Books & Culture articles from January 2003

Books & Culture archives from January 2003

Letters.
January 1, 2003... Weird Science? In his review of journalist Judith Hooper's book Of Moths and Men in BOOKS & CULTURE ["The Peppered Myth," September/October 2002], Jonathan Wells made several incorrect and misleading statements about both the science...

The death and life of Bonnie Witherall. (Stranger in a Strange Land).(Column)
January 1, 2003... I never met Bonnie Penner Witherall, the 31-year-old American Christian who was killed on November 21 at an evangelical clinic in Sidon, Lebanon where she worked as a nurse's assistant. I wish that I had. Maybe I will someday. In an...

When disrespect is respectful. (The Groves of Academe).(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... While pondering Christian Smith's "Force of Habit" [September/October] and a response to it [Will Katerberg, "Special Pleading?", November/December], I came across an article in a Philadelphia weekly newspaper that explains why the academy's...

A vocabulary for suffering.(Interview)
January 1, 2003... INTERVIEW BY CARLA BARNHILL Why does a loving God allow people to suffer? It is sometimes those who have suffered the most who are most at peace with this question. David and Nancy Guthrie are such people. In 1998, Nancy gave birth...

Looking for Bach: the mystery of the missing years.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... The world of Bach scholarship was rocked in the 1950s and early 1960s, when new research into the chronology of the Leipzig cantatas overturned the view of Bach that had prevailed since Philipp Spitta's monumental biography of 1873-1880. It...

Humming Schoenberg.(Arnold Schoenberg's Journey)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Arnold Schoenberg's Journey by Allen Shawn FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX, 2002 272 pp.; $26 Reading Allen Shawn's Arnold Schoenberg's Journey reminded me of an anecdote Oscar Levant gave about Schoenberg in his Memoirs of...

A man of appearances.(Benjamin Franklin)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Benjamin Franklin by Edmund S. Morgan YALE UNIV. PRESS, 2002 368 pp.; $24.95 Edmund Morgan is arguably the finest living American historian, an adornment to the tradition that includes Francis Parkman, George Bancroft,...

Thursday the Rabbi met with the search committee: the changing face of religious authority in America.(The New Rabbi: A Congregation Searches for Its Leader)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... The New Rabbi: A Congregation Searches for Its Leader by Stephen Fried BANTAM, 2002 357 pp.; $25.95 In the late 1950s, Chaim Potok was scholar in residence at a suburban synagogue outside Philadelphia. He was charming...

Born again.(Movie Review)
January 1, 2003... Patrons of the New York Film Festival were disappointed last fall when two internationally acclaimed filmmakers did not come to the festival as planned. Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian auteur whose latest film, Ten, is a fascinating and complex...

Two religions, indivisible. (Ameriea's God).(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln by Mark A. Noll OXFORD UNIV. PRESS, 2002 656 pp.; $35 A generation ago, Sydney Ahlstrom and Sidney Mead led two schools of American religious historians in...

Cotton Mather, meet Bill Clinton.(The Religious History of America: The Heart of the American Story from Colonial Times to Today)(Religion in American Life: A Short History)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... The Religious History of America: The Heart of the American Story from Colonial Times to Today by Edwin S. Gaustad and Leigh E. Schmidt HARPERSANFRANCISCO, REV. ED., 2002 464 pp.; $29.95 Religion in American Life: A Short...

Sacred monsters: Frida seeks to shock but ends up prettifying its subject.(Movie Review)
January 1, 2003... The froggy eyes of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera seemed to bulge out of their sockets, as if all-seeing, and Pablo Picasso's gaze bored into people with fulminating intensity. There is rich poetry, then, in Picasso having once remarked to...

The Tao made flesh: rediscovering the ancient roots of Chinese Christianity.(The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls to Taoist Christianity)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls to Taoist Christianity By Martin Palmer BALLANTINE, 2001 270 pp.; $24.95 Arriving out of the Western desert in A.D. 635, a group of Nestorian Christians, led by the monk...

How congregations serve. ("I Was Thirsty...").(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... The Invisible Caring Hand: American Congregations and the Provision of Welfare Ram A. Cnaan NEW YORK UNIV. PRESS, 2002 328 pp.; $19. 50 paper On August 22, 1996, President Clinton signed into law a welfare reform bill known as the...

Counting (helping) hands: a conversation with Ram Cnaan. ("I was Thirsty...").(Interview)
January 1, 2003... INTERVIEW BY AGNIESZKA TENNANT Less than a year ago, America's religious congregations received a stunning compliment. It came from the desk of a secular Jew frequently quoted by John Dilulio. He is Israeli-born Ram A. Cnaan,...

Reading Dostoevsky religiously.(Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition edited by George Pattison and Diane Oenning Thompson CAMBRIDGE UNIV. PRESS, 2001 280 pp.; $60 The great 19th-century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky is universally recognized as a...

Hindu history wars.(The Myth of the Holy Cow)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... The Myth of the Holy Cow D.N. Jha VERSO, 2002 183 pp.; $22 What happens when an eminent historian argues that a society's sacred cows have not always been as sacred as-people now imagine them to be? In The Myth of the Holy...

American Jihad.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Manifest Destiny's Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America by Robert E. May UNIV. OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS, 2002 426 pp.; $45 As I write this, an article in The New York Times describes how relatives of...

The goldilocks universe: Is our cosmos the whole kaboodle, or is it merely one among an infinite number of universes?(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Frederick Forsyth's 1971 thriller The Day of the Jackal tells the story of a fiendishly clever assassin who almost brings down Charles DeGaulle. Through a combination of elaborate planning, ingenious subterfuge, and great skill, the Jackal...

Beyond bricks and mortar?(Edward Sorin)(The Idea of a Catholic University)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Edward Sorin by Marvin Richard O'Connell UNIV. OF NOTRE DAME PRESS, 2001 800 pp.; $49.95 The Idea of a Catholic University by George Dennis O'Brien UNIV. OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2002 239 pp.; $28 After...

"Come now, let us reason together".(Interview)
January 1, 2003... "There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers," Thoreau wrote in Walden. The complaint is an old one, as old as philosophy itself, which suggests that an impulse to reform philosophy, to make it somehow more "real," is a...

Resistance movement.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons by David Dark BRAZOS PRESS, 2002 160 pp.; $13.95, paper David Dark's Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead,...