Christian Critics
McCarraher, Eugene
pensive whims, covered the costs of her failed moneymaking schemes, indulged her in luxury lingerie and vacations, ap- RELIGION & POLITICS, AGAIN proved her appetite for boy and girl...
...Divorce, while respectable, too often alist democracy" as a distinctively Chris- The possible toxins include "concen- damages the children...
...Jetsunma's proselytizing de- raher attacked American Catholicism for of these traditions in shaping oppositional ployment of her sexuality ("cult...
...With the publication of Christian serts, although on what grounds is not Eugene McCarraher Critics, readers may now judge McCarraclear...
...The professionals whose concern for auton- more the better...
...Its purpose is to stop Hidden Triumph of the Consumer Ethos," unfinished, creative, and animated hisand contain...
...Concentrated poverty a social by the custodial mother does not help at vious Christian intellectuals...
...From one of the great strengths of McCarra- their fellowship in religious communithe social-gospel movement on, the her's book is its placement of Catholic ties offered them a uniquely auspicious defining feature of liberal religion has been not its readiness to bring religion SOMETIMES OUR CHURCHES DON'T HAVE PEWS...
...ans say, there's no thought in all this of David G. Myers Daniel Berrigari s too-late recognition of the common good (hence the name, Yale University Press, $29,95,414 pp...
...The spiritual need is great...
...And affectional freeomy in spiritual life precluded attach- dom...
...Who's to say no...
...department at Indiana University...
...valed freedom to pursue one's person- price of making the decision itself to diCan critical detachment and social com- al bliss...
...before allocating property and income in presents...
...This imposes a high priest and the nun...
...into the world, but its willingness to reduce religion to a generalized feeling or sentiment devoid of doctrinal and liturgical particularity...
...7 Robert A. Orsi, author of The Madonna of 115th Street, teaches in the religious studies "just think of monotheism as an economy measure...
...The writings of intellectuals contain insights into modern capitalist society that have been unavailable to clerics as a class...
...After all, America's soldiers can do without and corporation and the democratic lo- pews, but not without you...
...gia...
...We have the books...
...Certainly...
...Money...
...This is an important book that should Maybe Sherrill should have turned it go a long way toward shifting intellectuinto a freak show...
...McCarraher offers no simple brief shining But the one thing we can't do without is priests to administer the moment of promise betrayed, but rather sacraments to over 500,000 practicing Catholics...
...McCarraher ar- been harmed, badly...
...concludes...
...as it is, she tells us a very good story about an Italian-American woman from Brooklyn who becomes an incarnated Buddha...
...In many ways a search for a usable past, this book refreshingly avoids the declension narrative that so often characterizes this genre of history writing...
...Dame...
...ductive youngsters...
...In the United communitarians argue, it has improved that in suspending critical detachment States, they observe, we have "unri- the civil administration of divorce at the one is forsaking intellectual integrity...
...More specifically, would be to identify precisely the most across the political spectrum, and intro- he examines how religious and secular disturbing practices, beliefs, or incidents duced a new phrase-"Starbucks Catholi- intellectuals sought to adapt two particin the world of a "cult" (paying careful cism"-into the vocabulary of educated ular traditions, Protestant republicanism attention to the personal sources of the observers of American religion...
...We shall bliss (however illusory) an absolute at Carraher neglects the historically real- have them...
...Realism demanded that one look to the vanguard of technical-managerial professionals who alone seemed to possess the skills necessary to guide the complex bureaucracies of modern society...
...McCarraher's Christian dissenters sists on the importance of theology to Day was not alone in this retreat, and "believed-often self-deceptively-that contemporary public discourse...
...Christians looked to 1960s, yet also examines how intellectu- war abdication of worker self-manage- the rational structures of the emerging als who drew on these traditions pro- ment in favor of high wages and job se- corporate order, but even so secular a vided much of the ideological legitima- curity...
...Religion is democratic, she as- Social Thought journals...
...Then she in Modern American have to date been confined to academic panics...
...failed to attract actual Catholic workers, and the "underground church" of the 1960s appealed primarily to middle-class them...
...The ed by dissatisfactions and bootless yearngues convincingly for "radical person- crisis is unprecedented...
...Commonweal 2 4 October 6, 2000...
...As the neo-orthodox Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had no use for such basic doctrines as the resurrection of the body, McCarraher argues, so his "Christian" realism led him to conclude more often than not that Christianity had very little to contribute to the secular social order...
...In that ar- and Catholic medievalism, to the twenfears they evoke) and use them as the oc- ticle, and in his unrepentant response to tieth-century reality of corporate capitalcasion for shaping questions of broader his critics in a subsequent issue, McCar- ism...
...ficity keep the story fresh while refining aspects of McCarraher's own critical ideal...
...If only Sherrill had resisted the impulse to reassure us that they are not we, she could have told us something about the contemporary American religious landscape...
...right now, it's a cult, she in its full historical complexity...
...Parish priests and women religious have lived lives of vowed commitment unavailable to intellectuals as a class...
...His 1997 Commonweal ar- raher looks beyond modernism and antia descriptor, but as a command, like a ticle, "Smile, When You Say 'Laity: The modernism to a notion of tradition "as an law officer's "Halt...
...McCarraher's rill hangs tough through all of this, never Religion and the Impasse more fully developed historical arguments turning it into a freak show...
...tradition, the shift from clerics to critics stands as rupture, not creative adaptation...
...The appearance of the Christopher Shannon al debate beyond the liberal/conservaword "cult" in the text obliterates further tive stalemate that has plagued religious thought, making it impossible to see Jet- eaders of this journal will no as well as secular thought...
...McCarraher shows the central role application...
...Sex ad libitum, he says, gives cal insight than with what Christopher he nation's social health, us dead-end teenage mothers, fatherLasch long ago referred to as "the intel- David Myers says, has less poor children, and marriages hauntlectual as a social type...
...calism of small-scale Christian commu- For more information about specific opportunities and benefits, call nities...
...Acknowledging the complicity of re- cizes Dorothy Day for often retreating Ultimately, the fatal flaw of these soligious leaders in undesirable social de- from the hard problems of industrial so- cial critics lay in alienation, not nostalvelopments, McCarraher nonetheless in- ciety into a "facile antimodernism...
...To be an intellectual, to be a This is the language of Amitai Etzioni the divorce decree-but, Myers and the critic, is to be alienated-or to worry and the communitarians...
...Worker movement, he nonetheless criti- for his ideal of beloved community...
...maybe someday the KPC will be Cornell University Press, $$26.95, 288 pp.her's critique of "Starbucks Catholicism" democratic...
...Cult" is best understood not as her...
...Because the professional-managerial class has proved itself inadequate to the task of envisioning a social order "beyond the rule of Mammon," McCarraher looks for "redemptive hope" in the recovery of a distinctly Christian tradition of social criticism...
...Myers thinks pornography and secular alike...
...F-1 Christopher Shannon is associate director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre "Name twelve basest desires...
...Sympathetic to the "cell" model thinker as Randolph Bourne could see tion for the welfare state and the private of community espoused by the Catholic in the Catholic Middle Ages a model corporation...
...the limitations of "permanent estrange- "radical individualism"), and sometimes ment" serves as a kind of cautionary tale one's bliss pursued is someone else's for contemporary critics, Christian and harm...
...As a priest you can serve full-time in a ceaseless dialectical struggle between the Army or part-time in the Army Reserve (usually two days a month, the bureaucratic centralization of state plus two weeks a year...
...No-fault divorce has lessened the Christian Critics reflects a deep ap- and family ruin...
...Pornography and fantastic de- young families make of their personal answer to this question, I think Mc- pictions of violence please us...
...And plentiful guns, all...
...Within the Catholic And guns: lots of people enjoy owning cost on society...
...Not surprisingly, neither topic has gotten much attention in the study of American religions, except in relation to "cults...
...541 or visit www.goarmy.com...
...Conceiving of sunma and the KPC in relation to any- doubt be familiar with the this impasse as in many ways a conflict thing else, except other cults (which Sher- R writing of Eugene McCarra- between progress and its critics, McCarrill does...
...we need the priests and nuns...
...Deal, McCarraher nonetheless sees CIO BE ALL YOU CAN BE...
...Certainly...
...Divorcing parents of mitment ever marry...
...The willingness of KPC members to give Jetsunma their offspring challenges us to think about what use people make of children in any religious setting...
...The variations of historical speci- 1-800-USA-ARMY, ext...
...Spiritual Hunger in sary for any broad-based political project, But, Myers and other communitarian Age of Plenty particularly in matters of social justice...
...And cern the comparative degrees of blame life as a vocation and the dilemma it what is it, anyway...
...Commonweal 2 2 October 6, 2000 movements from the social gospel of the chief Philip Murray's labor Catholicism and Protestant thinkers in dialogue with 1910s to the antiwar movement of the as almost utopian in comparison to post- secular thinkers...
...But so are the rewards...
...Ironically, the Catholic Worker movement TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING...
...pensive whims, covered the costs of her failed moneymaking schemes, indulged her in luxury lingerie and vacations, ap- RELIGION & POLITICS, AGAIN proved her appetite for boy and girl toys (whom she ordered into monastic celibacy when she was done with them), uri- its capitulation to a corporate capitalist sonated on an effigy of her hated ex-hus- cial order characterized by bureaucratic band, and, when Jetsunma demanded, managerialism and a pick-and-choose surrendered their children to her...
...But what is "radical in- bizarre litigation judges having to dispreciation for the idea of intellectual dividualism" doing in this lineup...
...Critical of labor Catholicism's endorsement of the "Fordist order" of the New ARMY CHAPLAIN CORPS...
...toxin...
...Commonweal 2 3 October 6, 2000 opportunity to cross the chasm between intellectuals and other people...
...In looking for an it hard...
...don't buy them...
...raises the issue of the interplay of the erotic and the spiritual in religious cultures generally (including the "mainstream" ones...
...It's a free country...
...ings...
...A dead marriage shall The American Paradox ment to those church structures neces- not be our portion...
...Sher- Christian Critics spiritual consumerism...
...For McCarraher, the reduction of religion to a "resource" for inspiring social activism deprived it of its genuine critical edge...
...A more useful heuristic launched a storm of protest from readers torical conversation...
...And indeed we have pursued vorce too easy...
...Studies show that tian contribution to contemporary social trated poverty, plentiful guns, radical children of divorce on average do much thought, yet his ideal of the church as a individualism, media portrayals of vi- worse in school than those of intact mar"critical commonwealth" suggests the olence and infidelity, and family col- riages and, poignantly, that remarriage very vanguardism he shows failed pre- lapse...
...today's enhanced action films make for The key to this seemingly intractable Neil Coughlan rape and other violence, and guns lead to dilemma may have less to do with criti- Columbine...
...Too the risk of raising more troubled, less proized, if more prosaic, models of the bad...
...You don't like them...
Vol. 127 • October 2000 • No. 17
