CrossCurrents - The Journal of Addiction and Mental Health articles from December 1998

CrossCurrents - The Journal of Addiction and Mental Health archives from December 1998

Peace culture: the problem of managing human difference.
December 22, 1998... Peace culture, neither a fantasy nor accident, is as central to human nature as war culture. The creative management of differences is at the core of peace culture; in other words, it is not a culture without conflict. Since every human...

Love songs to the dead: the liturgical voice as mentor and reminder.
December 22, 1998... Liturgy should be as destabilizing as art and just as difficult to make. There is something in religion that may not be true, but has not yet been sung. - E. M. Forster, A Passage to India The Jewish ritual of Tahara, the...

Green lap, brown embrace, blue body: the ecospirituality of Alice Walker.(Afro-American author)
December 22, 1998... Alice Walker's Earth is a womanist goddess of many colors. In The Color Purple, Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, the blues singer Shug is the sassy, sensual, bounteous woman who awakens the brutalized and silenced Celie to her...

Womanist theology, epistemology, and a new anthropological paradigm.
December 22, 1998... Womanist theologians can bring the experience and knowledge of the marginalized to the center by standing aside to let the community speak for itself. Womanist theology is an emergent voice of African American Christian women in the United...

The meaning of Zionism for the Diaspora.
December 22, 1998... Jews in the multi-ethnic future will need to redefine themselves in the larger society, as Theodor Herzl did for political Zionism. The modern Zionist movement has never been at peace with the Diaspora. In all of its versions, it has taken...

On inspiration.
December 22, 1998... It is one of the most mysterious moments in any one's life, the instant when things "click" and fall neatly in place, or a new idea flashes in the dark. It happened to Nietzsche on the shores of Lake Silvaplana, when he felt, "6000 feet...

Reflections on the Vatican's 'Reflection on the Shoah.'.(Roman Catholic document 'We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah')
December 22, 1998... The summer of 1987 was a particularly difficult moment in Roman Catholic-Jewish relations throughout the world. In June of that year Pope John Paul II had a widely publicized and highly controversial meeting at the Vatican with Austrian...

Milan: Radha goes to meet Krishna in the trysting place.(excerpts from 'In Praise of Krishna')(poem)
December 22, 1998... O Madhava, how shall I tell you of my terror? I could not describe my coming here if I had a million tongues. When I left my room and saw the darkness I trembled: I could not see the path, there were snakes that writhed round my ankles! I...

Artwork.(poem)
December 22, 1998... "We color inside the lines." The first Instruction at pre-school, from the dispenser Of crayons and coloring pads, is firmly Specific: art is defined by the lines; art Is the color inside them. The scribblers Who challenge the boundaries are...

Mary of the media.(poem)
December 22, 1998... The College of St. Mary this morning names Its newest campus-Gothic in her honor: Taking place beneath her lowered gaze From the library lintel, the dedication speech Lauds learning, quotes the classics, quotes From...

Ascension Thursday.(poem)
December 22, 1998... Out of the plane's porthole at thirty thousand feet, the ascension, my seat-mate priest speaks of this morning, is almost do-able. A royally cubited arc falls like a stairwell from clouds and I could puncture the plugged muffle of voices across...

Anthony de Mello's workshop on prayer.(poem)
December 22, 1998... Sculptor of words, he hammered and chiseled a solid block of content, quickly, deftly, precisely disclosing the shape of his teaching. We hearers, awed by its power and beauty even as it stood in the rough, thought we understood, more or...

Confessions of a believer in exile.
December 22, 1998... by Peter A. Young For most of my adult life, I have lived at the edges of traditional Christianity, seeking a spiritual home in one protestant church or another, yet never fully comfortable with theological language. Early on, it became...

Troubling presences and misrecognitions.
December 22, 1998... by Alfred E. Prettyman It was Lincoln who, prior to emancipation, referred to both freedmen and slaves as a "troubling presence" in the nation. It is a thought that persists in the minds of many in our society who are not black. For...

Murder most promising.(causes and effects of Murder)
December 22, 1998... by Robert Wexelblatt Beverly Coyle and Nadine Gordimer have written superb new novels about murder, but neither is a murder mystery. Set in North Florida and South Africa respectively, each tells with intelligent, irresistible sympathy how...

Why Christianity Must Change or Die.(Review)
December 22, 1998... John Shelby Spong. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998. 288pp. $24.00 (cloth). For most of my adult life, I have lived at the edges of traditional Christianity, seeking a spiritual home in one protestant church or another, yet never...

Seeing a Color Blind Future: The Paradox of Race.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Patricia J. Williams. New York: Noonday/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1998.74pp. $10.00 (paper). It was Lincoln who, prior to emancipation, referred to both freedmen and slaves as a "troubling presence" in the nation. It is a thought that...

A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America.(Review)
December 22, 1998... David K. Shipler. New York: Knopf, 1998. 607pp. $30.00 (cloth). It was Lincoln who, prior to emancipation, referred to both freedmen and slaves as a "troubling presence" in the nation. It is a thought that persists in the minds of many in...

Long Way to Go: Black and White in America.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Jonathan Coleman. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997. 451pp. $26.50 (cloth). It was Lincoln who, prior to emancipation, referred to both freedmen and slaves as a "troubling presence" in the nation. It is a thought that persists in the...

A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson. New York: Broadway Books/Bantam Doubleday Dell. 1998. 355pp. $27.50 (cloth). It was Lincoln who, prior to emancipation, referred to both freedmen and slaves as a "troubling presence" in the nation....

Taken In.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Beverly Coyle. New York: Viking Press, 1998. 305pp. $24.95 (cloth). Beverly Coyle and Nadine Gordimer have written superb new novels about murder, but neither is a murder mystery. Set in North Florida and South Africa respectively, each...

The House Gun.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Nadine Gordimer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. 294pp. $24.00 (cloth). Beverly Coyle and Nadine Gordimer have written superb new novels about murder, but neither is a murder mystery. Set in North Florida and South Africa...

Albert Camus: A Life.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Olivier Todd. Trans. Benjamin Ivry. New York: Knopf, 1997. 434pp. $30.00 (cloth). Olivier Todd's Albert Camus: A Life is a biography for the 1990s, devoted as much to the private foibles of the man as to the achievements of the gifted...

Walker, Percy: A Life.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Patrick Samway. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. 506pp. $35.00 (cloth). Since Walker Percy's death in 1990, the fast-growing Percy studies industry has produced a number of impressive multi-dimensional interpretations of his...

'Something of a Rebel': Thomas Merton, His Life and Work, An Introduction.(Review)
December 22, 1998... William H. Shannon. Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1997. $9.95 (paper). Well conceived and executed, this book focuses information for readers who need an overview of Merton's voluminous production. The straight-forward text will...

Striving Towards Being: The Letter of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Robert Faggen, ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. 178pp. $21.00 (cloth). Robert Faggen's edition of these letters traces the spiritual journey and growing friendship of two writers as they struggle together with the deepest...

Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Janet Hadda. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 243pp. $27.50 (cloth). This, as Lord Jeffrey famously declared, will never do. Janet Hadda, professor of Yiddish at UCLA, has produced a thin, patchy, slapdash biography of a writer who...

The Origins of Moral Theology in the United States: Three Different Approaches.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Charles E. Curran. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1997. 311pp. $24.95 (paper). The scarcity of books in the history of Catholic moral theology in America makes this book indispensable for scholars of theological ethics and...

Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Frederick and Mary Ann Brussat. New York: Scribner, 1996. 608pp. $27.50 (cloth); $15.00 (paper); $18.00 (audiocassette). Lovers of order, like myself, find ourselves on sticky ground when we encounter the New Age and the related...

The Bible As It Was.(Review)
December 22, 1998... James L. Kugel. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. $35.00 (cloth). A book browser might think from the title of this volume that its author is concerned with the compositional and editorial problems of the Bible, those very...

The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Thomas Cahill. New York: Nan A. Talese, Doubleday, 1998. 291pp. $23.50 (cloth). Thomas Cahill has assigned himself an enormous task: a seven-volume series called The Hinges of History. His best-selling How the Irish Saved Civilization was...

Law, Legend, and Incest in the Bible: Leviticus 18-20.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Calum M. Carmichael. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997. 209pp. $35.00 (cloth) Carmichael, a professor of comparative literature at Cornell University, has an admirable objective, to provide a single thesis that will explain all...

Fruits of Sorrow.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Elizabeth V. Spelman. Boston: Beacon, 1997. 206pp. $24.00 (cloth); $12.50 (paper). It is strange that a book about human suffering is something unusual in contemporary ethics. Elizabeth Spelman states what is largely true, that...

Interracialism in a Christian Community in the Postwar South: The Story of Koinonia Farm.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Tracy Elaine K'Meyer. Charlottesville.: University Press of Virginia, 1997. 189pp + Appendix, Notes, Bibliography, and Index. $35.00 (cloth). The story of Koinonia Farm (from the Greek, roughly translated as church, fellowship, or...

Courtly Desire and Medieval Homophobia: The Legitimation of Sexual Pleasure in Cleanness and Its Contexts.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Elizabeth B. Keiser. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. 299pp. $37.50 (cloth). This study needed a good editor. Nonetheless, Keiser's efforts oblige us to reflect anew on an unusual medieval text. Cleanness not only extolls...