Summer reading
Donnelly, Daria
to wage an essentially gutless war. run across the field to attempt the rescue. to liberate people but to enslave them. Kosovo involved a new kind of war- McEwan's narrator,...
...1(iralirirsg about just ice front the pulpit is easy...
...Call it ressourcement, for the 1J...
...PAUL BUSSAN New Haven, Conn...
...Maufriend's improvisational service in sev- ris's conviction that U.S...
...If they are not, "more evil, and faith to the point that Maurice thropologist, elegist, National Socialist, or violence, and death" will surely be the asks to be left alone, ungrateful to be New Ager to keep faith with the folk and result regardless of U.S...
...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...
...To do so is to confuse realms...
...Bulgakov's "happiness" there but to our political and social behavior...
...He only connected, by some reon myth, criticism and teaching, archae- Colombia can be reduced, if not arrangements, with the externals...
...ology, and mental illness...
...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...
...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...
...Greene was chester's urban professionals...
...From there the story explores house...
...aid en- and too tired to learn how to love...
...These cool attacks on inch-deep politics biblical verses, along with Albert EinBulgakov is one of Russia's greatest are great fun, though she spares no one, stein's 1932 open letter to Freud ("Why writers, but he was panned, pruned, not even the amused reader...
...Jorcated his life to saving the material and dan does not understand Greene's (Continued from page 4) folk culture of his native Cheshire...
...That's true only if you beCommonweal 28 June 16, 2000...
...Robinson (whose novel Housekeeping Public Religion, and Law 1974--1995 Aprivate Woman is as gorgeous as Larry Breiner suggests fir !lotlorru :tray iI mime s In Public above) is a committed Calvinist...
...0 to Neil Jordan's film version of Gra- abstract theological concepts from the work of a poet (a good poet), or from the drama of a concrete life...
...Or the essay where he measures Colombians have demonstrated in wardly unaffected...
...t what it means to genuinely preach justice...
...tempted to shape society by faith and paper $16.00 reason, in contrast to prigs who are content to announce their opinions and "puritanically" damn all who disagree...
...theologian Jean Cauvin...
...Sarah, believing the severity of an impending bout of de- favor of the negotiated peace Presi- her prayer for Maurice's life to have pression by his response to the dinosaur dent Andres Pastrana is pursuing...
...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...
...Ig- into ever deeper wells of irrationality as natieff himself would have preferred a the aftermath of the incident unfolds...
...Alleva returns Paul Baumann's defense of the film version of The End of the Affair was written with elan but didn't come even close to convincing me...
...Commonweal 2 7 June 16, 2000 British novelist Alan Garner has dedi- CORRESPONDENCE ham Greene's The End of the Affair...
...novel surrounding Satan's stunning per- Herbert Spencer, Nietzsche, and Freud Where Robinson is bent on rescuing formance in one Variety Theater...
...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...
...Thought (Houghton Mifflin, $14, 254 miscalculation in a hot-air balloon puts In The Golden Compass (Knopf, $10, 399 pp...
...and to teach Robinson undertakes her revivalist congregation s wh a t it means to put justice at the heart and project in several genres: a testament of soul of the church's mission and witness...
...Robinson's fullest and boldest essay, tabled summation at the Scopes trial Son of a professor of theology, the be- "Darwinism," deftly uses Scripture to that make for the most unexpected and leaguered playwright, novelist, and counter not the science of evolution, but persuasive turns of argument...
...comfort, a luxury of the powerful...
...There he Paul Baumann, in "The Novelist & the a poet, in the true sense of the word, witnesses to an estranged past, retelling Director" [May 5], is far too generous and it is misleading and dangerous to England's most ancient stories...
...gakov's The Master and Margarita (Grove, novelists as well...
...bond between the men...
...Stalinism, argues Marilynne Robinson in her essay "Puritans and Prigs," NEW FROM TRINITY reveals the murderousness at the dark heart of social perfectionism, that priggish forgetting of the universal reach of A Private Woman in Public Spaces sin she fears is gaining ground in Amer- Barbara Jordan's Speeches on Ethics...
...lawyers monitored the accident has torn the fabric of the facade convictions of being right...
...the in- sess a depth and complexity that will The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern tervention is an unplanned impulse...
...support for alive and proclaiming himself too old reject a global cosmopolitanism based the Pastrana initiatives...
...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...
...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 sense...
...PENNSYLVANIA the economy has played in reshaping email: trinity@morehousegroup.corn or visit our web site at www•trinitypressind•com the family along lines they deplore...
...He was, at his best, a true poet who knew that this drama can be painful, exhilarating, and ultimately gripping, because it is a love story...
...In Ian McEwan's En- Written for children, these novels pos- $11.95, 402 pp...
...These are short-story writer once begged Stalin to the philosophy called "Darwinism," the fruit of her intense and wide reading exile him...
...precision bombing pro- of his life...
...Think Dante, updated...
...Jean Mouroux's I Believe: The Personal Structure of Faith (Sheed and Ward, 1959) addresses this tension between theology and the nature of personal faith...
...War...
...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...
...He is company...
...and William Jennings Bryan's and largely unpublished in his lifetime...
...She argues that paper $17.00 Calvin, as he came to be known, had a large hand in shaping American goodness, and that our unjust and uninformed dismissal of his values and ideas Preaching Justice has been disastrous for our country and The Ethical Vocation of Word and Sacrament Ministry our times...
...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...
...Stalinism's corruption of literary artists and critics is the broad target of Bulgakov's brilliant burlesque...
...Or the fairy-tale victims of leftist guerrillas than gov- es to what has happened in the wake essay which begins with the story of a ernment troops...
...I've story...
...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...
...1. Baumann says that a Sarah who "Got a inomen t cowboy...
...A provocative look to renew interest in the ideas of the now at the woman who emerged from the obscurity of I bus Ion's scarcely known French humanist and se,reyated Fifth Ward to rhallenge a nation...
...Her essay "Family" locates similar ironies in At a bookstore near you TRINITY PRESS the tendency of family-values funda- or call 800-877-0012 INTERNATIONAL mentalists to dodge the crucial role that or fax 717-541-8128 to order HARRISBURG...
...been answered, becomes profoundly fossil on the kitchen floor of his medieval Whether or not the guerrilla groups grateful...
...Stalin assented to the writer's which she argues is poisonous not only in primary literature...
...Ironic and sharp, Comparing Spiritualities Robinson is at her best when skewering Formative Christianity and Judaism with actual Calvinist history and ideas on Finding Life and Meeting Death by 8rui r (hiIIo,1 and fmu sJ Nux, 'r those most apt to dismiss and embody An insightful exploration of similarities and differenecs iii caricatured Calvinism...
...faith...
...And her faith, second choice, a job at the Moscow Art to our sense of ourselves and our world, which-contrary to elite and popular Theater...
...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...
...citizenries operate...
...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...
...breaks her vow isn't acting out of character...
...Joron mass culture...
...Although he does convey an enmentioned his essays before [Common- is not at all clear that the current situa- joyment of the plot in the first half of weal, April 71, and bet I will again...
...amm's M. Chills...
...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...
...His weird (old-sense) writing tes- are serious about peacemaking is the gratitude, love, hate, anger, bitterness, tifies that you do not have to be an an- question...
...ica...
...I IP...
...Bulgakov's Master has authored exactly such a work, under the inspiration of his mistress, Margarita, and to the peril of his sanity...
...El was a higher priority than achieving victions about the nature of the world...
...Joe's actions tude...
...Graham Greene's religious vision is tenaciously to the rural landscape of his neither heterodox, antinomian, nor ancestors, now lightly occupied by Man- Missing Greene driven by predestination...
...Real Puritans, Jewish and C'' Iiristian understandings of conversion, life after she opines in "Puritans and Prigs," " at- death, anti martyrdom...
...Millions of sort of "experience," but remains inWar II...
...Gar- tion in Colombia can simply be equat- the film, he never realizes the "inner's meticulous passions are enthralling...
...In The A comprehensive aua]ysis of Barbara Jordan's speeches that Death of Adam essays, Robinson seeks dared the nation to reclaim constitutional Ideas, and commit to a dro sum it and transfomiative pluralism...
...If U.S...
...There are luminous re- ables Pastrana to forge a negotiated dan never grasped the heart of the flections here on the vocation of writing, peace, the violence that now engulfs story...
...Explore allies...
...His is a worthmilitary targets...
...ed with the recent history of El Sal- scape" of the tale, to borrow a term Don't miss the essay on a wooden shov- vador or Guatemala...
...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...
...For one thing, at from Gerard Manley Hopkins...
...el he carried around for forty years until the moment Colombia's campesinos Maurice Bendrix and Sarah Miles museum experts finally confirmed his and others are more likely to be the have fundamentally different responsBronze Age dating...
...These are "counterculturverge to try to save them...
...Here are my major problems with the argument...
...hortatory reflections on public mat- r.eadka paper $13.00 ters...
...For his pains, he is denounced by a literary critic eager to inherit the writer's Moscow apartment...
...belief about belief-is intelligent, exmay be surmised by the vignettes in the Though she calls on Darwin, Malthus, acting, and (zounds...
...A challenge the most sophisticated reader...
...relevant...
...and Alan Garner's The Voice that a young boy and his grandfather in dan- pp...
...We take moral cred- both deepened and endangered by his Commuting on the New York-Boston it for our interventions, but we delegate encounter...
...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...
...involvement rice does sense that he has had some eral armies, and on both sides, in World need always be malign...
...Greene realized that faith is a drama of persons and their personalities, human and divine...
...historical accounts of Calvin and his circle, as well as those shaped by his legacy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the abolitionists among them...
...train, I've met three emphatically intelthe sacrifice...
...military ends...
...I won't to mount her argument, it is her use of religious voices in the history of ideas, spoil it, but the Master gets lots of new company at the asylum...
...Marilynne Robinson's during Love (Anchor, $12,262 pp...
...Garner clings ended...
...Nor do we share Fer- of the bomb that strikes his flat...
Vol. 127 • June 2000 • No. 12
