Children's books: Entering expansive territory

...Larky Mavis is a slightly daft girl (always "mooning about, mooning about") who notices that a peanut she is about to pop in her mouth is actually a baby...

...But it helps...

...But nothing suggests that these aspects will prove any more or less resistant than nonLatino forms of Catholicism to the pressures of education, upward mobility, and secularization, or any more or less resourceful in coping with the internal problems of the American church...

...Would Roman Catholic liturgy and sacrament provide an element of identity not so available to his Presbyterian baby boomers...

...And this sample, remember, is probably more religious than other young adult Catholics...

...Instead, it delicately suggests the new resources that children (and those who write for them) have as a result of the contact between non-Western folk belief and Western views on the imagination...

...Ones so good that the child will wonder, as does the boy in Jim's Lion: "Maybe everything else was a dream and this is the only thing that's real...

...Having carefully designed 15 their research to get a more accurate reading than is usual on young Latino adults, the researchers found that, contrary to other reports, Latinos among their sample did not seem to be leaving the Catholic Church at a higher rate than the non-Latinos...

...Although Hoban has quite a following, from preschool lovers of the badger Frances to adult fans of his postapocalypse novel, Riddley Walker, this, his first novel, had fallen out of print...

...Dip in, and let yourself be governed by mood and caprice...

...It's a blazing portrait of good achieved...

...Still, a recent prospective biographer recounts that Part gave him, as a parting gift, the Russian Orthodox Archimandrite Sophrony's biography of his spiritual master, Saint Siluoan the Athonite...

...And yet they triumph...

...She brings a similarly playful intelligence to the language and pictures of Elsie Times Eight...

...Both the non-Latino and Latino samples turn out to be somewhat more educated, more white-collar, and more involved in church life than the average for Catholics aged twenty to thirty-nine...

...Another area of near unanimity was religious education...

...After her marriage to an American, she moved to New York City...

...The good guys—an occasionally insightful Frog, a daffy Muskrat, some misanthropic birds, and an array of ragged wind-ups—don't exactly inspire confidence...

...Perspective is all, when it comes to great illustration...

...After some years of what he later called "despair and search," he emerged in 1976 with a new and extremely spare approach to composition...

...Who believed what...

...17 The authors' attention to Latino Catholics is praiseworthy and rewarding...

...The authors called this stance "lay liberalism...

...As a devout Orthodox Christian, Part's leaving Estonia in 1981 for the relative freedom of West Germany allowed him to create major choral works of explicitly religious inspiration, such as a "Te Deum" (1984-6), "Miserere" (1992), and Johannes-Passion (1982), which has just received a brilliant new recording on Finlandia Records (8573-87182-2...

...And we like the idea of something that can't be sold...

...For Jews, as a small group within a largely Christian population, the lesson of history, at least so far, is that intermarriage means assimilation and disappearance...

...It is not a report card...

...The results are published in Young Adult Catholics...

...Bishop staked moral, religious, and even national life on story reading...

...On the one hand, they breathe in a culture of religious individualism...

...His remarks were greeted with hisses and derision (New Yorker, October 22...

...But Shaye is right...

...Should be...

...In Hoban's restrained hands (and with the help of Andrew's intelligent pictures), Jim's encounter with his finder never strays into the maudlin...

...As he told the British press, "I am not a prophet, not a cardinal, not a monk...

...A flashing yellow light," is the way one author has described this study...

...At least in principle, one wants to add...

...We are not supposed to pick and choose what we believe, but we know it is more essential to believe in the Incarnation than to believe that only men can be priests...

...His answer: yes...

...Who had returned to Presbyterian congregations...

...Both sound like music with links to the Early Middle Ages, balancing silence with sound in an emotional, sweet-sounding way...

...They look exactly like the mice and the moles...

...But how much more isolated I would be if poems and stories had not nurtured me, and if they did not go on fostering me...

...Still higher percentages agree that "all the major world religions 16 are equally good ways of helping a person find ultimate truth...

...The young Catholics still here stay because we assent to the community consuming God together, to the message that we are all connected, to the idea that the divine is present in all of us, and to the belief that this assent nourishes us...

...Called Vanishing Boundaries (Westminster John Knox Press), the book tracked down a representative sample of baby boomers who had been confirmed as mainline Presbyterians, and it traced their consequent religious histories: Who had left and for how long...

...But both should be dwelt on...

...in subsequent novels, they are increasingly negligent, narcissistic, even predatory...

...shouts the Nazi soldier...

...At least 80 percent expressed belief in "a divine judgment after death...

...But the authors warn that this concern about social justice appears to float free of religious identity and be more theoretical than actual...

...They also note that, to their surprise, about three quarters of the sample turned around and agreed with the statement, "The only absolute Truth for humankind is in the teachings of Jesus Christ...

...Yet it seems that remarkably little thought has been given to this development from the viewpoint of Catholic identity and continuity rather than the viewpoint of easing marital and child-rearing tensions...

...We are able to discern which teachings are central...

...There are three or four reasons why we continue to call ourselves Catholic, even as we disagree with Vatican teachings on women priests, on birth control, on dissent, on homosexuality...

...For Latinos, it comes as a long-overdue acknowledgment of their importance...

...It is an assessment of how much needs to be done—quickly—and where church leaders might best begin...

...As a member of a largely Latino parish, I am not denying the obvious: the more Latino Catholics, the more Masses in Spanish, and the more Virgenes de Guadalupe instead of Infants of Prague or Anthonys of Padua...

...One turned out to be that Catholics are indeed different...

...Or the importance of his father's hands still laced in his own...

...The research was designed on "where-are-they-now...

...Stated in market terms: there is a vast market for child religious education programs, and it is clearly in the Catholic community's interest to serve this need effectively...

...Zemach answers one of the big questions: What books do our children deserve...

...It is part of our identity, from plaid jumpers in childhood, to respect for celibate, learned men, to a take on fighting poverty that is not charity but justice for fellow humans...

...But his praise is a bull's-eye...

...The more interesting question is, Why do we stay...

...The Nazi is dumbfounded...

...When the label is torn away, the mouse discovers that what is beyond infinity is himself, glimpsed for the first time in the reflective tin...

...But much larger percentages are distanced from parish life and church institutions, have little sense of church authority, and are not sufficiently versed in the distinctive symbols, narratives, and vocabulary of Catholicism to articulate to themselves a coherent Catholic identity...

...Is this a case of being ecumenically correct...

...Although young Catholics are different, in other words, many are not that different...

...Some outstanding chamber pieces, including "Fratres" (on Telarc CD-80387) and "Tabula Rasa," (on EMI Classics for Pleasure 2221), both from 1977, resulted...

...His 1987 novel, The Goats (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $4.95,184 pp., Ages 9-12), wows...

...It is safe to say, then, that the study's findings are slightly rosier than the reality...

...Asked about the claim that the Catholic Church "is the one true church," less than half the non-Latinos and less than two-thirds of the Latinos agree...

...I instinctively favor imaginative books by, affirming the unvarnished hope of the great Arabic poetry translator, Salma Jayyusi: "If we read one another, we won't kill one another...

...The Presbyterian problem—and by extension the mainline Protestant problem—was not, the study showed, driving adult members out of church but failing to bring their sons and daughters in...

...The characters look modern, with their hairdos and glasses, but are costumed in fairy-tale outfits...

...The child alone with her or his book is, for me, the true image of potential happiness, of something evermore about to be...

...Certainly everyone wants to believe that...

...With new works, seemingly constant revisions and rearrangements of older works, and superb new recordings like the Johannes-Passion, Part's stature as modern master becomes increaslingly clear...

...Nor does he uncover the impulses that have turned much of children's literature away from the value of the imagination per se, toward other values...

...Her famous novel, Tuck Everlasting (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $4.95,139 pp., Ages 9-12), is about immortality, the state in which book characters, but not we, live...

...Even if we don't go to Mass every week, our worldview, our approach to politics, to work, to relationships, moves within a Catholic framework...

...Nancy Ammerman, another sociologist of religion, has more recently called it "Golden Rule Christianity...

...It's one we should fiercely covet for our children...

...This is not in any sense an "easy" read: The sentences are demanding, the jokes pitched high, the philosophy rigorous and pretty dark...

...Such are the happy reversals in perspective available to those who trust the imagination...

...That was not the only surprise...

...Only 10 percent of Catholic adults under forty have actually ceased to consider themselves Catholic, and no more Latinos than non-Latinos...

...Novelist Philip Roth puts it well: "The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that's otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn't fiction...

...Retreat experiences constituted the one really bright spot in these recollections...

...Young Adult Catholics concludes on a sobering note...

...She never forgot it...

...On another question, about 90 percent "strongly agree or moderately agree" that "in Mass the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ...

...I am not even a vegetarian...

...As one critic put it, Part's works have "one underlying theme: the numinous...

...Quick fixes tempt: the transparent message, the easy pleasure, information dressed in a story...

...The essential teachings of the church stand in stark contrast to a cynical, consumer culture...

...No similar ambiguity marks young adult Catholics' attitudes toward enlarging the roles of women and lay people in the church and facilitating wider discussion of "doctrinal issues such as divorce, remarriage, and human sexuality...

...Too few, according to Harold Bloom in the manifesto-like introduction to his new anthology Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages (Scribner, $27.50, 573 pp., Ages 5 to adult...

...Let the final thinking on that be devoted to Claire Huchet Bishop, who from 1952 to 1964 wrote Commonweal's annual assessment of children's books...

...Who had gone elsewhere and why...

...Presbyterianism is decidedly word-oriented, and the translation of religion into a general ethics comes more easily...

...A random sample of American Catholics who would be between ages twenty and thirty-nine as of 1997 was constructed from confirmation records in parishes chosen to be representative in terms of region, class, ethnicity, and rural, suburban, and city location...

...The story follows a wind-up pair of tin mice, a dancing father and son joined at the hands, as they journey to the freedom of self-winding...

...Born in poverty, Zemach here confesses that she wanted to be an artist of social significance, but discovered a different talent along the way...

...And the story of Christ and his church still resonates...

...And that's what a good story does...

...Aesop, Grimm, Arabian Nights, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Oscar Wilde are richly represented along with less familiar writers and stories...

...But Part has, according to a statement welcoming him five years ago as honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, "created a body of religious and secular music that simultaneously moves the heart and impresses itself on the mind through its purity of craftsmanship...

...This is my church, and reactionary Vatican pronouncements aren't going to get me to leave...

...But only in The Goats do Cole's 22 adults have the capacity for shame...

...Yet what is perhaps their central conclusion I find almost completely unconvincing: "In time," they write, "the surge of Latinos will change everything...

...23...

...A child withdrawn into a great work of imagination is, above all, havign an encounter: an en-couraging and enlarging one...

...Of course, I am in monasteries more often than in concert halls—but then again, you have no idea how many times I am in concert halls...

...You don't have to know Grahame, or 1 Corinthians 13:12 ("through a glass darkly") to feel the depth of aloneness presented...

...This considerably ups the castor-oil effect...

...And yes, there are distinctive and quite attractive aspects, primarily familybased, to Latino Catholicism, as there have been to every immigrant group's religiosity...

...Of considerable importance is one other finding, that half of the married non-Latino Catholics under forty married non-Catholics...

...In a phone interview, I asked one of the authors, Dean R. Hoge, a Presbyterian himself but long a professor at The Catholic University of America and a prolific researcher of Catholic Peter Steinfels writes the "Beliefs" column for the New York Times...

...She had no familial ties to the people or events of the story...

...However, when the sample was asked not just about the duties of Catholics but about the church itself, somewhat more than half agreed that it "should stick to religion and not be involved in economic or political issues...

...Even when these young adults were at odds with the church and disconnected from parish life, the high percentage "who called themselves Catholic surprised us," the authors write...

...The Mouse and His Child, to my ear, is a dark version of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows...

...Most of the poems and stories Bloom selects are from the Romantic, Victorian, and Edwardian eras...

...Russell Hoban is also responsible for the best publication this year, a new edition of his 1967 cult classic The Mouse and His Child (pictures by David Small, Scholastic, $16.95, 244 pp., Ages 9 and up...

...That may not be true for the 10 percent whom the authors label "core Catholics...

...Trouble, fear, disturbance of the usual: these might especially spur us to seek a different consciousness in books...

...Is there anything beyond the Last Visible Dog (this phrase also serves as the title of a pretentious philosophical play put on by the Caws of Art company and is the name of the mice's eventual home...

...For non-Latino church leaders, it promises fresh recruits, reinforcements to fill in what seem to be the thinning ranks of the old immigrants' descendants...

...Here is a finding of farreaching importance to the church," say the authors...

...A longtime resident of Berlin, Part premiered a well-received new work in February, "Littlemore Tractus," to commemorate the bicentenary of John Henry Newman with a ten-minute setting for choir and organ of a text Newman preached at Littlemore 170 years ago...

...Expect laughs but also disconsolations...

...Not only the classic struggle to know and serve God...

...His fine new picture book is Larky Mavis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16, Ages 4 and up...

...You aren't part of the balance of nature...

...She fully and unapologetically dedicated herself to her gift, in all its lushness: "children deserve detail, color, and excellence...the best an author and illustrator can provide...

...There is utter Northern desolation in the unadorned vocal setting of Jesus on the Cross declaring to Mary, "Mulier, eccefilius tuus" ("Woman, behold thy son...

...There is probably no other children's book where death is so remorseless and rapid in its effect (it's so terse, that I burst into laughter when a frustrated hawk spits out the tin mice and declares, "Ugh...

...This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me...

...I am, says Jesus...

...There is little here that hasn't been said before...

...marriages and baptisms that are prepared, celebrated, and then followed up with the kind of ample pastoral attention that has characterized the R.C.I.A...

...But his taste is terrific...

...I am, says Mary...

...Young adults were also overwhelmingly convinced that Catholics have a duty to oppose racism, close the gap between rich and poor, and preserve the environment—and again this was true across the board, indeed even more true of parish activists and the more theologically traditional than of others...

...In a new compilation album from Virgin Classics, Classical Dreams: Music to Inspire, Part's 1990 "Summa" for strings has a noble, openhearted spirit, and does not sound difficult or unfamiliar like other, more modernist new music...

...At the same time, virtually all young adult Catholics said that they wanted their children to receive some religious instruction...

...It would be a shame if this book ends up just in hospital waiting rooms...

...A book like this provides a statistical reality check...

...Of course, the bookkeeping of belief and commitment is less clear, the time of reckoning harder to predict, and the whole process more gradual...

...says Larky, looking down at the townspeople...

...Hoge did not rule out the possibility, not before someone had done the research...

...He often composes "with no more than basic scales," the anonymous academic noted, but the results transcend mere simplicity...

...Meanwhile all the adults around her debate whether it is a deformed bird, a pig with four ears, a calf and a half...

...If these young adults, ten or fifteen years after their confirmation, are largely remaining Catholic, their Catholicism can look increasingly attenuated...

...At least yes for the post-immigration Catholics whose demography approached that of Presbyterians and who shared similar values about higher education, broadening cultural experiences, and the benefits of pluralism...

...Almost as many agree that "there is something very special about being Catholic which you can't find in other religions...

...Part's music, included on the soundtrack of the recent film The Thin Red Line, about the 1942 Battle of Guadalcanal, was lauded by one critic who stated that it nudged the audience "onto a higher plane of awareness...

...And one I trust...

...The authors wisely keep in mind the cultural mood favoring pluralism and frowning on anything smacking of religious exclusivity...

...Focusing on confirmands has the advantage of using a group that had a common starting point: some roughly similar degree of documented church involvement during adolescence...

...But it should not be ignored...

...He was not sure about the new waves of Catholic, especially Latino, immigrants...

...Now he has done the research, this time working with three other scholars, William D. Dinges, a professor of religious studies at Catholic University, and two sociologists, Mary Johnson, S.N.D...

...But when the time comes, no statutory change or adjustment of rates, whether modest or drastic, will be able to compensate for the deficit...

...They are overwhelmingly in favor of "more empowerment of laity and women," regardless of their theological views, their Mass attendance, or their involvement in parish life...

...Over 90 percent affirmed the divinity of Jesus...

...Jim's Lion tells the story of a boy facing grave illness and possible death in surgery...

...Few have mined this happy aspect of globalization...

...followed by the consolation of a triumphal chorus, "You who have suffered for us, have mercy upon us...

...The children laugh...

...It is in regard to young adults' beliefs about the church itself that the findings are perhaps most significant and most difficult to interpret...

...What can those stories do...

...Once things get straightened out among the hapless adults, Elsie returns to her reading, and we finish ours...

...Their knowledge of the language and symbolism of the tradition is more limited and sparse—as is their experience of Catholicism as a tight-knit culture system...

...We withdraw...

...One is the belief that all's well as long as high percentages of young adults register agreement with a few core doctrines—though they reject the ecclesiastical teachings and the sacramental and communal participation that have conveyed and sustained those doctrines...

...It opens, encourages, and stays...

...It keeps faith...

...She calls it Heart's Delight...

...This is not, after all, news that most of us want to hear, and we have found a variety of ways to deflect it...

...He orders readings somewhat opaquely (into seasons), and provides no guidance for how to use the book...

...At the same time, because only about 60 to 70 percent of non-Latino youth and 30 to 40 percent of Latinos were confirmed during the 1970s and '80s, the young adults of this study do not represent all current young adult Catholics...

...Given a list of beliefs and practices and asked "how essential is each...to your vision [emphasis in the original question] of what the Catholic faith is," young Catholics ranked highest the "belief that God is present in the sacraments," with 65 percent labeling it as "essential...

...The church appears to have done a remarkable job in restoring awareness of that dimension of the Gospel...

...Religious education for adults as well as for children (Chicago's Theology-on-Tap program has been widely adopted), social-justice programs, and retreats have engaged young adult Catholics by effectively responding to their intellectual questions, personal generosity, and spiritual hunger...

...In a number of core Catholic teachings, these young adults appear largely orthodox...

...For all its religious, political, and personal meanings, the Eucharist is why I'll never leave my flawed church...

...When the schoolmaster, parson, and doctor shift from patronizing neglect to active interest in separating the two, Heart's Delight utters its first words, "LET GO MY MA," and transports Larky high above the town...

...In his earlier years, when Estonia was still under Soviet rule, some of his works with overt religious content, like the 1968 choral work "Credo," were banned by the government...

...We feel a sense of ownership for the church...

...Reading (both ability and enthusiasm for), manners, and gender, racial, and international relationships—all these are manifestly imperfect...

...For what happens when we, young and old, read imaginative literature...

...The label pictures a dog holding a can of food with a label of a dog holding a can of food and so on...

...The Catholic Church's relationship with its young adults is not unlike that...

...Bishop's "The Ban on Imagination" provides a virtual blueprint to her fictional narrative of twenty French children outwitting Nazi soldiers, and successfully keeping hidden ten Jewish peers...

...Part states, "I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played...

...First, other values: Most children's 21 writers, parents, and teachers want a better world, and want children to be better in the one we've got...

...And worse, it is precisely in such times that puritans, positivists, and the impatient of every political stripe rise up to shame readers...

...Let us not," she warned, "attempt to bar access to the world of mystery lest we become a nation with the fate of Lot's wife...

...The emphasis is on nonsense, fable, wonder—and fairy tale...

...You can almost match set piece for set piece...

...Set with austere simplicity and economy, the chorus represents crowds of soldiers, guards, and priests as well as individual characters like Saint Peter...

...And while informational fictions are direct and swift in effect, they are not memorable...

...on the other hand, they are no longer tied to the Catholic community by their most important friendships or even their spouses...

...The Teaching Resource Center at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has put together an excellent annotated list, available through its outreach coordinator, Barbara Petzen...

...The children outwit the Nazis by thoroughly knowing and playing out a story, the biblical "Flight into Egypt...

...To their credit, the authors have highlighted findings that confounded their expectations and took them by surprise...

...He gains courage when his African-born nurse tells him about finders, dream-vision animals who sustain people in their darkest hours and return them to the world...

...Babbitt, one of the giants in children's literature, loves to play with the boundaries and conventions of fiction...

...From Cusick and DeVries as well as from Young Adult Catholics, one can easily discern the importance of building on that residual sacramentalism: Sunday liturgies that are genuinely communal (for example, the music works) and meaningful (for example, the ritual has been explained and the enactment fits the meaning...

...For Catholics, a large group whose young are for the most part marrying fellow Christians, the consequences are not so clear...

...Contemporary children's literature and the Age of Information, in his view, conspire against children, against the possibility of their looking for, let alone finding wisdom, pleasure, and companionship in books...

...Great stories and poems work slowly on us and on the world, their reading being more like prayer than social action...

...de N., and Juan L. Gonzales Jr...

...I confess to being a reluctant fan of the well-regarded Cole...

...Over the course of two thousand years, Mary has become a virgin and professors have had to sign loyalty oaths, but the story hasn't changed...

...How should one evaluate these responses...

...In 1992,1 wrote a report for the New York Times on the preliminary findings that later became Vanishing Boundaries...

...Retention, in other words, not rejection...

...Don't be confused by cheap tabloid information...

...Bloom mixes literature written for children (and adults) with literature that probably never had a child in mind...

...It is not an indictment...

...After listening to this affecting work, performed last spring by the Children's Opera Company of Ossining, New York, I went back to Bishop's columns and her Twenty and Ten...

...John C. Cusick and Katherine F. DeVries, Chicago Young Adult Ministry Office n 1994, three sociologists published one of the best—because one of the most rigorous—studies of generational change in American religion...

...The children's opera, The Secret Cave, by Judith Lane, is adapted from Bishop's 1952 children's story, Twenty and Ten (Puffin, $3.99,26 pp., Ages 8-12...

...The struggle is a fight to reform this church of ours...

...That's how Russell Hoban presents it in his new picture book, Jim's Lion (illustrated by Ian Andrew, Candlewick, $15.99, Ages 5 and up...

...My guess, however, is quite the opposite: The pace of change will accelerate...

...The bad guy—Manny Rat, lord of the dump and cruel master of the discarded windups—is potent...

...What literary resources would you use to teach a child about the Middle East and Islam...

...It's been part of me my whole life," she told an interviewer...

...It is these that Bloom anthologizes and celebrates: "Where will we find ourselves more truly and more strange...

...Lasting just over one hour—concise as Passions go—Part's setting in Latin of Saint John's text has the role of the Evangelist sung by a vocal quartet, movingly making a communal event of the Gospel narration...

...14 The next generation: a diagnosis Peter Steinfels "In the not too distant past, the backbone of Catholic Church life, from parishes and organizations to ordained and professed religious, was people twenty-five to forty-five years old...

...Decade by decade, the funds are running lower and lower, while the countermeasures remain halting and inadequate...

...This collection of twenty-seven rhymes (grand, but disjointed by way of her absence) also presents a biography in pictures, many from unpublished illustrations held by her family...

...This is something that every child, smitten by books, understands immediately, though it's not at all a childish idea about the importance of reading...

...However labeled, the impression is that it lacks the capacity to energize congregational life, sustain social or political engagement, or pass the faith on to children...

...That art affords an opportunity to withdraw from the "real" world to some other state is its greatest gift to humanity...

...Her "The Ban on Imagination" (November 19,1943) credits to imaginative literature the capacity to transform us, to increase our understanding, solidarity, and wisdom...

...But animated by a palpable enthusiasm and respect for the young adults with whom the authors have worked, the book reasserts a sense of struggling, generous individuals easily lost in aggregated statistics like those I have summarized...

...At least half these confirmed Catholics agree that "all the great religions of the world are equally true and good...

...It will simply be too late...

...What this study underlines are the many striking similarities, not differences, between Latinos and nonLatinos, including the high rate of intermarriage by the third generation and the minuscule percentage of the Latino sample who chose to be interviewed in Spanish...

...A third is that today's young adults are merely a new species of "communal" or "cultural" Catholic...

...But duress erodes the concentration required for reading...

...Not surprisingly, almost twothirds don't consider going to Mass necessary to "be a good Catholic...

...Three out of four of the non-Latino Catholics and four out of five of the Latinos cannot imagine themselves "being anything other than Catholic...

...I pressed him...

...Bloom hyperbolizes...

...Indeed, among those who did stay Presbyterian as well as those who did not, many had reduced their faith to a kind of generic being good to family and friends without insisting on strong convictions or obligatory practices...

...If we leave, we accept defeat...

...Today's young adults are not communal Catholics, the authors write, but are the children of communal Catholics...

...I am, says the boy playing Joseph...

...Young Adult Catholics simply makes it harder to ignore...

...In fact, it is initially off-putting, and not just because of its infelicitous title...

...And if you are looking for a book to help address children's post-September 11 anxiety and sorrow, this is it...

...Grahame's mystical "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" resonates here in a quirky, tragicomic scene in which the pond-submerged mouse child searches for an end to infinity by staring at a Bonzo Dog Food can label...

...Bishop was born into a family of Breton storytellers, educated at the Sorbonne, and served as a storyteller at the first children's library in France, which she helped to found...

...It includes a full bibliography of her work...

...Eileen Markey is an American journalist living in London...

...Sacramentalism apparently remains central to young adults' Catholicism...

...A hardof-hearing fairy godmother and set of well-meaning parents conspire to turn a perfectly happy, absorbed Elsie into eight noisy, brawling, unwanted Elsies...

...That feature (fifty to a hundred children's books surveyed, with extensive pages of advertisements for children's books) was first developed and written by managing editor Harry Lorin Binsse during World War II, when Bishop was reviewing books about conditions in her native France...

...Moreover, the Catholic identity they do possess appears to be less and less central in their lives...

...Of course, eight identical girls cannot share food, parents, a bed, a cat, let alone a book...

...A new minimal style limited itself to one tone—or combinations of two and three chords—as the basic musical content of a work...

...So we stay...

...The implications are portentous," the authors write...

...Perhaps cynics in the audience thought it a tasteless plug for New Line's forthcoming The Lord of the Rings films...

...For many of my peers, being Catholic means being in struggle...

...But he was doubtful...

...During World War II, Commonweal's children's book reviewer, Claire Huchet Bishop (of whom more below) was horrified to learn that many nursery schools for the children of defense-industry workers had banned fairy tales, and that imaginative literature itself was in need of vigorous defense...

...As for Vatican II, more than 40 percent of the non-Latinos and 70 percent of the Latinos had never heard of the council, and of those who had heard of it only about half said they had ever read about or discussed any "of its ideas...

...Amen...

...Young Adult Catholics warns us against four of the more consoling ways we arm ourselves against the seriousness of the situation...

...Many of us stay in the church because we appreciate its countercultural stance...

...The noise to which he refers is that emanating from "a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control" us...

...We stay for the radical message of love and forgiveness and community...

...John C. Cusick and Katherine F. DeVries, the director and associate director of the Chicago Young Adult Ministry Office, have written a very different kind of book but one that clearly reflects the same reality—and the same urgency...

...Church and family had simply not answered the question, why be a Presbyterian...

...The authors deeply appreciate Andrew Greeley's notion of "communal Catholics" as pointing to those who remain profoundly Catholic even while becoming detached from the institutional church, but Greeley's concept, they add, assumed an absorption of communal experience and cultural tradition...

...When it comes to generalizing about young people—and who doesn't generalize about young people, including young people themselves?— most of us fall back on our own personal history or the histories of our siblings, children, nieces, nephews, friends, or students...

...The popular British composer John Tavener, like Part much involved with Eastern Orthodoxy, has been criticized for sugary-sounding works...

...In practice, only one out of five attends church weekly, probably fewer than the percentage who scarcely ever darken the church steps...

...preaching that is intelligent, heartfelt, and skillful...

...Ideally, in family and in friends, or at last, if possible, in life partnerships...

...On the one hand, there is that "kind of glue holding them closer to their church" that the authors find so striking...

...It's a mistake to read The Mouse and His Child as menacing or too tough...

...A discovery a decade ago that half the marriages of young Jews were to non-Jews set off a shock wave in the Jewish community...

...Who are the Jews...

...Latinos will assimilate far more rapidly than European immigrants, especially to a popular culture that is quite ready to incorporate Latino elements in its voracious wooing of new consumers...

...A second is that 18 marriage and childrearing can be relied upon to bring young adults back into church life—though marriage is coming later, disconnectedness is lasting longer, increasing numbers are marrying non-Catholics and doing so outside the church...

...How many of those writing for children today value withdrawal...

...Young Adult Catholics is such a mix of good news and bad news, reassuring findings and alarming findings that the authors themselves often seem hard pressed to reach a clear judgment...

...But finally, what keeps us Catholic is what makes us Catholic: the Eucharist...

...We stay also because we are educated enough to understand that we are the church...

...But the study's own data suggest, on the contrary, that the surge of Latinos will change relatively little...

...Which is why reading great books matters: because they lead children deeper and deeper into a lifelong, expansive territory of insight and pleasure, made not of one or two books, but of many in conversation across time...

...The study was set firmly in the context of the prolonged debate over the decline of mainline American Protestantism...

...matters, whether he thought these discouraging findings would apply to the coming generation of Roman Catholics as well...

...Yet...in all human love that something deep within us may go on feeling lonely....I was a very lonely child, despite a loving family circle, and remain solitary after a lifetime of teaching, rereading, and writing...

...Judith Lane first read Twenty and Ten at age nine...

...Part's work was not always acclaimed...

...Filled with meaningful pauses as well as melodies that hearken back to early church chanting, Part's music reinvents what is familiar by a deep and personal involvement in past traditions...

...But we also can't leave...

...We stay because in remaining we add a drop of liberal thought into this sea of conservative practices...

...She wrote more than twenty-five children's books (including my childhood favorite, Five Chinese Brothers), and was a storyteller at the New York Public Library...

...nevertheless, they became part of her own experience...

...20 Wanted: hobbits, fairies & wind-up toys Daria Donnelly What the world needs now is hobbits...

...The figure was a quarter for Latinos/Latinas...

...Belief that Christ is really present in the Eucharist" virtually tied with "helping the poor" for second place...

...Nonetheless, their final word runs more to alarm than to reassurance...

...But what is that something...

...The authors hypothesize that assimilation will come much more slowly for Latinos than for earlier immigrant groups, a conclusion that seems to rest on one part wishful thinking by scholars protective of Latino identity and three parts unwillingness by political liberals to admit the openness of American society and economy to outsiders...

...Some American minimalists like Philip Glass, despite commercial success, seem to write music on automatic pilot, undemanding and lulling for both composer and listener alike...

...It's about two misfits at summer camp, the cruelties they suffer, and the friendship they forge...

...If many young adults now believe that Catholicism is simply another denomination, that it 'doesn't really matter whether you're Catholic or not,' that there is nothing unique or distinctive about Catholicism, or that all that really counts is a generic Christian lifestyle, Catholicism's institutional vitality, public witness, and capacity to retain its young are in jeopardy...

...Zemach's ability to pick an interesting focus, her quick wit, her varied styles and moods, always triumph...

...On most levels of the church today, the leadership is still held by that same group—not the same age group, but the same people now twenty to thirty years older...

...I work with very few elements—with one voice, two voices...

...The young composer reacted by immersing himself in the study of old Franco-Flemish choral music from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, by such composers as Machaut, Ockeghem, Obrecht, and Josquin...

...The countercultural stances of other groups and institutions get sucked up into marketing every few months, but the church remains separate from all that...

...Cole's touch in picture books is lighter, and more convincing...

...Because Hoban does not underestimate either evil or good, terror or tenderness, the natural order or what can happen when one dares to think outside the terms of nature...

...There is much talk, some of it inaccurate or alarmist, about this or that date when Social Security or Medicare funds will run out and a whole system will tilt into crisis...

...Despite the composer's emaciated appearance, with beard and tonsure-like baldness, Part rejects any projection of sacredness upon his person, rather than his music...

...Bloom, alas, does not cover post-World War I literature, the stories that emerged after, and because of, the wonder eras he so appreciates...

...I would not belong to any other organization whose practices I disagree with so much...

...How many write to smite their readers with the imagined, the beautiful, and the fantastical...

...She feeds and comforts it...

...One of the best was the late Margot Zemach, whose nursery-rhyme pictures are gathered in a new collection, Some from the Moon, Some from the Sun (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $17, Ages 3 and up...

...Not that they are overwhelmingly rosy to begin with...

...Bloom's anthology reveals itself slowly...

...If you like your adults scary as well as inept, there is always Brock Cole...

...We stay out of loyalty to a vision of what the church could be...

...The ultimate point is not to justify optimism or pessimism—although it is to increase urgency...

...The final refuge is in the idea that what young adults may have lost in other dimensions of their faith they make up for in commitment to the poor and social justice...

...Like Catholics of any generation, we like the story...

...That's what Bob Shaye, CEO of New Line Cinema, said at a public forum in New York City following mass murder at the World Trade Center...

...Over eight hundred of these young adults who had been confirmed years earlier were tracked down and interviewed by phone in either English or Spanish...

...On the contrary, the young Presbyterians had imbibed the notion that strong claims in support of distinctive religious beliefs and practices were irrelevant if not even intolerant...

...We stay because we were raised with a high level of practice and taught the rough rudiments of theology at Catholic schools and universities...

...The recommended books range from stories and poems about unfamiliar persons to those by them...

...The findings were fleshed out with focus groups, in-depth interviews, and several other national surveys...

...The contentment of a child, alone with her book, provides the opening image of a very funny, smart new picture book, Elsie Times Eight (Hyperion, $15.95, 32 pp., Ages 4-8) by Natalie Babbitt...

...The Basic Guide to Young Adult Ministry is what its title indicates, a manual filled with lists of dos and don'ts, examples and anecdotes...

...For anyone harboring a suspicion that his or her favorite anecdote may not necessarily sum up the condition of 20 million young adults, a study like this is invaluable...

...In focus groups and interviews, virtually all respondents disparaged their own experience with religious education...

...Hence the title: Vanishing Boundaries...

...Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear preside...

...Or even why be a Christian...

...lines similar to those of Vanishing Boundaries...

...Not all of Young Adult Catholics is surprising, not all of it is good news, and some of it raises more questions than it answers...

...The best, truest children's stories and poems are those whose art provides lasting companionship...

...Bishop has been on my mind lately, not only because of war, but because of a new work born out of her labor...

...19 Benjamin Iury A SINGLE MOTE, A SILENT BEAT The spare beauty of Aruo Part At age sixty-six, the Estonian-born composer Arvo Part continues to defy categories...