The Road to Santiago
Harrison, Kathryn & Moses, Paul
Can anything be done? The editors of Kid Stuff affirm their commitment to First Amendment principles and their opposition to government censorship. Consequently, the proposed solutions rely on...
...This does not stop her from weeping when she receives the Eucharist during a long day on the trail...
...Paper proposals are solicited on the following subjects • Faith and Campus Culture • Faith and Classroom Teaching Faith and Scholarly Vocation For more details and full text of call for papers sec www,messiah.edu/faitbintheacademy or call (717) 766-2511, ext...
...Another is Wallace Stevens, on whom he has written a short book and who is S ANTONUCCI Commonweal 18 February 27, 2004...
...speakers include: Lee Shulman Cw-ncgic7 oan~auo f0 l: ncc Advaucculcru.ol Thad-ling Robert W uthuow Phnx'COn l-rii',eYSItr Commonweal 2 7 February 27, 2004 templative retreat, drenched more in sweat than in holy water...
...She does not refer to her father here, a minister of sorts, but does continue to examine herself with the same honesty and concision...
...This interest was most fully expressed in Shakespeare's Language (2000), a widely praised book which is likely to remain his most popular...
...Many were looking for something—often they were at turning points in their lives—but had no strong connection to organized religion...
...forth-coming April 2004) will serve as a common point of reference...
...Why do I like this road...
...After his schooldays on the island, Kermode attended the nearest mainland university, at Liverpool, and launched on an academic career that eventually took him to chairs at Manchester, Bristol, London, Cambridge, Columbia, and Harvard...
...she asks...
...James, has transported travelers on this pilgrimage for more than a thou-sand years...
...Kermode has always preferred to develop his ideas in essays and lectures rather than in sustained monographs, and Pieces of My Mind contains a substantial and representative selection of them...
...Paul Moses teaches journalism at Brooklyn College/LUNY...
...Nowadays, a steady flow of books provides the history and legends of the camino, the how-to and anecdotal treatments...
...Scholarship and Christian Faith: Enlarging the Conversation (Oxford lJniversity- Press...
...Now in his eighties, he lives in active retirement in Cambridge (England), still writing...
...Superficially, it involves blisters, sore calves, and enduring the heavy weight of carrying all your belongings, all day...
...Although she is the author of five novels, her best-known work is the memoir The Kiss (Random House, 1997), the spellbinding, disturbing story of the sexual relationship she had with her father when she was twenty...
...Instead, she re-sorts to the rhetorical tactic of verbal bludgeoning, placing the word "fear" in every chapter title, on nearly every page, and in her utterly vacuous conclusion: "Fear can be crippling", she writes, "especially when we fear some-thing that poses no major threat...
...Francis 1500 34th Avenue Oakland, CA 94601 916.4433717 ofmcadev@att.net www.sbfranciscans.org Conference...
...He began fifty years ago as a Shakespeare scholar, with a learned and still necessary edition of The Tempest...
...She became a Catholic at the age of ten after her mother converted from Christian Science, but reports that a priest told her in confession she had excommunicated her-self by marrying a Quaker (writer Colin Harrison) and not having their two children baptized...
...FRANCIS magazine for the Franciscan in each of us...
...I heard Benedictine monks chant vespers in Latin in a church the Templars built...
...She misses a lot by being aloof from the other pilgrims...
...To receive a free issue, please contact: The Way of St...
...Ittl...
...All I want is what my feet deliver: simultaneous communion with those dead and those yet to be...
...If he has been happy to make a life and career in England, he is also at home in the United States...
...Commonweal 2 6 February 27, 2004 The particular grace of Harrison's re-counting is that it finds the elusive words to explain how the pilgrims' step-by-step tedium turns to transcendence...
...How often will this be true, my luck that feels like grace, like God was there all along, holding off the wolves and saving my bed...
...Lovely country churches dot the trail's haunting, quiet villages, but they are almost al-ways closed...
...Why do I love it...
...While Harrison is sure-footed on the terrain of her interior journey and her relationship with her daughter, hers is not the book to read if you want to know about the camino's history or how to make the pilgrimage...
...One reason is that despite all the pitfalls—the exhaustion, the uncertainty of where you will stay the next night, or even the fabled wolves—it somehow works out...
...This was a pilgrimage on cow paths and mountain trails, village to village, from one bell-towered square to the next...
...Barbara Dafoe Whitehead is the author of Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman (Broadway Books...
...Not some medieval fair, with jousting, damsels in cone-shaped hats, and Harleys crowding the parking lot...
...The book's focus on the personal tends to downplay other dimensions of the camino, such as the history or politics (legend holds, anachronistically, that St...
...Still, the concluding essay by Newton Minow and Nell Minow invites reflection on a central question: In order to defend the right of free speech, how far do we go in surrendering our responsibilities to protect children from lurid, trashy media...
...For starters, she herself packs too much, bringing along the manuscript of a novel-inprogress—heavy reading, no matter how well written, after she has carried it a mere twenty miles...
...2720...
...Sociologist Karen Sternheimer argues that public concerns about the media's effects on children are simply fear-based...
...Kermode's basic assumptions are that if one is interested in literature one needs to take in much of it, and that a serious interest in literature involves an extensive concern with other things...
...For nearly as long, pilgrims with a bent for writing have felt compelled to set down what they experienced...
...OUR BEST CRITIC Pieces of My Mind Writings 19;8—2002 Ii1ink 1<rrmncod, Bernard Bergonzi it Frank Kermode is the outstanding British literary scholar of his generation, and one of the few with an international reputation, but he is not properly speaking an Englishman...
...She has worked this terrain before...
...Yet Sternheimer offers no evidence to support her contention...
...The experience is difficult to put into words...
...She starts too late in the morning and walks through the afternoon heat into the evening, exhausting herself...
...Early accounts were basically travelogues, indicating where the water was bad, the wolves were fierce, or the wine was good...
...It's Not the Media purports to tell the "truth" about the media's influence on children but offers instead a tedious polemic...
...Harrison draws her account from three separate trips on the camino, the most recent with her twelve-year-old daughter, who dubbed it their "not-exactly-avacation...
...I THE PATH OFTEN TAKEN Kathryn Harrison back from Santiago...
...In The Road to Santiago, novelist Kathryn Harrison describes it as "living in real time—not writing time or brain time or screen time, but footstep time, hunger time, and body time...
...They show how bewilderingly di-verse and numerous his interests are...
...James, son of Zebedee...
...In that sense, she is like some of the pilgrims I met on the camino...
...James killed thousands of Moors in battle, one reason for the pilgrimage's popularity in the Middle Ages...
...Academic studies use the camino as a window on the Middle Ages...
...But historical data can be found elsewhere...
...Kermode has long been fascinated by the aesthetic movement of the fin de siecle before last, as is apparent in the first essay here, "Poet and Dancer before Diaghilev," and a later study of the development of Botticelli's reputation...
...The camino is a strange sort of conCUNELkFNCF AiN'NUuNCEN)LNT AtCt SEPTEMBER 30-OCTOBER 2, 2004 MESSIAH COLLEGE, GRANTHAM...
...People fear change, so they deflect their anxieties onto an easy tar-get like the media...
...Harrison, who quotes herself as saying, "At least I'm more Catholic than I am anything else," is not sure of her religious affiliation...
...Consequently, the proposed solutions rely on grass-roots action and consumer boycotts aimed at advertisers and media moguls, as well as efforts to strengthen the spine of parents who lack the guts to just say no to too much TV...
...I saw people washing clothes in a stream and elderly women tossing hay with pitchforks...
...Shakespeare appears in the present collection in a minutely attentive study of the presence of pairs and other doubled entities in Hamlet...
...He grew up on the Isle of Man, which, although it is visible in clear weather from the coast of northwest England, is not part of the United Kingdom, having a curious constitutional status as a dependency of the Crown (which makes it a favored haven for off-shore banking and other louche enterprises...
...Harrison concentrates on her descriptive and reflective strengths, making this a welcome addition to a thousand years of literature on the camino...
...Beyond that, it focuses pilgrims on basics: the feet, the ankles, the knees, the slope of the land, the shade, the next drink of water, the next place to sleep...
...The Road to Santiago k(illlr101 Ilurriso;t Paul Moses walked through the Middle Ages last summer...
...I stumbled along dung-spotted stone roads and bridges the Romans built...
...Throughout this distinguished progress, Kermode the Manxman has preserved a certain distance and difference from the English establishment and its habitual attitudes...
...And I learned what it meant to travel solely on foot, following a hundred-mile section of a path that leads five times that distance across 1i tt northern Spain to the traditional tomb of St...
...The Camino de Santiago, or Way of St...
...Each day I tire myself to the point that I am indifferent to what tourists seek, shops and sights and restaurants and galleries, morsels of an alien culture, toothsome and purchasable...
...As Harrison explains, this does not seem to be mere coincidence...
...Nonetheless, pilgrims of whatever religious belief often find the hike to be one of the most spiritually meaningful events of their lives...
...Only one room left, and it is mine," she writes of her late arrival at a refugio, an inexpensive pilgrims' hostel in a remote village...
...both of them have an oblique relation to Yeats, who is one of Kermode's poetic points of reference...
...That book demonstrated Harrison's amazing ability to analyze her own turbulent emotions with frightening clarity and distance...
...it THE , WAY of ST...
...Noting that First Amendment challenges to TV programming practices were al-most unknown until the mid-1970s when they brought down network "family viewing time," the Minows write: "If we accept the notion that the First Amendment prohibits us from trying to protect our children from the mass media, then we have committed the perverse error of divorcing our commitment to free speech from our commitment to the public interest itself...
...PA 'Faith in the Academy' is a national conference exploring the role of faith in American higher education...
...Harrison brings to this well-worn path a poet's eye for detail and a novelist's knack for narrating a journey that is more interior than geographic, as a pilgrimage should be...
...As the title of her more recent memoir, Seeking Rapture (Random House, 2003), implies, Harrison is a "seeker...
...It is inevitable that she would de-scribe her mixed feelings about religion as she pursues the pilgrimage...
...And since children stand at the forefront of a changing world, "the concern about the media and violence is not just a fear for children but a fear of children," she writes...
Vol. 131 • February 2004 • No. 4
