is drawn editor...
...bond that develops between those who wish to use their newfound power not Imagine a novel about Pontius Pilate so good, so true, and so beautiful that when Jesus Christ reads it he removes Pilate from Purgatory to Paradise...
...We spend a Also by Donald B. Cozzens, Editor lot of time castigating ourselves for our The Spirituality of the Diocesan Priest indifference in the face of suffering...
...The Kosovo war was One of the other men involved in the "virtual" not only because it was fought balloon rescue begins to stalk Joe, be- Daria Donnelly on computer screens, but because the lieving that the accident had a higher Western commitment to its goals was purpose: to establish a divinely-inspired so shallow...
...Thought (Houghton Mifflin, $14, 254 miscalculation in a hot-air balloon puts In The Golden Compass (Knopf, $10, 399 pp...
...ed in material comfort and the demands a body so aware of its soliBut even those of us who were more of sudden human suffering...
...fantasy, character, and drama, Pullman solidarity of purpose among the gener- more tellingly, he finds that the balloon launches a deep moral assault on smug al population...
...run across the field to attempt the rescue...
...A Reflection on the Priest's Crisis of Soul...
...and Alan Garner's The Voice that a young boy and his grandfather in dan- pp...
...artistically paints the very soul of the eQ ' priesthood...
...For his pains, he is denounced by a literary critic eager to inherit the writer's Moscow apartment...
...Andrew journalist's eye to the ongoing crisis in Greeley Kosovo...
...What is it about gliding across more wholehearted military interven- Like Ignatieff, McEwan explores the steel rails at 60, 70, and soon tion in Kosovo, a more robust commit- abyss between middle-class lives shroud- 150 miles an hour that makes ment to the protection of human rights...
...Rev...
...to liberate people but to enslave them...
...the in- sess a depth and complexity that will The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern tervention is an unplanned impulse...
...color fronuspece - $24.95 cloth The real value of Virtual War, however, lies not in its prescription but in Ignatieff's probing analysis of the ethics JOHN W. OMALLEY of intervention-the consequences not for the Serbs or the Kosovars, but for HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS the Western nations who were willing 800-448-2242 • www.hup.harvcird.edu Commonweal 2 5 June 16, 2000 to wage an essentially gutless war...
...Eugene F. Hemrick, aving the world is a dan- Syndicated Columnist, Catholic News Service gerous business-especial- 0-8146-2504-5 Paper, 168 pp., 6 x 9, $14.95 4 T ly for those whom we are www.cataloa.litpress.org detail.rfm?IQ=1745 S trying to save...
...more of our moral capital on consider- Reconciling Faith and Reason ing the consequences of the "good" that F Apologists, Evangelists, and Theologians RECO'sC'lLING we do attempt...
...El was a higher priority than achieving victions about the nature of the world...
...the Counter Reformation, and Ignatieff's prescriptions will not sat- Early Modern Catholicism-The isfy everyone...
...precision bombing pro- of his life...
...the first in a trilogy that is nearing Thunders: Essays and Lectures (Harvill, ger, and a disparate group of men con- completion, the young Lyra Belacqua $24, 244 pp...
...In Ian McEwan's En- Written for children, these novels pos- $11.95, 402 pp...
...Under that press, train riders turn to skeptical about the military intervention at the rescue are impulsive, uncalculat- the strangers beside them, or to those have much to learn from Ignatieffs prob- ed, and even noble...
...Lurking vulnerabilities sud- while caution in a time when our tools vided the illusion that intervention was denly emerge from beneath his steady for repairing the world may be more adnot harming "ordinary" citizens...
...lawyers monitored the accident has torn the fabric of the facade convictions of being right...
...Like other observers t who covered the siege of Sarajevo and THE LITURGICAL PRESS the ravages of the war in Bosnia, Ignatieff brought to the later conflict in Kosovo a conviction that this time the Western powers should intervene early and forcefully to counter Slobodan MiloseTREN'T vic's campaign of ethnic cleansing...
...bond between the men...
...The child lives, finds herself in the middle of a battle be- al" works, urgently and stylishly arguthe grandfather does not, but what in- tween powerful adults who have begun ing back against cultures that distort or terests McEwan is the strange and tragic to unlock the secrets of the universe but threaten our humanity...
...The novel's theological gloss on life under the dictator (Satan enters modern Moscow to wreak breath-taking wickedness and God's justice) is comedy in the old Commonweal 26 June 16, 2000...
...delivered in a pithy lucid, and entertaining style...
...But 0-8146-2421-9 Paper, 208 pp., 6 x 9, $14.95 some of our sharpest contemporary writers warn us that we should spend Thomas R Rausch, 5.3...
...NATO's bombing cam- result is the single best overview of paign inflicted its own damage on scholarship on Catholicism in early Serbians and Kosovars alike, and people modem Europe...
...portant check on Serbian power...
...We take moral cred- both deepened and endangered by his Commuting on the New York-Boston it for our interventions, but we delegate encounter...
...His is a worthmilitary targets...
...Stalinism's corruption of literary artists and critics is the broad target of Bulgakov's brilliant burlesque...
...He is company...
...Ignatieff was and remains a At bookstores or 0-8146-5956-X Paper, 144 pp., 6 x 9,$14.95 strong hawk in the Balkans, a card-car- 'rrraJJ rJ~i.l www.catalog.Iitore ss.org/detall.cfm?ID=1044 rying member of the something-must- e~irij be-done brigade...
...and success as a science writer, his loving re- vanced than our capacity to use them protecting the lives of NATO soldiers lationship with his wife, and his pat con- well...
Vol. 127 • June 2000 • No. 12
