A Future South Africa: Visions, Strategies, and Realitiesedited by peter l. berger and bobby godsellwestview press, 344 pages, $32.50 “My dear friend, clear your mind of cant,” said Dr. Johnson in a celebrated piece of advice to Boswell. “You may talk as other people do; you may say to a . . . . Continue Reading »
Thinking the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American Context by douglas john jaul augsburg press, 456 pages, $29.95 The intention is admirable, indeed urgent. It is to restate the Christian proposition in a manner critically attuned to American culture and the challenges facing our society. . . . . Continue Reading »
Paul Tillich famously wrote about ethics in the heteronomous, autonomous, and theonomous modes. To summarize all too briefly, heteronomous ethics is authoritarian, requiring submission to alien rules. Autonomous ethics is the conceit of modern liberalism that the individual is a law unto himself. . . . . Continue Reading »
Dull, restless mornings, crawling with hungers— To have something to do and to have done it. Blackbirds, treading the rubbery rowan branches. Sucking down the berries like juju beads. Walkers heading for work, pointing like windsocks. The indifferent trees around them, letting their leaves . . . . Continue Reading »
Forget the romance purveyed of windowseats, knocked as they be by the winds that skim drowned lawns of all but fleets of scavenger gulls. Summer, a dandy assures us from his portrait next to horse and hounds, grooms the hay just out of sight. Marquis, field marshal, bishop, mistress of the king, . . . . Continue Reading »
As I write these words, it is exactly one week before my seventieth birthday”“the days of our years,” according to the Psalmist; the day “the warranty runs out,” according to a friend of mine. Today is also the twenty-fourth anniversary of my father’s death, four months and ten days . . . . Continue Reading »
Real Presencesby george steiner university of chicago press, 236 pages, $19.95 Of the major literary critics of our period there is, apart from Northrop Frye, but one other whose work requires us to reach toward such a term as “greatness,” and this is George Steiner. The shocking . . . . Continue Reading »
Settling the estate, the lawyer said. It seemed too grand a way of putting it— bills to be paid, a bank account to close, and finally her mother’s house to sell while her own, half-a-continent away, sat waiting for her with its lights on timers and neighbors dropping in to feed the fish. . . . . Continue Reading »
Abortion and Morality If abortion is to be one of your major concerns, as it was in the premier issue, shouldn’t it be discussed as the tragedy it is for those persons, mostly young and unmarried, who have neither a moral nor a legal right to bear children? Why is fornication itself immoral? . . . . Continue Reading »
By now it should be axiomatic that surveys and polls tell us as much about the people who conduct them as they do about those they query. What's involved is the census-taking equivalent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the notion that pollsters affect the content of the responses they . . . . Continue Reading »
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