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While I was traveling with the antiabortion activist Randall Terry, I asked one his staff members about C. S. Lewis’s popularity among evangelicals. This man, an ordained product of Westminster Theological Seminary, himself a Christian reconstructionist, said: "Some of us now consider Lewis as food for beginners. The real meat is Chesterton." Implausible as it …
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During the past decade Chaim Potok has emerged not only as a pre-eminent American author, but also as one whose books are avidly and widely read. Why has this Jewish author whose books are openly religious in theme and tenor achieved such uncommon public success? Why does he appeal to this age, saturated as it …
Continue reading “A Way of Seeing: Chaim Potok and Tradition”
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I discovered Richard Ford while looking for a novel to accompany Tocqueville, Habits of the Heart, and the travel narratives of Jonathan Raban and William Least Heat Moon in a course on American character. I sought one that would help illuminate the moral consciousness of America in the ‘80s, a nation bogged down and hemmed …
Continue reading “America’s Moral Landscape in the Fiction of Richard Ford”
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For the Reverend Clarence Arthur Wilmot, the loss of faith was accompanied by a distinct sensation: "a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward." The Presbyterian minister "was standing, at the moment of the ruinous pang, on the first floor of the rectory, wondering if in view of the heat he might …
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In 1980, Marilynne Robinson published her first novel, Housekeeping, which won a PEN/Hemingway Award and was made into a movie. She published nonfiction works during the next 24 years, including The Death of Adam and Mother Country, but kept her fans waiting until 2004 for a second novel. Gilead is the memoir of John Ames, …
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Novelist Ron Hansen is known for working with a variety of themes and in a variety of genres. His first novels, Desperadoes (1979) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983)–recently made into a film starring Brad Pitt–were set in the wild West. Mariette in Ecstasy (1991) is about a nun …
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One day, recalls the contemporary American writer Annie Dillard, a small, single-engine plane crashed on her island home in Puget Sound: It fell easily; one wing snagged on a fir top; the metal fell down the air and smashed into the thin woods where cattle browse; the fuel exploded, and Julie Norwich, seven years old, …
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Flannery O’Connor once said that any novelist who could survive her childhood had enough to write about for a lifetime. Had she herself lived longer she might have added a corollary: the writer who survives middle age will invariably want to tell the story of that childhood directly, in autobiography. It’s not that the events …
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Buckminster Fuller once suggested that the purpose of people is to counteract the slide toward entropy described in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Human beings put things together, and this keeps the universe from falling apart. This notion, says Annie Dillard, appealed to her, and she elaborated on it, taking Fuller “to mean something even …
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All who write for publication in South Africa, both black and white, run the risk of being censored, banned, exiled or worse. Blacks, of course, have been much more harshly treated than whites. Steve Biko, political activist and budding poet, paid the ultimate price: when banning and imprisonment proved insufficient to silence him, he was …
Continue reading “Apocalypse and Beyond: The Novels of J. M. Coetzee”
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Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., first gained a following on American college campuses as a cult figure for young readers who identified with his comic and pessimistic view of the world. In recent years a wider audience has come to know his books — Player Piano; Cat’s Cradle; Slaughterhouse-Five; Sirens of Titan; Mother Night; God Bless …
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The trouble with W. H. Auden’s poem For the Time Being is that in subtitling it “A Christmas Oratorio,” Auden condemned it to being treated primarily as an inspirational holiday ritual — akin to watching “Charlie Brown’s Christmas” on television with the kids or spiking the eggnog. A hurried Christmas reading tends to misconstrue Auden’s …
Continue reading “Auden’ s Moral Comedy: A Late-Winter Reading”
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The Nobel Prize is only the latest honor for Saul Bellow, who has already won three National Book Awards and so now becomes the most rewarded American novelist, as he has long been the most rewarding. The Stockholm committee said that he deserved the award “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture …
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A review of Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. The book reviewed gives a thorough introduction to New Testament textual analysis. It challenges the reviewer to do research in biblical criticism. Book Review: Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, by Bart D. Ehrman. HarperSanFrancisco, 256 …
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The recently completed 11-and-one-half-hour Public Broadcasting System series based on Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited proved a smash hit. Across the country bridge parties and pancake suppers were rescheduled so as not to compete with Charles Ryder’s memories. Americans beginning to feel Poverty her Pinch have thought it great indoor sport to watch plover eggs …
Continue reading “Brideshead Revisited: A Twitch Upon the Thread”
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The human race is haunted by the desire to do what is right. People invariably defend their actions by arguing that those actions do not really contradict a basic standard of behavior, or that the standard was violated for good reasons. The first five chapters of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (1953) discuss this objective …
Continue reading “C. S. Lewis: Natural Law, the Law in Our Hearts”
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Book Review The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis. By Alan Jacobs. HarperSanFrancisco. 368 pp. Into the Wardrobe: C. S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles. By David C. Downing. Jossey-Bass, 256 pp. Revisiting Narnia: Fantasy, Myth and Religion in C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles. Edited by Shanna Caughey. BenBella Books, 240 pp., paperback. …
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"The excitement, anticipation and just plain hysteria that came over the entire country this weekend was a bit like the Beatles’ first visit to the U.S." Lisa Holton, president of the children’s publishing house Scholastic, was referring not to the appearance of a rock band or blockbuster movie but to the release in July of …
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Book Review: The Life of Graham Greene (Vol. One) : 1904-1932, by Norman Sherry. Viking, 783 pp., $29.95. If there is a virtue implicit in the vocation of the biographer, it is surely the willingness to pay serious attention to another person’s life. Throughout the often lengthy years of research and writing, the pressing demands …
Continue reading “Confrontation and Escape: Mysteries of Graham Greene”
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It isn’t until several days after the accident that Lottie lets herself—makes herself—think about it. Think about how it was for all of them, for Cameron and Elizabeth, and for Jessica." The opening paragraph of Sue Miller’s novel For Love hints at the answer to the novel’s central question: "Where are the 20th-century love stories?" …
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A Book Review: LANCELOT. By Walker Percy. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $8.95. For an increasingly large number of college students, teachers and church people, the fiction of Walker Percy has the value virtually of prophecy. We await the publication of his novels with almost evangelical zeal, eager to be entertained and edified by him as …
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If you’ve not read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, you’re in a shrinking group. More than 7 million hardback copies of the novel are in print, and it has by the publisher’s count been translated into more than 40 languages. It has remained at or near the top of most bestseller lists since its …
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During her lifetime, Dorothy L. Sayers was known to many readers as the creator of that debonair, aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, who solved the mysteries in Murder Must Advertise, Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors. To others, she was the dramatist whose radio serial, The Man Born to Be King, brought the words of …
Continue reading “Dorothy L. Sayers: A Christian Humanist for Today”
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Peter Shaffer’s play Equus has been savagely attacked by drama critics and psychoanalysts alike. Said one analyst: “I felt I had been had.” Yet Equus has now held the stage for almost four years. Having survived even the vicissitudes of translation, it continues to fill houses in several European capitals. Its appeal must emanate from …
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The fact that Ballantine Books has created a special division to publish only fantasy literature testifies to the enormous interest in such works. Indeed, the purchases — and one would assume the reading — of fantasy books are staggering. According to the New York Times Book Review (October 16, 1977), this year Ballantine expects to …
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From Baptist to Presbyterian to Orthodox — that’s hardly a conventional trajectory for an American Christian. Even less usual, perhaps, than claiming to be a Christian poet, or being summarily unhired from a Christian university because a single poem was deemed unsuitable by the administration. But Scott Cairns has never managed to he typical. One …
Continue reading “Flesh Becomes Word: The Incarnational Poetry of Scott Cairns”
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A walk down the aisle of any major bookstore reveals that spirituality sells, and that spirituality is not confined to the “religion” or “Christian inspiration” sections. Diverse though the literature on spirituality is, a body of popular teachings about God — and how we might experience God — is emerging within it. If the civil …
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When theologians and others were arguing about the ultimate fate of Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene commented: “I wrote a book about a man who goes to hell — Brighton Rock — another about a man who goes to heaven — The Power and the Glory. Now I’ve simply written one …
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When someone asked me several years ago why I was offering a seminar in Hemingway and Faulkner, what the two writers had in common, and what it all meant anyway (or such I take to have been the design, of the question). I was at first hard put to think of some straightforward answer that …
Continue reading “Hemingway and Faulkner: Tracing Their Resemblances”
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Books Reviewed: Ghost Pain. By Sydney Lea. Sarabande Books, 99 pages paperback. Deaths and Transfigurations. By Paul Mariani. Paraclete, 95 pp. Poetry reviews appear in religious journals more rarely than poems, and poems are rare enough. This absence is not because poetry of interest to readers of these journals is in short supply. It is …
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When Isaac Bashevis Singer wow the 1978 Nobel Prize for literature, his status seemed to change from that of coterie hero, loved by a dwindling but enthusiastic Yiddish-speaking public, to that of world hero. But the subject matter of his work did not change. It has always been about the adventure of being a Jew …
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Job asks “Why?” But no satisfactory answer to his question emerges — not from the confrontation with the three comforters, nor from the arguments of Elihu, nor from the framing device of Satan’s wager, nor even from the voice in the whirlwind. In all his glory God appears to Job, who, abhorring himself, repents in …
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Since the initial publication of Robert N. Bellah’s widely reprinted 1967 essay on “Civil Religion in America,” theologians, historians and sociologists have given much attention to the phenomenon Bellah described. In that influential article Bellah argued “that there actually exists alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the churches an elaborate and well institutionalized civil …
Continue reading “James Reston: Prophet of American Civil Religion”
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At the beginning of this decade and each of the past two, John Updike has published a novel about Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, his prototypical American character who embodies the fears and hopes, the vices and virtues, of our age. Now with the release of Rabbit Is Rich (Knopf, 467 pp., $13.95), it is fair to …
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To the casual reader, John Updike might seem just another writer clever in his use of words and in his ability to capitalize on sex. His best-selling novels and short stories are filled with puns and pudenda. But Updike’s purpose is something other than mere titillation. Sexuality has been for him a mode of human …
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Though Simone Weil (1909-43) is read by many people from a wide variety of backgrounds and with a wide variety of interests, she remains a marginal figure in the world of theology. This is especially strange considering the large amount of attention theology gives these days to social and political issues and Weil’s own passionate, …
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We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Everywhere on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid pictures of ourselves …
Continue reading “Margaret Atwood’s Testaments: Resisting the Gilead Within”
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The writer P. D. James is now receiving recognition for her contribution to the transformation of the traditional English detective story. James herself prefers to call the genre the “crime novel,” for she is concerned with much more than the writing of escapist thrillers. In an interview several years ago she discussed the conventions of …
Continue reading “Moral Ambiguities and the Crime Novels of P.D. James”
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Murdoch’s books are not modest either, in scope or in size. The Book and the Brotherhood, for instance runs to more than 600 pages; it has at least eight major characters; and its themes include love and the failures of love, death, belief and disbelief in God, friendship, Marxism, and the social condition of contemporary …
Continue reading “Murdoch’ s Magic: The Consolations of Fiction”
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Book Review: Crooked Heart. By Cristina Sumners. Bantam, 336 pp., paperback. The Book of Light. By Michelle Blake. Prime Crime, 304 pp., paperback. Out of the Deep I Cry. By Julia Spencer-Fleming. St. Martin Minotaur, 304 pp. In the shadowy world of the mystery novel, nothing is ever quite what it appears to be, including …
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One of America’s most admired writers, Mary Cordon writes about women’s choices and about moral and spiritual struggles in the context of strong family connections. She has a deeply Catholic perspective, though not exactly an orthodox one, Her novels include Final Payments (1978), The Company of Women (1981), Men and Angels (1985) and Spending (1998). …
Continue reading “Notions of Purity: An Interview with Mary Gordon”
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In Great Britain, Ronald Stuart Thomas has long been considered one of the pre-eminent Christian poets in the English language. In the U.S., however, he is little known. The publication of his collected Poems last year by the University of Arkansas, which ought to have been something of a major literary event, went virtually unnoticed. …
Continue reading “Passing Through Hard Facts: The Poetry of R.S. Thomas”
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The Public Burning, Robert Coover’s most recent book (Viking, 1977), has proved to be one of the most controversial novels of the decade. Like his earlier fiction, the book mounts a frontal attack on the ways people order their existence in the hope of giving it meaning. In his award-winning novel The Origin of the …
Continue reading “Playing at Life: Robert Coover and His Fiction”
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It was, I believe, Dr. Johnson who told an author that his work was both good and original — but that, alas, what was good was not original and what was original was not good. Something like that is my own evaluation of A. N. Wilson’s biography of C. S. Lewis. Wilson does not tell …
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Some day an earnest young scholar in pursuit of a suitably narrow research topic may turn to the works of British writer Barbara Pym and compile an exhaustive index of the occasions when pots of tea are brewed and consumed in her 11 novels. Such a project might well have appealed to Pym’s own sense …
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Book Review: Rabbit at Rest. By John Updike. Knopf, 512 pp., $21.95. It is tempting to thank John Updike, if not also God, for relieving our misery by putting Rabbit Angstrom out of his. The final installment of Updike’s tetralogy takes Angstrom to his fated end, and it is no giveaway of the plot to …
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The fires men build live after them, this night, this night, I elfking, I stonehands, sit feeding the wildfire . . . Robert Lowell. When Robert Lowell died on September 12, he was riding in a taxicab from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan. There is little question that the most distinguished poetic voice of our time …
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These are familiar themes in the works of Robert Penn Warren who died on September 15, 1989 — these and the frequently recurring motif that “nothing is ever lost.” Or as Jack Burden goes on to say, “There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed.” …
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While packing my bags for a summer vacation not long ago, I decided to bring along Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business. Friends had recommended the novelist to me, saying that he was a Canadian, a master storyteller on the spellbinding order of Iris Murdoch, and sufficiently engaged with religion to make the likes of me less …
Continue reading “Robertson Davies: Shaking Hands with the Devil”
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For several weeks I’ve toted around Bruce Chatwin’s book The Songlines, on the off chance of having more time for it. Before he died at 48, Chatwin wrote a handful of brilliant travel books, this perhaps the most brilliant — a funny and fascinating account of the Aboriginal songlines. Invisible to Western eyes, the songlines …
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (Harper & Row, 1974) has been celebrated as a refutation of Marxism, a revision of Russian political history, a warning to the West, even a tour de force of literary realism. Rarely has it been recognized as a contribution to moral philosophy. And yet. In other words, he has reinterpreted …
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The intellectual world of the 1920s was treated to a delicious irony. A pioneer of the modernist movement, T. S. Eliot, known for his fragmented, elusive poetry, became, in his own words, a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion." The author of The Waste Land, that obscure work of dark despair, …
Continue reading “T. S. Eliot’s Christian Society: Still Relevant Today?”
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Summertime, and the living may not be easy, but it is a good time to embark once again on the quest to find the perfect novel. Granted, perfection is unattainable, but like the holy grail it must be sought, if for no other reason than that the quest itself is a goad, pushing the earnest …
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The seven books of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicle, which sell 6 million copies annually, are being filmed by Walden Media, a subsidiary of Walt Disney Pictures. Disney has spent $150 million (plus millions more for advertising) on the first episode, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the much-beloved story of the four Pevensie …
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In celebration of this anniversary the Steinbeck Research Center of San Jose State University will sponsor a conference exploring the novel from every conceivable angle — sociological, political, historical and literary. The University of Alabama’s prestigious Literary Symposia series will this year focus on “The Steinbeck Question.” Dozens of other enterprises have developed, including several …
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The figure of the priest is nearly irresistible to some fiction writers. As a living exemplar of Christ on Earth, he is already halfway to being a symbol. Thus novelists have portrayed censorious, unforgiving priests to demonstrate the gap between the church and genuine Christianity; repressed, neurotic priests to demonstrate the unhealthiness of the celibate …
Continue reading “The Marrying, Burying World of J. F. Powers”
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Three weeks before her death at the age of 39, Flannery O’Connor copied out a prayer to St. Raphael and sent it to a woman she had never met, but who in the short year and a half of their correspondence had become a close friend. This prayer, which O’Connor said she prayed every day, …
Continue reading “The Meaning Is in You: Flannery O’Connor in Her Letters”
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“It is not, somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death; it is the lights and signs of love and friendship.” Thus speaks the protagonist in one of John Cheever’s most celebrated stories, “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill.” His fictional testimony to the power of human virtue and solidarity …
Continue reading “The Modest and Charitable Humanism of John Cheever”
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I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages. but those pages cannot save me. perhaps because what is good no longer belongs to anyone, not even to the other …
Continue reading “The Other Borges: A Precursor from the Future”
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Oberammergau, July 27, 1960 P. T. Barnum, who reputedly said that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, but you can fool some of the people some of the time, would have admired Oberammergau. The gullibility of the general public is always great, but when the credulity of the religious is …
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John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins [Mark 1:4]. John the Baptist knew that the decisive moment was at hand, and he interpreted that moment in terms of his sense of outrage over sin. However, his proclamation of “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness …
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Book Review: The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy (Farrar Straus Giroux, 372 pp., $17.95) Walker Percy’s sixth novel, The Thanatos Syndrome (Farrar Straus Giroux, 372 PP., $17.95) , is at once his most thrilling and most disappointing book. The last three sections of the novel are so excitingly plotted that the reader is kept in …
Continue reading “The Thanatos Syndrome: Exciting, Horrifying, Disappointing”
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Because our religious tradition finds the heart of divine revelation in the Holy taking human form, Christians have a powerful theological basis for understanding and learning from the arts. Unfortunately, Protestants have historically had an uneasy relationship with the arts because we have mistrusted form and physicality. Our inheritance of Reformation iconoclasm is usually put …
Continue reading “The Theater of Revelation: Art and the Grace-Fullness of Form”
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PHILIP BERRIGAN, former priest of the Josephite Order, and a member of the group of draft-record-burners known as the Catonsville Nine, now lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Having served a number of prison sentences, Berrigan, with his wife, the former Sister Elizabeth McAllister, has formed a small community of eight adults (and the two Berrigan children) …
Continue reading “To Be Accurate and Blunt: The Activist as Writer”
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On bright days, when I was a child, I dreamed summer clouds into shapes of wonder. The clouds became my own being, and depending on my disposition I peopled my sky with elves or ogres, birds or beasts. Now no longer a child, I know that clouds are of various types — cirrus, cumulus, cirrocumulus, …
Continue reading “Tolkien’s Crucible of Faith: The Sub-Creation”
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One of the distinctive features of American black slaves’ secret religion was the ring shout, probably adapted from African memories. A singer — whoever felt so moved — would step forth from the circle of worshipers. By chanting, dancing and clapping, the community provided a base beat upon which the singer would create his or …
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More than a decade after Zora Neale Hurston died penniless in a Florida welfare home, Alice Walker made a pilgrimage to the town where the anthropologist and novelist had lived, and placed a monument on her unmarked grave. Posing as a niece of the all-but-forgotten writer, Walker gathered what information she could about Hurston’s youth …
Continue reading “Transforming Vision: Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston”
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This positive estimate of Updike is far from unanimous. For all of his huge literary success, he remains a dubious figure for many readers. What they find worrying is Updike’s determination to bare all. He makes public display of his sexuality and many other private matters as well. For instance, soon after the break of …
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By his own admission, V. S. Naipaul’s situation is odd and suspicious. A novelist and journalist of Indian heritage, he grew up on Trinidad and became a resident of England. He appears “unlikely and exotic,” a colonial seeking to depict larger reality, yet threatened with being seen as a regional, West Indian writer; his writings …
Continue reading “V. S. Naipaul and the Plight of the Dispossessed”
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Walker Percy has taught me more about the human condition in the 20th century than virtually any other writer. It was through reading his works that I was first stirred from my religious slumbers and made aware of the unconscious despair that holds our culture in a veritable death grip. I discovered, however, that Percy’s …
Continue reading “Walker Percy as Satirist: Christian and Humanist Still in Conflict”
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Octavio Paz, Mexican author of more than 40 volumes of poetry and prose and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for literature, has written an extensive biography that reintroduces a long-neglected literary figure of the 17th century: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. One of six illegitimate children of an unusually self-reliant mother who refused …
