Summer reading
Dillon, Michele
VALERRY things about pain: first its "incontestable and unnegotiable" presence for the per-son in pain. It's the "most vibrant example of what it is 'to have certainty.'" But for others this pain...
...The book provides a gentle commentary on the ordinariness of life in a small Midwestern town...
...Residents of luxury high rises on the Upper East Side pay handsomely for their safe view of the East River's Hell Gate, where the Harlem River violently encounters water from Long Is-land Sound...
...You may want music too...
...It was a time when the newly evolving power of the church hierarchy was contested by Gnostic scholars who believed that a true understanding of God could only be achieved by a personal journey of discovery, one that is not mediated by bishops, priests, and deacons of the church...
...Sometimes, especially perhaps in summer, that is precisely what we want a great book to do...
...which traces the emotional journey of a successful professor who is set adrift by the prospect of moving to a bigger house...
...In the process, it must not lose its soul, or else it becomes useless...
...Pagels ofCommonweal 28 June 18, 2004 fers a masterful and historically accurate depiction of Gnosticism based on manuscripts discovered accidentally by an Egyptian farmer at Nag Hammadi in 1945...
...The Gnostics thought that the God worshiped by most Christians was a demiurge or usurper...
...Michele Dillon An associate professor of sociology, Michele Dillon teaches at the University of New Hampshire...
...If you want total relaxation this summer and a beautiful read, then you probably cannot do much better than By the Lake, by Irish novelist John McGahern (Vintage, $14, 352 pp...
...and the subtle and some-times glaring ways in which people try to inject meaning into their lives...
...The archipelago of New York, probably one of the greatest of waterfront cities, is given an excellent if partial walking tour by Phillip Lopate's Water-front: A Journey around Manhattan (Crown Publishers, $25.95, 432 pp...
...Whatever pain achieves," she says, "it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language"—in fact, to its active destruction of language...
...They believed that the true divine force did not assume a human form and was capable of fusing polarities (for example, the masculine and the feminine) into one...
...The upward mobility of Jews and the Irish...
...The Gnostic tradition continues to affect popular culture, most notably through the influence of Carl Jung on the Star Wars movie trilogy, New Age spirituality, and the writings of Robertson Davies and Joseph Campbell...
...It is impossible to read this book without getting dragged deep into the wrenching pain that Roth unsparingly evokes...
...The second strongest tidal current in the world, behind the Bay of Fundy, the East River (really a tidal strait) was tamed somewhat in the late nineteenth century by engineers who blasted the Gate's treacherous rocks...
...Some Common-weal readers may well associate McGahem with The Dark and other controversial books he wrote years ago and the debates they ignited over sex, women, and the repressive power of Catholicism...
...When almost every public voice is trying to badger, cajole, or persuade me, it is like paradise to hear a voice freely at work in thinking out a public good...
...the precipitous shift from a manufacturing to a corporate economy...
...Summer offers us time to restore the soul, to build up the harried self buffeted by the raw chills of winter...
...Still, each metamorphosis sheds enough of the past to let romantic re-constructions become the dominant public impression...
...ummer would be unthinkable without water—its tempering of heat, its romance, its beauty, its infinite offerings of fun...
...the suburban affluence of their children and grand-children...
...Dearborn, MI 4812 (313) 624-9784 u,ww...
...By the time you are finished, you will have a new appreciation for the tragic beauty of life and of relationships whose texture cannot be undone...
...corn...
...It's the "most vibrant example of what it is 'to have certainty.'" But for others this pain is "so elusive that 'hearing about pain' may exist as the primary model of what it is 'to have doubt...
...I'll end by recommending two dazzling piano recordings (from Hyperion) by Angela Hewitt: Bach's magnificent English Suites and Couperin's lyrical, witty Keyboard Music...
...The book also recounts the adventures of the professor's young student, Tom Outland...
...The world Cather creates is ultimately a pleas-ant one to travel through, but readers cannot journey for long without at least rethinking the superficiality of some of their own ambitions and recommitting to the sacred ideals that animate life...
...This is indeed the same author but writing totally different prose...
...By the Lake touches on nothing controversial or really tragic...
...Finally, given the wide appeal of Gnosticism evidenced by the popularity of Dan Brown's novel, The DaVinci Code, may I suggest that readers turn to Elaine Pagels's concise yet erudite The Gnostic Gospels (Vintage, $12, 224 pp...
...These are large subjects and this is a large book, but it is not larger than a mind...
...These texts, as Pagels points out, show us a very different side of Christianity present in the first two centuries after the birth of Christ...
...The gentleness and connectedness of life and the endless gifts of nature are what McGahern evocatively celebrates...
...Historians and theologians have traced the development of Christian doctrine, and even offered theories to explain it...
...The narrative is typically attentive to the details of personal charcommonwealmagazine.org acter and the intricate beauty of the surroundings in which life plots unfold...
...I was going to write about Shirley Hazzard's wonderful new novel The Great Fire (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24, 278 pp...
...but space does not permit and I'm sure someone else will praise it as it deserves...
...N o matter how you spend your summers or what memories they evoke, the prospect of summer is full of the promise of endless freedom...
...On the other hand, various observers of the church in the world—perhaps most notoriously Max Weber—have interpreted how Christianity and the world have, for better or for worse, reacted upon one another...
...But, as Friedrich Schleiermacher said, it must open its windows to the world, lest it become irrelevant or even harmful...
...Yet our benign view of water is a very recent phenomenon, as a walk around many major American cities re-minds us...
...The truth is that New York's rivers re-main dangerous, despite all the ingenious engineering to make them serene and navigable...
...The power of the book comes, though, from the poignant descriptions of the well-meaning but disconnected members and friends of the Levov family...
...Even as waterfront property is today prized above all other, until the 1960s urban waterfronts were primarily industrial, brutal, and cheap...
...Reading about the protagonist, Seymour Levov, one writhes with torturous recognition...
...Nonetheless Hell Gate is still too hazardous to allow for the economical recovery of the S THE DIALECTICAL DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINE A Methodological Proposal by Charles Dickinson If Christianity—including Christian faith and theology—is to avoid becoming totally out of touch with the world—a museum piece at best, a force of baleful reaction at worst—it must constantly update itself by constant interaction, dialogue, dialectic with all the important intellectual currents, movements, disciplines of today...
...This is a searingly rich and compelling story of one New Jersey family's psychological odyssey through the years that transformed post-World War II American society...
...and the intergenerational conflict and political turmoil of the 1960s are all woven seamlessly into Roth's story...
...The rich lived inland, and with few exceptions, only the poor worked and lived on the water...
...Beginning in this way with unmaking, Scarry goes on in the second half of the book to the nature of imagining and making: "making up and making real," that is, to the structure of belief and of the artifact...
...What better way to lose one's self than to get immersed in Philip Roth's Pulitzer Prize-winner, American Pastoral (Vintage, $14.95, 423 pp...
...But going beyond such works, The Dialectical Development of Doctrine combines the two themes by proposing a necessary two-way dialectic between theology and the world, a dialectic absolutely essential to the healthy growth and development of both our faith and our understanding of the world, as well as of the culture which we continue to create and will bequeath to our children...
...Sitting "by the lake," taking in the peaceful dignity of its changing views, and observing the seasonal routines of the inhabitants is gripping precisely because it is so richly descriptive of ordinary people in a very ordinary but alluring place...
...Like the other two novels I have recommended, By the Lake envelops you and remains with you long after you have turned the last page...
...dovebook...
...Less intense but equally gripping is Willa Cather's The Professor's House (Vintage Classics, $11.95, 258 pp...
...Lopate writes of New York's transition from "a working port, to an abandoned, seedy no-man's-land, to a highly desirable zone of parks plus upscale retail/residential, each new metamorphosis only incompletely shedding the earlier associations...
...Commonweal 29 June 18, 2004 Pryor Petreugill Ann Arbor, MI 48107 ISBN 0-933462-01-U.S...
...the faults we wish we didn't find in ourselves and those close to us...
...There is no big plot and no character development, and although some of its themes and personalities are what one would expect from a story set in a small rural community in the west of Ireland, this is primarily a Wordsworthian narrative...
...25.00 hardco`, Dove Booksellers 13904 Michigan Ave...
...rs Julia VitulloMartin A frequent contributor, Julia Vitullo-Martin is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute...
Vol. 131 • June 2004 • No. 12
