I WAS A TEENAGE CONSERVATIVE
Wolfe, Gregory
SIPNEY CALLAHAN f 111 CALL ¥® H0LiiiES$ Planned & unplanned In his apostolic letter Novo millennio ineunte, initiating the new millennium, Pope John Paul II asks: "Can holiness ever be...
...Is Johnson sure that "absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us" from our bodies...
...Seminaries should offer more courses in literature and the arts...
...By a wonderful coincidence, a fine book came my way at the same time this article did...
...It is Wendell Berry's long essay, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition (Counterpoint...
...In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Alexei II has spoken of the "persecution of Orthodox Christians by Greek Catholics in western Ukraine, and the work of proselytism carried out by Catholic church structures among the traditionally Orthodox population of the canonical territory of the Russian Orthodox church...
...He already has a church that is growing with the devotion of many young people, one that represents a highly visible part of every city and village...
...Catholics are playing a central role in a revival of art that grapples with faith...
...If s what the great Basque philosopher Miguel de Unamuno called "the tragic sense of life...
...Most Catholics, I suspect, are annoyed if not dismayed at the unwelcoming and unecumenical attitude of Alexei II, Patriarch of All Russia...
...Overburdened pastors coping with the multiple activities of a busy parish may quail before this papal insistence that they reclaim the church's holy mystery and offer a training in holiness...
...I was born with the conservative intellectual movement's silver spoon in my mouth...
...It should be no surprise that beauty—long vilified as hopelessly bourgeois or subjective by modernists and postmodernists alike—is making a comeback...
...As they listen to such horror stories, it is hardly a wonder that many Russians take "Roman Catholic" to mean "alien" or indeed "enemy...
...Wilson wishes you to take empiricism...
...The title might lead people to dismiss Life Is a Miracle as one of those dreadful inspirational books...
...Eureka moments I trust that Luke Timothy Johnson is too good a scholar not to be profoundly embarrassed that he failed to read Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility before penning his "A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body.'" In this 1960 work, the future pope convincingly establishes the "embodiedness" of his teaching on human sexuality, including a positive discussion on the role of pleasure in the conjugal act, the sheer candor of which was considered by many contemporaries as beneath the dignity of a prelate...
...Wilson would consider this "a 'beneficent' falsehood, supported by no 'objective evidence' or 'statistical proofs...
...Arguing that there is such a thing, Berry provides examples from King Lear, a biography of Robert E. Lee, and the Old Testament...
...Far from causing them to write safe, didactic tales, their Catholicism encouraged them to render in dramatic form the paradoxes of faith for an increasingly secular audience...
...And there is yet more that is seldom mentioned in Western history books...
...MATTHEW KOWALSKI, O.S.B...
...I began reading T.S...
...They were piping voices compared to the rumbling organ chords of Dante and Aristotle, Aquinas and Newman, whom I was reading with Kirk and Niemeyer...
...Instead of O'Connor's belief in the need to shout for a hard-of-hearing secular audience, we are more likely to find writers these days choosing to whisper...
...how, then, could you explain it to Mr...
...In her book, Scarry laments the loss of a transcendent ground for beauty in modern thought...
...Would a visit from the pope in any way add to Alexei's prestige, or would it rather only confuse and influence his people in undesirable ways...
...In the seventeenth century, Polish and Lithuanian armies invaded Russia...
...But it is hyperbole to speak of "persecution...
...Though the movement Kirk helped to launch would degenerate into a large, fractious coalition dominated by Washington-based think tanks, his own thought manifests an amplitude of mind and heart that cannot be reduced to a manifesto...
...Most registered Catholics aren't even coming to Mass every Sunday...
...In my youthful ardor, I embraced the notion, espoused by many conservatives, that "modernity" was a monolithic, and very bad, thing...
...The journal is a twoedged sword: a challenge both to the secular critics convinced that religion can no longer inform great art and to those believers who, like my old conservative comrades, are convinced that the Western tradition is dead and buried...
...I lost the last of my enthusiasm for conservatism soon after graduating from Hillsdale, when I was at National Review in the summer and fall of 1980 during the final run-up to Ronald Reagan's election...
...I wonder how this squares with the experience of believers...
...Eliot, these novelists synthesized modern concerns—from existentialism to scientism— with the truths of the ancient faith...
...It lacked order...
...The arts—and the Incarnation itself— are incapable of the generalization and reductionism that a merely scientific point of view imposes...
...it lacked nobility...
...In 19891 launched a quarterly journal of literature and the arts called Image, whose purpose is to feature original creative work that grapples with the Judeo-Christian tradition...
...Jeffreys connects my poor grasp of the pope's overall position with my suggestion that the church may be in danger of colluding in genocide...
...Bill Buckley came there to discuss the idea of starting up a magazine to be called National Review...
...Nevsky is a sort of George Washington for the Russians, made a saint because he saved the country for the Orthodox religion...
...The primary function of religion is not to generate happiness but to construct meaning" (see, Tyron Inbody, The Transforming God [Westminster John Knox...
...Why doesn't the professor provide a consistent ethic of sexual behavior taking into account the experience of married people, homosexuals, and those who are single "yet whose erotic desires find no legitimate or sanctified expression...
...This was a mantra ready-made for me...
...Overzealous proselytizing is a real concern, but after seventy-four years of atheism, it is not surprising that many have no religious allegiance...
...As he suggests, we ought to revisit this encyclical, and we may end up concluding that John Paul II's personalism cannot support his opposition to artificial contraception...
...A great deal of education is needed...
...Carroll's irony The ultimate irony of James Carroll's theories [see Robert Wilken's review of Constantine's Sword, "Dismantling the Cross," Janurary 26] about the inevitability of Christian anti-Semitism is that those Christians who risked their lives to save Jews did so not in spite of their faith but because of it...
...The holiness quest of a person in the world has to be grounded in the realization that working well and loving well require engrossed states of emotional and mental concentration...
...With all respect to my elders and betters, I think my generation, which grew up after the '60s, is less interested in manning the ideological battlements and more interested in cultivating the spiritual and imaginative sources of our common life...
...I began trying to think my way out of it...
...Moreover, I have witnessed too many joy-filled "Eureka...
...Valaam, on a beautiful island in Lake Ladoga near the Finnish border, is once again home to both monks and hermits...
...Despite the aesthetic richness of our tradition, American Catholics are not exempt from these forces...
...REV...
...Here I wish John Paul II had probed more deeply into the meaning of holiness for lay persons engaged in the world...
...A universal education in the art of prayer must be initiated, centered on all the different forms of public and private prayer such as eucharistic prayer, liturgical prayer of the hours, contemplative prayer, and personal conversational communion with Jesus as friend...
...Godfrey's opening sentences prepared me for a sentimental look at his ordeals as a single parent...
...Most important, today the churches are crowded...
...Having moved through several Protestant denominations in my undergraduate years, I had arrived at the threshold of the Catholic church...
...By the way, though certain passages of the book of Revelation are commonly used to support interpretations of the Rapture, the notion itself is drawn from 1 Thessalonians 4:17...
...In Communist times, Catholic clergy and laity who did not convert to Orthodoxy were imprisoned in labor camps and often murdered...
...But what ultimately drew me to the church was another facet, one about which too little is spoken...
...A few years later I found a way to live out the best part of my conservative education and address the need for a deeper engagement between religious faith and contemporary culture...
...Now it is once again named after Saint Sergius, the most revered of Russian mystics...
...But if these are the pope's sentiments, why is there no trace of them in the multiple addresses making up Theology of the Body...
...The chemist who is directing the cloning project for the Raelians says that a number of young women are willing to serve as surrogate mothers...
...Alleva's rapture It is irenic of Richard Alleva ["Beam Me Up," January 12] to seek no quarrel with the idea of the Rapture or even with the LaHaye-Jenkins interpretation of it...
...But this book is finally much more than an argument with Wilson...
...Heart speaks to heart...
...This was particularly true when it came to literature and the arts, which I had discovered to be my true passions...
...Yet, it is to the Orthodox church that many Russians return...
...REV...
...Today, pilgrims travel to Sergiyev Posad to venerate the saint's relics, and 300 seminarians study theology there...
...my mission is to go off and slay the beast of modernity...
...I cannot be concentrating on reciting lauds and compline at church, or on private prayers at home, and at the same time fully attend to my granddaughter's emotional needs—or talk over some thorny bioethical question with my husband...
...Hence, his evident coolness...
...My euphoria evaporated and was replaced by something closer to moral revulsion...
...DEREK s. JEFFREYS Green Bay, Wis...
...Godfrey's "Crowd Control" reimpressed on me how disparate elements can join to strike a blow to the solar plexus...
...The problem that von Balthasar sets out—the danger of a social order in which truth and goodness are stressed at the expense of beauty—speaks directly to my own struggle to find an integrated vision in a polarized time...
...14 (Continued from page 4} personhood undermines the utilitarian reasoning pervasive in debates about artificial contraception...
...At the famous monastery of Optina Pustin, several hours from Moscow in the Russian countryside, I winced when a young Russian guide described how the Polish troops massacred the monks and then immolated the women and children who had taken refuge in the village church...
...See this, and more strange stuff, in Margaret Talbot's article, "A Desire to Duplicate...
...The "Orthodox Vatican" and holiest of all monasteries is Sergiyev Posad, about forty miles outside Moscow...
...I agree...
...These sad testimonies always begin with the words, "I had twelve years of Catholic education, but...
...Is Alexei willing to pay a similar price for this freedom in Russia...
...Johnson wants church teaching to be based in ordinary life experience, but let him consider this basic problem: If a population of 1 million couples is using artificial birth control, one year the normal failure rate will result in at least fifty thousand unwanted pregnancies...
...In what way is God's image connected to the human body...
...In ten short years, several historic monasteries and convents have been restored to the Orthodox church and have welcomed hundreds of young novices...
...For that matter, holiness always attracts crowds...
...Yes, he answers, there exists a "genuine 'training in holiness' adapted to people's needs...
...The truth, as I came to see it, is that the tragic sense of life is the ultimate antidote to religious arrogance and sentimentality, as well as to the ideological triumphalisms of the Right and Left...
...Wilson...
...I would not be surprised to find them multiplied...
...The patriarch is said to be ailing...
...This to me is the real problem of native...
...Why...
...I was drawn by many facets of Catholicism, including its communitarian ethos and sacramental vision...
...But in the meantime, it is unlikely that a Polish pope will be a welcome guest in Moscow...
...Since these couples have already decided to separate childbearing from sexual pleasure, abortion becomes the natural solution...
...Science is necessarily about generalization and exhaustive explanation...
...This, it seems to me, would go beyond repetition of the platitudes about access to a lover's body and the benefits of sexual enjoyment to a discussion about the real experiences of people who have made a serious attempt to conform to doctrinal standards...
...Since Alleva's own concerns have to do with the verisimilitude of the Left Behind series as thrillers, he is certainly entitled to be selective in his quarrels...
...But my point about genocide was linked to the absolute prohibition of condoms, including for people with aids...
...Catholicism appealed to me because it offered a corrective vision to the individualism, triumphalism, and politicization of the conservative movement...
...My experiences lead me to believe that the answer would not be as dismal as the author assumes...
...Toward the beginning of the book, after making a wonderful use of the dialogue between Gloucester and Edgar in King Lear, Berry writes something that shines through on every page: "To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it...
...People follow religion, he says, because it is 'easier' than empiricism, the lab evidently being harder to bear than the cross...
...The bishops could use a refresher course or two: their responses to controversial works of art like Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ, for example, have been inept...
...At a time when two of our most precious forms of communication—political discourse and reason itself—have been compromised by the divisiveness of ideology, art is one of the few things that can still bind us together...
...If the metaphysical realm has vanished, one may feel bereft not only because of the giant deficit left by that vacant realm but because the girl, the bird, the vase, the book now seem unable in their solitude to justify or account for the weight of their own beauty...
...The implicit message here is that mysticism for the masses is hopeless...
...For all their differences of personality, literary style, and politics, every one of these writers explored the tragic dimension of the Catholic worldview...
...This struck me as both sad—in the unlikely chance of a successful cloning, they will not get "him" back—and profoundly superstitious...
...The joys of Catholic sex Luke Timothy Johnson's article left me with a nagging unease...
...Nevertheless, before drawing such a conclusion, we ought to at least represent the pope's position fairly...
...PAUL A. HOTTINGER Downers Grove, III...
...With the example of Eliot 12 before me, I couldn't accept such a position...
...moments among young engaged and married couples not to be convinced of the Theology of the Body's great pastoral utility...
...It is precisely the connection between birth control and abortion that Johnson seems to disregard...
...Why can't the consensual use of a condom be as holy an act as the consensual avoidance of fertility...
...But Alexei II shows little interest in a papal visit to "Holy Russia...
...Throughout the evolution of my ideas about politics and culture, I had also been on a spiritual journey...
...But when I try to make my language more particular, I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated...
...John Paul II, however, rarely asks questions without his reply at the ready...
...The parish is "a diverse complex 8 reality" forced to provide "something for everybody...
...Can, for instance, holiness also be unplanned...
...We don't have figures today like Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy who might be capitalized by the critics as Catholic Authors...
...Commuting to Hillsdale from Notre Dame, where he taught for most of his career, Niemeyer would not only guide his students through the philosophies of Plato, Augustine, Rousseau, and Marx, but also through the literary visions of Dostoevsky, Musil, Trilling, and Solzhenitsyn...
...I think perhaps with more admiration about an incident recounted in a letter to the New York Review of Books by an Israeli who survived the occupation of Poland...
...When Catholics return to the faith, they do so because they discover the power of the Holy Spirit to heal and help them live good and happy lives...
...I tentatively conclude that prayer can be offered before and after intense, engaged activities, but not during...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON Large families & ideas I was pleasantly surprised by two pieces in the February 9 issue of Commonweal...
...Then there is the waste that comes with political posturing and name-calling...
...In Latin America, Roman Catholics are not very happy about the growth of Evangelical sects, but it is the price to be paid for religious freedom...
...He worked for a small foundation in a suburb of New York that promoted the virtues of the free market...
...Currently, new icons are being installed, frescos are being painted, domes have been regilded in magnificent gold leaf, and choirs have relearned the wonderful Slavonic church music—necessary because every liturgy is sung and there are no organs, pianos, or guitars...
...Perhaps it's the general intellectual numbness of coming off a hotly contested election with its high polemics, but I find personal reflections by such sensitive narrators more persuasive these days than the closely reasoned certainty of experts...
...Berry speaks of the Kentucky farm he has worked for thirty-seven years, and shows that its mystery cannot be exhausted by reductive language...
...Gospel joy leads to sacrificial love in action, but social action and meaningful constructs, sans prayer, don't lead to the abundant life...
...I rather doubt that this generation's revisionists would have either...
...I found that they were deeply alienated from the world around them—that they had, in essence, despaired of conserving any cultural legacy...
...Superstition, after all, is more about control and the illusion of control than it is about magic...
...His point is that growth in holiness and prayer will energize love of neighbor and enkindle the commitment to social justice...
...I have no more objection to those who choose this path than I do to those who choose celibacy, in or out of marriage...
...What he opposes is the claim that science can satisfactorily explain everything that matters most to us...
...It goes without saying that many contemporary Catholic writers have troubled or anguished relationships with the church...
...So I thought, "I'm a young culture warrior...
...Eliot with Russell Kirk, and the cognitive dissonances became more pronounced...
...Forbidding as these two quotations may appear at first, I find them liberating...
...SIPNEY CALLAHAN f 111 CALL ¥® H0LiiiES$ Planned & unplanned In his apostolic letter Novo millennio ineunte, initiating the new millennium, Pope John Paul II asks: "Can holiness ever be planned...
...By comparison, the conservative political and economic nostrums touted by others at Hillsdale seemed brittle and thin...
...Conservatives routinely deride one of the most cultured and artistically sensitive Catholic bishops, Archbishop Rembert Weakland...
...We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past...can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love...
...JULIAN IRIAS Davis, Calif...
...Think of writers like Oscar Hijuelos, Alice McDermott, Ron Hansen, Annie Dillard, Richard Rodriguez, David Plante, Tobias Wolff, Jon Hassler, and poets such as Dana Gioia, Paul Mariani, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and the late Denise Levertov...
...The effort to renew this tradition through literature and the arts shapes my own form of Catholic civic engagement...
...The more I think about this, the more convinced I become that the best way to address it is to attempt something of a self-portrait, to describe both the evolution of my ideas and some of the reasons for my conversion to the Catholic church...
...Holiness will always consist of intense love of God and neighbor, but the specifics can present problems...
...He demonstrates his points well, sometimes devastatingly...
...I went off to Oxford University to study literature and theology...
...Maybe I will...
...How many times have I heard cradle Catholics say that they left the church because they never understood that their religion was more than a formal ritual, or dutiful conformity to rules...
...Alice McDermott's Charming Billy and Oscar Hijuelos's Mr...
...For example, Johnson's focus on the use of the rhetoric of self-control causes him to miss the larger point: many of us who follow church teachings do so joyfully and find that it has brought greater, not lesser, pleasure and happiness to our lives...
...As in Ireland or Bosnia, a dash of historical amnesia might be helpful in tempering ancient hostilities...
...Berry argues that a real dialogue among science, art, and religion would exhibit "a just complexity," which rules out the narrowness of Wilson's reductionism...
...But Christians reading the New Testament as a source of divine revelation may demand more of a proposed exegesis than that it be sincere and interesting...
...Familial and intellectual activities conflict (the working grandmother problem), and both require a loss of self-consciousness in service of the other...
...And then is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving...
...Suppose, granting the hopelessness of empirical proof, that you took Job's statement of faith as seriously as Mr...
...The metaphor of Jacob wrestling the angel is frequently invoked these days...
...The more I studied literature and the arts, the more I realized that they show us that the world is far more ambiguous than we think...
...Such misunderstandings fuel the "I am a recovering Catholic" movement...
...I'm obviously seeking a spirituality that covers the out-ofcontrol, unexamined passionate part of life...
...Instead he offered a gentle argument for the large family, that carried all the more weight for avoiding the hectoring arguments of church apologists...
...They stood—for there are no pews or kneelers—and made the deep bows and innumerable signs of the cross as they followed the lengthy liturgies with a quiet intensity...
...Niemeyer, an emigre political philosopher who had escaped from Nazi Germany, spent his life trying to understand the emergence of modern ideologies...
...Rather than impose a false classical order over his inner disorder, Eliot worked through his own chaos, shoring up fragments against his ruin...
...ROGER J. LANDRY Fall River, Mass...
...And those parishes which are true to Catholic social teaching will serve the needy (with or without President George W. Bush's imprimatur), while they work for structural reforms...
...God offers the gift of holiness to all, but "the gift in turn becomes a task which must shape the whole of Christian life...
...I also noticed that with despair came rage, which explained why conservatives were always furious: they had no tradition left to conserve...
...It was well known that Modern Art was all about chaos and fragmentation, unfettered sexuality, the occult, and so on...
...Without taking up the philosophical issues behind his "deductive theology," I would push Johnson on his concluding claim that "we must, in all humility, be willing to learn from the bodies and the stories of those whose response to God and to God's world involves sexual love...
...Place this alongside this thought from von Balthasar: "Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance...
...The dead child's parents know, says the chemist, that "this baby will have no memory of the ten months they had been living together...
...I have no reason to think I would have had such courage...
...By the time I got to college age it was only natural that I would go to the academic mecca of conservatism in America, Hillsdale College in Michigan...
...Many twentysomethings I observed in the congregations seemed extraordinarily devout...
...Perhaps we should wish that after the processes of reduction, scientists would return, not to the processes of synthesis and integration, but to the world of our creatureliness and affection, our joy and grief, that precedes and (so far) survives all of our processes...
...Jeffreys says that the pope does not really have an "act-centered morality...
...While we should mourn that to some extent—O'Connor and Percy were profoundly Catholic writers whose works manifested philosophical depth and prophetic wisdom—there are plenty of reasons to celebrate the fact that fewer writers are being pigeon-holed by their denominational allegiances...
...I am pleased to hear them...
...Nearly fifty years after its publication, Kirk's The Conservative Mind (1953) remains a brilliant, graceful synthesis of European and American traditionalist ideas from Edmund Burke to T.S...
...it is a necessary but limited and limiting way to examine aspects of the world...
...Johnson's failures to contextualize the pope's thought within its corpus as a whole and to understand the purpose of a catechetical address seem to be at the root of his embarrassingly off-base criticisms and misunderstandings...
...In the end, some might well agree with Johnson...
...Since "paths to holiness are personal," as the pope writes, holiness comes in many forms...
...This is true enough, but I wonder if Johnson has really offered an alter44 chetical address" was to support, as I suggest, Humanae vitae...
...13 Image is also a response to the hyper-politicization of our social order, a process that has been most visible in the socalled culture wars and the bitter dispute over last fall's presidential election...
...If I've had a recurring frustration over the years, it's been the difficulty of getting people to listen to good news...
...He has already been invited by Russian President Vladimir Putin, and only awaits word from the patriarch before flying to Moscow...
...Today's Catholic writers are describing more intimate and familiar worlds...
...Consistent ethic Luke Timothy Johnson does offer some salient points in his critique of Pope John Paul II's theology, which he describes as "abstract" and idealistic...
...In point of fact, has the author actually been willing to listen to and learn from people who give witness to the magnificent grace available to those 43 who foEow the church's teachings on sexuality...
...As a wife, mother, grandmother, writer, and lecturer, my days consist of many activities that require my full focused attention...
...I disagree with those theological authorities (often Protestant) who proclaim that it is a deep-seated misunderstanding of religion "to presume that the purpose of religion is to produce happiness...
...And we still love our partners and rejoice in our ability to demonstrate that physically...
...The great hero of ancient Russia is Saint Prince Alexander Nevsky (1220-63), the man who saved Russia from the invading Teutonic Knights who promised to make it Roman Catholic...
...In short, they espoused a form of Christian humanism that I found deeply moving...
...I think of Jan Korski skiing across the Alps, a consecrated host in a pendant on a chain around his neck, to tell the Allies who couldn't have cared less what was happening at Auschwitz...
...There is some debate about just how deep the divisions of the culture wars go, but I think it's fair to say that, at the level of public discourse, we have witnessed a slide into increasingly shrill, Utopian ideological rhetoric on both sides of the aisle...
...Matthew Kowalski makes the point that allowing artificial birth control would lead inevitably to abortion, since for people whose sexual activity already excludes the thought of having a child, "abortion becomes the natural solution...
...I take it as a healthy sign that there is no school of Catholic writers, that the group I've just listed is marked by a tremendous diversity of styles and sensibilities...
...As early as the 1950s my father was at the center of the emerging conservative intellectual movement...
...I gravitated toward Eliot's conservatism, which he once expressed by declaring himself "a royalist, an Anglo-Catholic, and a classicist...
...It is inspirational, like Lear, like Job...
...I wonder what the mystics would say about this...
...God will hear you...
...Today, the pastoral priority of every Catholic parish should be to prepare its members to respond to the Second Vatican Council's "universal call to holiness...
...I would love to hear a sermon helping me become whole and holy at every level of personal consciousness, with or without self-awareness...
...It became more and more difficult for me to reconcile this awareness of ambiguity and complexity with the ideological fervor of the community in which I lived...
...In the arts this entailed a repudiation of Modern Art (the words were always capitalized...
...one is the woman's own daughter...
...But this still represents a significant shift: there's less anger, less irony, and less willingness to turn one's back on the church in the leading Catholic writers today than was the case twenty years ago...
...Readings of Scripture that force it into a fortune-telling role do not have a good track record...
...I learned that Eliot came to regret that profession of his allegiances, and since Eliot was employing the fragmented modernist style that I had believed was part of the problem, further revisions in my thinking were necessary...
...Regrettably, there has been some anger and recrimination on the part of some Catholics...
...From scholarly books like Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton University Press) to such films as American Beauty, it is clear that our culture is longing for the liberating and restorative power of creative intuition (to use a phrase of Maritain's...
...An old woman on a crowded trolley in Warsaw, at a time and in a place where one could trust almost no one, replied to the anti-Semitic diatribe a fellow passenger was delivering by saying, "Hush up...
...During my two years in Oxford, I read the leading novelists of what has loosely been called the Catholic Literary Revival: Georges Bernanos and Francois Mauriac, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor...
...11 I WAS A TEENAGE CONSERVATIVE The dead end of politics & the possibilities of art Gregory Wolfe Iwant to relate my work as the editor of a quarterly journal of literature and the arts to the larger patterns of Catholic civic engagement in America today...
...At the end of my time in Oxford, I was received into the church...
...To paraphrase Hamlet, I gradually saw that what great art does is to hold a mirror up to nature, to reveal the "very age and body of the time his form and pressure...
...Quite apart from the fact that there are about five hundred thousand Roman Catholics in Russia, the pope knows that his visit would have enormous symbolic importance for the whole Christian world...
...Eliot...
...Liberals dance around the fact that the giants of twentieth-century Catholic aesthetics, including Jacques Maritain, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Romano Guardini, were not self-styled dissenters from church teaching and authority...
...What is pertinent is a reexamination of the moral issue in light of medical disaster, not a reexamination of the pope's entire corpus to justify the church's present stance...
...Robert hannon Fairbanks, Ark...
...Berry asks, "Is knowledge by definition explainable, or is there such a thing as unexplainable knowledge...
...Paul Hottinger asks why I don't work at all this stuff I said needed doing, since the pope is a busier guy than I am...
...Eliot was seeking to embrace ancient truths, but he did so in the artistic forms of his day...
...Even with the help of these two great mentors, I still experienced cognitive dissonance in a variety of forms...
...But the more I read his poetry, the more I found a disparity between his supposed classicism and the messy, fragmented, subjective reality of his poetic language...
...Marvin, S.D...
...5 McGowan, by juxtaposing the general chaos of India's earthquake with the particular and personal moral challenge of a public interrogation, managed, for me at least, to convey how bewildering our world is and how great events find reflections in our everyday life...
...As couples, we communicate more, not less...
...But they are still working to get him back...
...Some believe that the biography of Alexei himself—his rapid rise from a simple Estonian monk to official representative of the USSR at foreign conferences, to metropolitan of Leningrad, and finally to patriarch—suggests his collaboration with the former Soviet state...
...Finally, in regard to the Theology of the Body, I found one of Johnson's principles rather hard to accept: "Human bodies are part of God's image and the means through which absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us...
...May it not be precisely because the "purpose of a catemodern sexual ethics...
...No, dear friend, it is a far greater misunderstanding to think that a coherent belief system is enough...
...The pope accepts all this and says that working for social justice embodies the church's "commitment to history," and demonstrates our "love for our brothers and sisters...
...As a convert, I resist these stories, but over the years I've had to admit that abuses do happen...
...Berry is not at all against science...
...But even in his analysis, a dismissal of current theology would have to involve a serious attempt to confront the realities behind the church's teachings...
...For a time after the election I was caught up in the euphoria, but I was already lost to the conservative movement...
...Certainly, not everyone who uses natural family planning will find it easy...
...Just a small point in response to Popiel: I think that I called the pope's theology "deductive," whereas I would prefer a theology that was more "inductive...
...They think this baby should be alive...
...It seems to me that you would have to concede—and here empirical evidence is available—that it could not be done...
...In the new Russia, with its relative freedom of religion, many, especially the young, have questions about their own Orthodox roots...
...Every Russian child learns the story...
...But there is another reason, even less evident to Westerners: the heavy hand of history...
...it lacked unity...
...Just as sex does, I might add for the benefit of celibates and the cloistered...
...If each calls out for attention that has no destination beyond itself, each seems more self-centered, too fragile to support the gravity of our immense regard...
...Berry's point is that religion and the arts are, in Wilson's scheme, subsumed under a scientistic, reductionist point of view, one which is finally as much a matter of faith and a priori thinking as any religion ever was...
...As the book of Nehemiah (8:10) says: "rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength...
...If these authors are beset by doubts, they are also less likely to condemn the institutional church out of hand...
...Where some saw only gloomy, depressing stories, I found liberation...
...His thinking leads to a very confusing ethical point of view...
...But why should we assume that using a condom is different than periodic abstinence with respect to intention concerning childbirth...
...Ives' Christmas are both portraits of sanctity and suffering but their take on the "tragic sense of life" is quiet and unassuming when contrasted with the stark, existential dramas of the whisky and country priests...
...They are being assisted by a UFO cult, one led by a former racecar driver named Rael, who claims to have learned much from space aliens...
...I'm still looking for answers...
...They brought with them Jesuit missionaries to convert the people to Catholicism...
...worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God...
...marian burkhart New York, N.Y...
...Like T.S...
...D 10 Willard Francis Jabusch A PAPAL VISIT TO RUSSIA Where is Alexei II's invite...
...Well might he ask—given the complexity of the idea of holiness...
...Pope John Paul II would like to add Russia to the long list of countries he has visited...
...Furthering the transcendent spiritual life of a parish is, as Mary rather than Martha would understand, to choose the better part...
...They would have been about ten years old when the Soviet state collapsed...
...Holiness is also wholeness, or an integration of all that I am—and I am many things...
...We are more in tune with one another's desires...
...Whether consciously or not, they believed that Western civilization had died at some point in the past (some favored 1300, others 1832 or 1914...
...Political struggles take place over issues that are defined by the underlying culture...
...Landry praises what the pope had said about pleasure and the rest in 1960...
...They established their conservative visions on a rich synthesis of literature, history, philosophy, and theology...
...As I pursued the implications of this line of thought, I looked around to see whether my fellow conservatives were engaging the culture of their own time...
...To know that I am 'a white male American human,' that a red bird with black wings is 'a scarlet tanager,' that this is 'a riparian plant community'— all that is helpful to a necessary kind of thought...
...JENNIFER POP1EL Green Bay, Wis...
...The author replies: Derek Jeffreys and Roger Landry think that I have misrepresented Pope John Paul II because I did not take into account his other writings on the subject of human love, or grasp the "purpose of a catechetical address...
...Churches do build community bonds that strengthen civil society...
...In the late 1970s two great scholars taught there, Russell Kirk and Gerhart Niemeyer...
...Politics may be a noble calling, but it is always in danger of becoming an end in itself...
...He is more in a position to address these issues than the pope...
...A few days after the election, the phones at NR and other conservative organizations began ringing off the hook as people jockeyed for positions in the new administration, including jobs in departments these stalwarts had resolutely pledged to abolish...
...They did so in response to the belief that Christ died to save all of us— Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped as well...
...Taken together, these two statements suggest not only the enormous challenges facing our politicized society but also the possibility of a theological aesthetic that can heal and unite...
...There have been times when critics have confused the tragic sense with mere fatalism, but I suspect that is because Americans still suffer from the illusion that they can escape tragedy and remake themselves in the process...
...Jo McGowan's "Corporal Punishment" and A.W...
...The pope is far truer to the gospel when he says that prayer and worship lead to "ineffable joy...
...After a one-semester flirtation with libertarianism, I quickly apprenticed myself to Kirk and Niemeyer...
...Yes, parishes do well to act as "mediating institutions" (the buzz word in political analysis used to praise voluntary associations that stand between the individual and the state...
...Now the Catholics would like to have their churches and other property in the western Ukraine returned...
...By resurrecting an outmoded ethical category, Johnson does little to further the debate about Humane vitae...
...During Soviet days, it was renamed Zagorsk, after a Communist hero...
...It makes sense, therefore, that some Russians find themselves drawn to other religions...
...With this religious revival, the astonishing number of priestly and monastic vocations, and the restored magnificence of the Russian churches, Patriarch Alexei II may think he has no need of a visit from the bishop of Rome...
...In such a dialogue I think the pope makes the better case...
...The communitarian, sacramental, and tragic dimensions of the Catholic tradition grew out of a faith attuned to beauty...
...He offers Job's "I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though...
...I came to understand why Catholics venerate the crucifix, not the empty cross, why they are haunted / by the words to Mary that "a sword shall pierce your own soul also...
...Disappointed As someone who believes in Humanae vitae but also agrees there is room for further development in this teaching, I found Luke Timothy Johnson's essay disappointing...
...If natural family planners, surprised by pregnancy, are then open to God's will concerning a birth, why should we assume that those using condoms who are surprised whould then seek an abortion...
...Berry spends a good deal of the book arguing with Edward O. Wilson's proposed reconciliation of science, religion, and the arts, which Wilson put forward in Consilience (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998...
...Roger Landry and Jennifer Popiel offer testimonies concerning the joy brought to couples who are introduced to papal teaching on sexuality or who practice natural family planning...
...At the center of this sensibility is a profound awareness of the ambiguities and divisions within the human heart, along with a stress on the importance of suffering and contemplation...
...Berry has wise and powerfully moving things to say about ethics, morality, religion, and the arts...
...This is borne out by documented facts: a high percentage of women seeking abortions were using birth control methods that failed...
...The inner spiritual dimension of the faith was not apparent to them, only the judgments and guilt that produced the fear that cast out love...
...They know the baby will not be exactly the same as the first one...
...The property of Ukrainian Greek Catholics was confiscated and given to the Orthodox...
...But there are other stories, voiced by people of equally deep faith and love for the church but with quite different experiences, and I would like them to be heard as well...
...Their characters—including the country priest and the whisky priest, Charles Ryder and Hazel Motes— learned the painful lesson that happiness and blessedness are not the same thing, that the church calls us to make a choice "costing not less than everything" (Eliot...
...And culture, in turn, is nourished by art and religion...
...The relentless negativism of the culture wars and the suspicion of imagination that runs deep in our American religious tradition remain potent forces...
...Pastors in Western Europe and North America can only envy such numbers and devotion...
...True, some churches in Russia are still being used as restaurants, garages, or gyms, but when visiting there for several weeks last August, I saw that many had been restored to liturgical use...
...Well, if he does not, then his persistence in supporting Humanae vitae becomes even stranger, for that composition is strictly act-centered...
...Until the critics of Humanae vitae address this, John Paul II will continue to win the philosophical argument while much of the population simply ignores him...
...As one good pastor puts it, his parish has to make an effort just "to reach out, to invite, to encourage people to the active practice of their faith at the most elementary level...
...Contemporary Catholic writers are in some ways less ambitious than their predecessors earlier in the twentieth century...
...9 JOHN GARVEY THE LESSONS OF COMPLEXITY On reading E. O. Wilson & Wendell Berry Arecent New York Times Magazine article (February 4) told the chilling tale of a couple who are trying to clone their dead child...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 5
