City of God
Doctorow, E. L.
Two of Scorsese's greatest films, for ex- more than one version of the Catholic church works much more "dialectical- ample, were products of the director's imagination. He has...
...Underworld, or a will to get the book into together, their books tell us a great deal Gingrich handed pens to corporate CEOs print before the last century was long about what has gone wrong...
...The force...
...It is just a bad book...
...And, after a of millennium-and regressed from write a mere novel...
...The Dorothy Day book wasn't That priest could have been the pronity of faith...
...D Paul Elie, editor of A Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints, is a frequent contributor...
...An opening sedion gives a concise account of the development of the liturgical calendar and the The Inner Kingdom 575 Scarsdale Road origins of these feasts in the Orthadax [hutch...
...Judis arpline...
...most recent book is Dr...
...The ending is known and the "defining document" of our times that Joshua Gruen, and his lovely wife Sarah story is designed to arrive at the end- depicts nothing less than "a quest for an Blumenthal, a rabbi herself and the ing...
...by now I know tling on the doorsill...
...stop in and visit us_ on the web: commonweal masazine.or9 Commonweal 2 4 May 5, 2000...
...Doctorow people, especially, show little interest in lawyers gutted America's relatively weak makes his big ideas small by offering political matters...
...My Catholic students, with rare E.L...
...It is a found object with the radi- reactionary during the 1970s...
...My old copy of The Long Lone- edge that Christianity could no longer nation...
...But Doc- the book...
...ISBN 0.88141.200-7 432 pp...
...In the end, Pem, predictably and ther triumphs, with his novels having A few days after the theft, Pem spies an pointedly, becomes a Jew...
...What he had in mind few prank calls, a rabbi phones to inform there...
...for eminence and young enough for furcandlesticks and items from the sacristy...
...The ending movies...
...The known ending of life is clearly), is a conceit gradually taking shape tionary Judaism...
...There is Sarah's father's journal, a he is "permanently unassigned" and his of a novel emerges like a blessing, at once compendium of every Holocaust cliche in church deconsecrated...
...Businesses, upset by another, all at the same time...
...If you see City of God for sale on a provide his readers with a sweeping per- gues persuasively that this history illussidewalk or in a used bookshop, pass it spective on American political history trates how America's elites have placed by...
...These details sugother than to remind them how a song goes, in case they have forgotten...
...The tension between more than that, here as in the past...
...914-961-5456 The first of a planned six,vclume compilation of the rnllected works o email...
...A brief life of the narra- NOT JUST FOR ELITES tor given in long lines of unstressed verse, as in the Jerusalem Bible...
...Clearly somebody had sold off a familiarity with the idioms of both evan- whole library, had brought in books that gelical piety and the gospel of personal had been bought with care over the fulfillment...
...There are and a flock of five, dubs himself a "Di- It may be that the scriptural authors attempts to render Einstein's diary, and vinity Detective" and decides to find out...
...He has done considerably the British scholar Paul Giles's characfor Raging Bull...
...Alas, City of God is none of these heightened levels of cynicism, and young At K Street lobbying firms, high-powered things...
...The Pope from the Ghetto...
...His persona as a partnership with writer Paul Schrader, more than to raise the question" of a pos- controversial yet popular celebrity auwho wrote the screenplay for Taxi Dri- sible link between artistic and popular thor at war with Catholic "elites" evokes ver and devised the original treatment sensibilities...
...who wrote their antiregulatory wish lists gone, he let go of craft, taste, and disci- Judis's book starts slowly...
...American Democracy eralizations...
...It is a new regulatory regimes created by enviphilosophical crazy quilt made from the ronmentalists and public-interest lobbysheets of our "wrecked romance with Kevin Mattson ists like Ralph Nader, turned profoundly God...
...18.95 Crow, Bishop Basil of Sergievo, Metrapoliton Athanosios of Hercegovina, Sister Magdalen, Costa w.Mewr (error, Andrew Walker, Or...
...Doctorow Underground Church...
...arship, given his track record I would James T. Fisher teaches in the religious studGreeley has been criticized for down- not bet against him with your money, ies department at Saint Louis University...
...It seems Doc- been staged on Broadway and made into African street vendor wearing the purple torow started with the outcome Chris- movies and published in thirty lanLenten vestments...
...His playing generational differences among much less my own...
...Available Tune 2000...
...after Rabbi Joshua planned for and discovered...
...Yet even if we were to grant that the "Catholic imagination" remains constant across generations, no one can deny that American Catholics' knowl- AUGUSTINE, IT AIM'T edge and awareness of other traditions has altered dramatically over time...
...But there were some religion tagonist of City of God...
...January 28...
...their prior identity to the new commu- chology...
...The novel centers In a preemptive rebuttal at the con- books I hadn't seen before, in half a on Thomas "Pem" Pemberton, whose clusion of his book, Greeley asserts that dozen plastic milk crates on the floor: life and calling, already in doubt, are alcritics "miss the point entirely" if they a hundred books in all, the dust jackets tered once and for all when the brass suggest, among other things, that there is neatly covered in plastic...
...224 pp...
...Well, you see, there dled in large tracts of extraneous material, who as a rector has a forgiving schedule was this Garden...
...Commonweal 2 3 May 5, 2000 the bottom of the story of an SS officer hiding in Cincinnati...
...exceptions, display an unselfconscious Randonn House, $25, 272 pp...
...In spread, City of God is meant to be a Big this case, readers can simply skip over Book...
...Kallistos (Wore), Professor H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr., ISBN 0.88141.201-5 Andrew Louth, Metropolitan John (2iiiaulos), Gillian Press 192 pp...
...10.95 Paper ISBN 0.88141.209.0 $14.95 1-800-204-2665 (9-5, H-F) Hardback ISBN 0-88141-210.4 $22.95 Fox...
...An embarrassing series of episodes under the rubric of the 1960s, Judis provides few insights...
...I pictured role of converts in shaping American stopped at a secondhand him puttering in an empty church at 0 Catholicism must also be considered in bookshop in Greenwich midweek when it came-the knowlany discussion of the "Catholic imagi- Village...
...Sihmemonn's journals reveal his recollections and experiencse during the lost ten years of his life...
...Why do we suffer, and the story I have summarized is swadagogue and what they meant by it...
...He tries to into the "Contract for America...
...ground and draws years of political jourseries of universes expanding into one nalism into focus...
...It is a coda to the twentieth cen- Democracy Derailed the first sections of Judis's book for the tury, and so partial, tentative, inclusive...
...519.95 Hugh Wybrew Orthodox Feasts of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary Liturgical Texts and Commentary Kalfistos Ware Selected liturgical texts with commentary...
...Gree- terization of those quintessentially Schrader's Calvinist world-view (the ley has made the seminal insights of the- Protestant artists Emerson and Whitproduct of a fundamentalist Protestant ologian David Tracy on the "analogical man, "privileged seers prophetically emfamily, he viewed his first film at the age imagination" accessible to a wide audi- powered to perceive invisible resemof seventeen) and Scorsese's Catholic vi- ence and has validated by his consider- blances" (American Catholic Arts and Ficsual esthetic was, by the director's own able prestige inquiries into the sources tions, 1992...
...If you know the people of the world authentic spirituality at the end of the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, are at- speak many languages, that is the end- twentieth century...
...Out of a yearning to experi- add the analyses of two leading journal- endgame of these developments was ment, a desire to imitate Don DeLillo's ists, John Judis and David Broder...
...Priest and rabbis alike death: The story of Adam and Eve ar- in the workbook of a New York novelist, wonder who left the cross atop the syn- rives at that ending...
...tempting to "redesign" Jewish tradition ing: The story of the Tower of Babel gets The novel, it emerges (but none too through a movement they call Evolu- you there...
...Without the tural products of the universal church ative power...
...So out with the enchanting aspects," converts do not where the religious stuff is kept, on cardigans went the theological library...
...jazz musicians call a "fake book"-a torical acumen pales in comparison to He buttresses this story by discussing rough, hand-written guide to the stan- his journalistic skills...
...Jamie Moron...
...If not in all stories, certainly in all (the jacket copy suggests) was a mullihim that the cross has been found on the mystery stories, the writer works back- gan stew of fiction, prophecy, journalese, roof of his brownstone synagogue on the ward," the narrator, a novelist himself, cosmological musing, and the like-a Upper West Side, where the rabbi, intones...
...Two of Scorsese's greatest films, for ex- more than one version of the Catholic church works much more "dialecticalample, were products of the director's imagination...
...his "Midrash Jazz Quartet," in which the nar- reading is spotty, drawing from dated rator, again in verse, offers religio-exis- The Paradox of interpretations and tending toward gentential glosses on Tin Pan Alley standards...
...more than a workbook, it is what during the twentieth century, but his his- short-term gain before civic responsibility...
...During the ant energy of the writer's consciousness o say that American democ- 1970s and 1980s, corporations funded a and the manic street vibe of New York, racy is in crisis is like saying slew of right-wing think tanks where hired an "island cathedral, a religioplex," a di- the earth is round...
...Here was Karl altar cross is stolen from the church in Commonweal 2 2 May 5, 2000 the East Village ("Saint Timothy's, Epis- dies while in Europe in search of his torow-acclaimed, popular, wealthy, a copal, typical New York Brownstone Ec- wife's father's wartime diary, Pem joins professor at NYU on the side, old enough clesiastic") where he is rector, along with Rabbi Sarah in life and love...
...He has "attempted little ly" than "analogically...
...This weakness highlights a It may be that Doctorow's ambitions Elites, Special Interests, and larger problem in American intellectual were genuine...
...carelessly written and arranged...
...rates plummet, polls report drooling over the promise of free markets...
...To judge from the apho- the Betrayal of Public Trust life: increasingly, journalists fill in a void risms with which he studs the text, like John Judis left by academic historians, who write cellophane-tipped toothpicks in a catered Poi theon Books, 526,305 pp...
...To this sad scenario, welfare and regulatory policies...
...As I sorted through them, half servative evangelicals are currently gen- Paul Elie kneeling, half squatting, I wondered erating a "liturgical turn" within their who had sold them and why, but my own tradition, reshaping a legacy of hos- ne evening not long ago, mind had already supplied a scenario...
...Ronald as Greeley, did not really know any Knox's Enthusiasm...
...A monologue "as if" by Frank Sinatra...
...svspreas@svota.edu Bishop Kollistos Ware of Oiokleia...
...invent him anew one would need to American Catholic culture, a theme Gree- Though his habit of isolating the Catholic blend the gifts of a James T. Farrell with ley ignores in staking boundaries around imagination runs counter to the com- those of a Herman Melville...
...11 the "unchanged and probably unchang- parativist impulse of much recent scholing Catholic imagination...
...the candlesticks turn tian priest converts to Judaism at end guages-seems to have been loath to up at a secondhand shop...
...John Baggley Living Orthodoxy in the Modern I Festival Icons of the World lose Seminary Christian Year Contributors: Met ropoldon Anthony (Bloom), Bishop IItden Wr 18 full•rolor icon plates...
...Christian Yoga...
...Read Newt Gingrich's rise and fall from power...
...An ex-Times guy's quest to get to St VLa-dimir's Carras and Walker, edc...
...Initiative Campaigns and real rewards at the end...
...Paul Tillich's TheolProtestants until they entered the work City of God ogy of Peace...
...The broader issue here con- "questions" he has raised in the past, the for inspiration, but his own fabled cacerns Protestantism's highly collabora- field of American Catholic studies would reer could only happen in America: to tive and dynamic relationship with be much the poorer, if it existed at all...
...There are banal culFor giving a bold homily about the re- is more complex...
...In any case, the novel- tural-critical riffs about the power of the sponse of Christians to the Holocaust, ist usually works differently...
...My parents, who were born in the same year Barth in English and in German...
...16.95 The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983 These selections from Fr...
...The them as is...
...simply trade one whole identity for an- some narrow shelves in the back be- The priest, after the appropriate season other but bring significant elements of tween the literary criticism and the psy- of doubt, moved on...
...Covering the Pro- the decline of labor unions and the burndards, sketchy and artless, with no use gressive Era, the New Deal, and the out of 1960s activists...
...The central walking home from work, I A priest had lost his faith...
...rr.arr w..a..~ ISBN 0.88141.212.0 246 pp...
...Probably it Wittgenstein's too...
...Crestwood, NY 10707 ISBN 0.88141-203-1 144 pp...
...The shop hailstorm, perhaps subtly like dust setto Catholicism as adults by virtue of its was not thronged...
...there...
...Voting intellectuals could curse regulation while aspora of diasporas, a city of God...
...Pem, why must we die...
...Available June 2000...
...Greeley draws on the culadmission, the source of Taxi Driver's cre- of Catholic cultural identity...
...an infinite Ha rcourt, 523...
...knew where they were going...
...America: The Lives American Catholics (see sociologist The irony is that Greeley's highly con- of Thomas A. Dooley: 1927-61 (University James Davidson's letter in Commonweal, tentious standing in a fragmented of Massachusetts...
...specialized books for other academics...
...tility toward Catholic ritual...
...260 pp...
...Although Greeley acknowl- liness had split down the spine, and I hold him-perhaps all at once like a edges that some people are "attracted wanted another just like it...
...It is a mimetic riff on the century's defin- the Power of Money In explaining the current backlash ing account of creation-the Big Bang, David Broder against liberalism, Judis covers new "a great expansive flowering...
...At the same time, many con- years...
Vol. 127 • May 2000 • No. 9
