Critics' choices for Christmas
Sheahen, Laura
BOOKS Critics' choices for Christmas Laura Sheahen Laura Sheahen is religion producer at Be-liefnet.com. If baby-boomer Catholics have been puzzled by their younger Gen-X counterparts lately,...
...is a fascinating study of the return to traditional worship and doctrine among Catholics and Protestants under thirty-five...
...Pierced and tattooed teenagers combine music and moral mandates at the annual Rock for Life...
...The book's generous groupings allow readers to compare multiple variations on the same theme: there are no fewer than thirty poems about Orpheus, for example...
...And my big thing is: Who cares...
...Attractive college students forgo their evening activities on campus to squeeze in a little eucharistic adoration...
...Christianity in the United States, it would seem, has already been there, done that...
...Of course, it's not a literacy divide (one Indian grandmother quotes Shakespeare) that makes America's mores, like its knock-knock jokes, unintelligible...
...Organized into categories such as 'Titans," "Other Olympians," and "Lesser Immortals," the poems-all written after 1900, and drawn from many countries- put new spins on the classic tales...
...At their bittersweet best, Divakaruni's stories follow the poignant consequences of shutting others out, on one side of the ocean or another...
...Tradition is "sexy and exotic," says a thirty-one-year-old seminary professor...
...Thus we read of Arseny defusing lethal tensions between the political prisoners and the felons who share barracks...
...Despite a few surprising omissions- where is Louise Bogan's justly celebrated "Medusa"?-Gods and Mortals is a refreshing addition to a poetic landscape sorely in need of a Parnassus...
...When the story lines occasionally stumble, Divakaruni's writing is saved by her keen outsider's eye for what is ruefully ridiculous in American society...
...The writing is uneven, as any work by multiple anonymous authors must be...
...In a wrenching poem by Muriel Rukeyser, we watch Icarus' girlfriend wait for him on the beach: "He said all the buckles were very firm/He said the wax was the best wax...
...society or helplessly confused by it...
...If baby-boomer Catholics have been puzzled by their younger Gen-X counterparts lately, they need look no further than Colleen Carroll's excellent new book for an explanation of what's up with Gen-X Christians...
...and those who expect journalistic accuracy will be taken aback by such uncritical assurances as, yes, Arseny did ward off freezing by means of prayer...
...Orthodoxy with a capital O is the subject of Father Arseny: Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father (Saint Vladimir's Seminary Press, $15.95, 279 pp...
...a curious work that has captivated post-Soviet Russia's emerging Christian community...
...They opt out in search of jobs that are an "extension of their faith journey," and practice a traditionalism one describes as "in your face...
...The book defines another intriguing development: the early midlife crisis...
...the translation is inelegant...
...A well-researched, enjoyable read, The New Faithful is studded with revealing vignettes...
...Though most of the poems are by English-speaking poets, there's a healthy sampling of foreign poems, in better-than-average translations...
...Her latest volume of stories, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (Doubleday, $23.95, 268 pp...
...Old favorites like Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" stand alongside contemporary works like Lucille Clifton's lesser-known, but memorably caustic "Leda 3" (Leda to Zeus: "next time come as a man/or don't come...
...These "spiritual children" recount the priest's prescient knowledge of their lives-everything from a son's illness to a woman's confession of adultery...
...and urging a camp guard not to lose his soul by rejoining the secret police...
...a satisfying anthology of modern verse about Greek myths...
...Twentysomethings work all day in power jobs and then go home to...
...A mother-in-law visiting the States finds soap operas "baffling," and disparages Equal, the sugar substitute, as "that chemical powder...
...in need of a Parnassus...
...Boomers think well-informed believers need to "prove you can be a rational Christian...
...In Stephen Mitchell's prose poem, "The truth is that Sisyphus is in love with the rock...
...Too often, American society's very real emotional shortcomings are laid bare when Indian characters puzzle over customs like "children being allowed to close their doors against their parents...
...say the rosary...
...The anecdotes that make up Father Arseny were penned in secret and first disseminated as samizdat (think smudged mimeographed sheets passed from hand to hand...
...Poetry lovers feeling shut out by the mystifying in-jokes of America's poetry establishment will find respite in Gods and Mortals (Oxford University Press, $27.50,288 pp...
...A collection of narratives about a Russian Orthodox priest imprisoned for decades in Stalin's Gulag, the book is part ha-giography, part One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich...
...Mothers lose the respect of daughters-in-law, siblings grow aloof, lovers quarrel-and often, cultural incompatibilities are to blame...
...If the movement toward orthodoxy is not a widespread trend, it's a trend nonetheless, and one worth watching...
...The stories concern family relationships-often those of mothers and daughters- foundering across the distances created by not only green cards but conflicting expectations...
...Editor Nina Kossman's selection is deft and thorough...
...How absurdly American...
...The same professor laments the "boomer obsession" with reconciling faith and logic...
...Young lobbyists and lawyers on Capitol Hill push the church's social teaching in the halls of power...
...They make real to American audiences "abhimaan, that mix of love and anger and hurt which lies at the heart of so many of our Indian tales, and for which there is no equivalent in English...
...Who knew...
...By the end, however, Father Arseny won me over, as the man himself won over the hard-bitten skeptics of the Gulag, demonstrating how a great spirit survived history's worst epoch to minister as a "reader of the human soul...
...Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's first collection of short stories, Arranged Marriage, won praise for its sensitive portrayals of young Indian women encountering America as new wives...
...Unlike most Russian prison tomes, there is even a lengthy happy ending: the second half of the book is written by people Arseny counseled after his release...
...Raised in affluent homes and often achieving career success in their twenties, some younger Christians are realizing that education, money, and power aren't cutting it when it comes to fulfillment...
...A myth's worth and longevity are directly proportional to the permutations it inspires in artists through the ages, and these poems fulfill that promise...
...The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy (Loyola Press, $19.95,320 pp...
...In one story, an Indian woman laughs at her emigre niece: 'To believe that you can control everything in your life...
...explores the same immigrant experience from the standpoint of women either firmly established in U.S...
...Though one character muses that she doesn't "fully understand the word privacy, because there was no such term in Bengali," we know the dictionary is not the issue...
...miraculously stopping a beating (perhaps, it is suggested, by something akin to astral projection...
...They trace the impact of an unprepossessing man who became a source of grace in the Siberian camps- and beyond...
Vol. 129 • December 2002 • No. 21
