A Post-Zionist Moment of Grace?

In “Going to Meet the Man,” James Baldwin illustrates Flannery O’Connor’s theory that violence serves as a catalyst for a “moment of grace.” Through the remembrances of the main character during one sleepless night, Baldwin depicts how Jesse has the potential to renounce the ideologies of White supremacy and toxic masculinity through his interaction with his wife Grace, whose name signifies her role as an agent of redemption. Through recollections about the violence that he inflicts as a sheriff as well as the violent lynching he observes as a child, Jesse moves closer toward contrition and ultimately salvation. In the end, however, Jesse maintains an allegiance with indoctrinated beliefs and rebukes the moment of grace, a rejection substantiated by his sexual assault of his wife.

Flannery O’Connor is one of the modern spiritual writers and is identified with labels like Catholic writer, Hillbilly Thomist, Southern novelist, grotesque stylist etc. She deserves another equally convincing label–O’Connor the Mystic–her claim to be considered a mystic being based on the many instances of the description of mystic experience and the operation of grace in her motifs. Flannery O’Connor highlights her religious outlook of God in a nontraditional manner and allows others to obtain grace through her literature. Though faith underpins all of her work, she does not use it in a didactic manner as a medium to preach. Her short stories can be viewed as a search for redemption in Christ. These stories are quests which involve the hero’s recognition of his vocation and end in his eventual ordination. There is an initial rebellion against belief, a crisis in faith, and a resolution in a ‘moment of grace’ in her stories. For O’Connor, the very act of writing was itself a redemptive process. Though O’Connor’s works follow the features of Eastern as well as Western mysticism, the present study concentrates on the Christian mystical elements in O’Connor’s “Greenleaf” and “The Lame Shall Enter First” as O’Connor was a Catholic writer.

Love and Politics: Re-Interpreting Hegel. By Alice Ormiston. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 164p. $40.00 With this book, Alice Ormiston presents a compelling interpretation of Hegel's philosophy that speaks to the needs of our time. Her central argument is that love is “the continuous foundation at play in Hegel's understanding of the modern self” and the “experiential basis” of his philosophy (pp. 5–6). Hegelian love is an expansive notion that has historical grounding in early Christian mysticism. No longer readily felt in widely shared religious or civic practices, love has been all but eclipsed in the modern world. But love's knowledge is not lost. Reappearing as a moment of grace in situations of moral and political conflict, love helps us heed our conscience. Hegel's political philosophy is, we learn, a call to conscience. If we do not know what conscience requires, we become vulnerable to “the problems of our time”: alienation and social atomism—seen in poverty, weakened commitments to family and local politics, and selfish disregard for the welfare of others—and a collective inability to distinguish right and wrong that contributes to evil (pp. 115–24).

51 Marcia Smith Marzec Mr. Head's Journey to the Cross: Character, Structure, and Meaning in O'Connor's "The Artificial Nigger" Jesus is "SO SOUL hungry" that "he will chase [man] over the waters of sin" and "have him in the end," we are told in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood.1 God's Providential plan for human salvation , God's loving desire to bring man home to him, is, in fact, a major theme of O'Connor's Christian comedy. Again and again her fiction illustrates that even when man is engulfed in the darkness of disbelief, sin, and despair, God's plan is in progress, for the love of God is greater than human sinfulness. To illustrate God's transformation of apparent evil into a real and greater good, O'Connor purposely chooses what would seem the most unlikely agents for the salvation of her characters: the sociopathic Misfit of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," who unwittingly prompts the Grandmother to her one moment of grace through love, thus becoming the instrument ofher salvation; or the self-blinding of Wise Blood's Hazel Motes, which allows him to see as St. Paul saw and to bring that point oflight to his landlady. This is also her technique in the "Artificial Nigger," in which she uses a Logos 1:3 1997 52 Logos southerner's very racism as a vehicle for his salvation. In this story, God reaches out to the major character with his offering of saving grace through the agency of a plaster statue, but it is only because of his racism that this character is able to receive God's message. Thus, O'Connor communicates her point that no one, no matter in what spiritual darkness, is beyond the pale of salvation. From the beginning of the story, O'Connor takes pains to depict Mr. Head unsympathetically. Not only is he an ignoramus and vulgarian, but he is, in fact, so deluded as to think himself a savant. He sees himself as having "that calm understanding of life that makes him a suitable guide for the young."2 The narrator ironically describes his eyes as having a look of"ancient wisdom as if they belonged to one of the great guides of men"3: he compares Head with Virgil, and even with the angel Raphael. As Marshall Bruce Gentry has pointed out, "[sjuch elevated comparisons are easily understood as the narrator's satirical exaggeration of Mr. Head's too-high opinion of himself."4 Head feels that his "will and strong character" are written in his features, but the reader perceives his "long tube-like face with a long rounded open jaw and a long depressed nose"5 as anything but impressive. Similarly, Mr. Head deludes himself concerning his motives for the trip to Atlanta with his grandson Nelson.6 He thinks ofthe trip "in moral terms": "It was to be a lesson that the boy would never forget. He was to find out from it that he had no cause for pride merely because he had been born in a city. He was to find out that the city was not a great place."7 Yet the very next sentence belies Head's motives: Mr. Head, we are told, "meant him to see everything there is to see in a city so that he would be content to stay at home for the rest of his life." We realize that Head's true motivation lies in his own insecurity and his fear of losing Nelson. It is clear from the text that Head's relationship with his daughter had been less than good, and he fears losing his grandchild to the big city as he'd lost Nelson's mother. Character, Structure, and Meaning in O'Connor's "The Artificial Nigger"53 The description of Nelson, coming from the viewpoint of Head, reflects this insecurity, with Head's resulting suspicion ofthe child and his need to belittle in order to control. While critics have been quick to see the irony in the way Head sees himself, they fail to recognize a similar irony in his judgment of Nelson. Taking seriously the...

Books reviewed in this article: Suzanne Keller, Community: Pursuing the Dream, Living the Reality Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened Nicolas P. Retsinas and Eric S. Belsky (eds.), Low‐Income Homeownership: Examining the Unexamined Goal Renee Y. Chow, Suburban Space: The Fabric of Dwelling Michael Johns, Moment of Grace: The American City in the 1950s Michelle Miller‐Adams, Owning Up: Poverty, Assets, and the American Dream

Eternal Returns Laura Jok (bio) Undoing Kim Magowan Moon City Press www.moon-city-press.com/store/ 216 Pages; Print, $14.9 The stories in Kim Magowan's collection Undoing suspend characters in states of dissolution—adultery, divorce, forgetting, impossible decisions—and contemplate whether the process of undoing itself can be reversed. This double meaning of undoing, to ruin your life or to take it all back, creates an atmosphere of brutal fatalism and brutal hope. Through this indeterminacy, each story is able to hold, in intense compression, the best and worst possible scenarios, the characters' very best and worst selves, as capacious as experience itself and subject to eternal revision. In "When in Rome," the introductory story from which the collection takes its title, would-be lovers salvage their marriage and their extramarital desire, their incommensurate states, through the openness of story. They relegate their potential affair to an "alternate reality," an imaginative space in which their pasts can be rehashed, replaced: We are in Rome. Why Rome? Because it is not the place where either of us live… Perhaps, in the kind of eternal return of dreams and stories, because Rome is where I lost my virginity, and I will undo that night…by replacing it with you. So, we are in Rome. You stand in front of me. Your arms are at your sides, or perhaps you lightly press my shoulders, and you look at me. But I do not meet your eyes. I am concentrating on undoing, one by one, the mock mother-of-pearl buttons of your shirt, to reach your invisible and secret skin. In this passage, the combination of the potential ("perhaps") with the declarative ("We are in Rome" and "You stand in front of me") and tangible detail ("mock mother-of-pearl buttons") valorizes fiction as its own form of truth. Between two unsatisfying choices, characters preserve the path untaken through the stories they tell, which in this case, saves them from destroying themselves and their young families, if it does not protect them from wistfulness. "When in Rome" is bookended thematically by the final story, "This Much." in which a couple conceals their imminent separation so they can watch their daughter walk down the aisle, holding hands, divorcing but not yet divorced, eternally in-between until, unless, they choose to tell the news. Even when the reader can assume that the moment of grace is short-lived—that the characters will make the wrong decisions—the choice to end the stories before the turning point forgives without forgetting that they are capable of doing harm, whether by transgression or neglect. The story "On Air" ends with Alice observing her ex-husband, finally, for a moment, pay attention to their anorexic daughter, after neglecting her in favor of his new baby. Upon Alice's insistence, he looks at Laurel: "She watches the expressions (annoyance, perplexity, then concern) shift and slip across her ex-husband's face. 'I'm looking,' he says at last." The narrator knows Nathan's concern, and this elegant instance of seeing his daughter will not last because the narrator knows Nathan. Even his expression "shift and slip," is transient across his face. He is inclined to boredom, the parent who "refused to read" Curious George to baby Laurel because he found it tedious: "So boring, that book!… Nathan treated parenting as a menu, from which he could choose the entertaining items." [End Page 27] Such a father will not likely attend to his daughter's harrowing long-term illness. The story lets us know that, but kindly does not overwrite his concern with his inability to sustain it. Preserving people at their best selves even as they know better, the omniscience treats its characters with the knowing patience with which we treat our intimates: loving without idealizing. Like these generous stories, we may choose to remember our people in the moment before, when they could have been better. The gift of authoring one's own experience, in Magowan's world, comes with the possibility of redemption but also the cruelty of erasure. In "Palimpsest," a teacher writes lessons on a chalkboard only at the cost of those...

This chapter is about the experiences of a grieving family: a mother, father and brother, on the death of their daughter and sister. It is told in three voices, from three perspectives, at different ages through different lenses and describes how their grief in some ways shared with one another is also experienced alone and in profoundly different ways. It is a chapter about love as much as it is about death and grief.KeywordsGriefLoveShared experiencesDeathFamilyStillbirthSiblings

Flannery O’Connor’s Productive Violence Doreen Fowler (bio) Flannery O’Connor Famously insisted that the subject of her fiction “is the action of grace in territories largely held by the devil” (Mystery 118). While, as James Mellard notes, O’Connor largely has “had had her way with critics” (“Flannery” 625), her interpreters have been hard pressed to reconcile the signature violence in her fiction with traditional religious beliefs. When called on to explain this seeming contradiction, O’Connor remarked: “Violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace” (Mystery 112). The operative word here is “strangely,” and scholars have found very strange, even inexplicable, the redemptive properties of murder, rape, and mutilation.1 Claire Katz writes that O’Connor “unleashes a whirlwind of destructive forces more profound than her Christian theme would seem to justify” (55); and Preston Browning observes that O’Connor’s enigmatic fiction calls for interpretations that go beyond religious orthodoxy: “If it was Christian orthodoxy to which she subscribed, her work is manifest proof that it was orthodoxy with a difference. For her persistent habit of finding the human reality in the extreme, the perverse, the violent calls for closer examination” (56). Even if the redemptive value of destruction is not immediately apprehensible, O’Connor’s insistence on the purposive nature of violence readily maps onto the white, Western logic of difference. This Western, exclusionary logic holds that a sense of individuation and autonomy issues out of a power struggle between opposing terms. The marginalization or violent suppression of one term in a binary guarantees the ascendancy of its opposite. For example, working from this [End Page 127] logic, male authority seems to depend on female subjection, and white supremacy is confirmed by the domination of people of color. As feminist theorist Jessica Benjamin explains, “The ideal of freedom carries with it the seeds of domination—freedom means fleeing and or subjugating the other; autonomy means an escape from dependency” (221). Critics like Katz and Mellard have argued that one formulation of this Western notion of autonomy, the Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic narrative, seems particularly congruent with O’Connor’s insistence on purposive violence. According to Freud, entry into a cultural order organized by polarities begins with a fear of castration, and, for Lacan, “symbolic castration” introduces socialization.2 Seizing on this notion of symbolic castration, these critics have cited figurative castrations in O’Connor’s stories, like the sodomizing of Tarwater, the theft of Joy/Hulga’s prosthetic leg, or the goring of Mrs. May by a bull, and have suggested that violence functions in O’Connor’s texts according to a Freudian Oedipal formula; that is, it works to stabilize social hierarchy and positions of dominance. My purpose here is decidedly not to apply a Freudian schema to O’Connor’s texts. Rather, I propose that the Roman Catholic writer, like feminist theorists, rethinks and rewrites a phallocentric, Western, exclusionary narrative of social individuation, which is inscribed in the psychoanalytic master-narrative. As evidence for this assertion, I invoke O’Connor’s admission that her texts bear a complicated, adversarial relation to Freud’s theories. Writing to a friend, she states: “As to Sigmund, I am against him tooth and toenail but I am crafty: never deny, seldom confirm, always distinguish. Within his limitations I am ready to admit certain uses for him” (Habit 110). Like a feminist revisionist, O’Connor has “uses” for Freud, but also moves beyond his model. To interpret the changes O’Connor rings on a Freudian Oedipal paradigm, I turn to feminist revisionist of psychoanalytic theory, Julia Kristeva, whose theory of abjection, I propose, can help to untangle the riddle of O’Connor’s redemptive violence. With an insistence reminiscent of O’Connor, Kristeva argues that violence can be “productive” (Revolution 16). Like O’Connor’s shattering violence, Kristeva’s abjection “pulverizes the subject” (Powers 5), and, for both writer and theorist, this violence opens onto a sense of powerlessness. Critics have long noted that “the common experience [in all of O’Connor’s fiction] is that of humiliation” (Napier 23); similarly, [End Page 128] Kristeva writes that abjection...

The Physician in the Moment of Grace

Through Martin Buber’s ‘I and Thou’, a profound philosophical reflection on the encounter between ‘I and Thou’, we can see that we can achieve true life only through true encounter. In contrast, if we live inhumanely, using each other as if we were objects, in an ‘I-It’ relationship, the value and dignity of the personality of members of our community is lost. The essence of a true encounter is a direct conversation with one's whole being. The important thing is that I cannot achieve such a meeting and conversation just because I want it and am obsessed with it. The meeting time is when you empty your heart towards the other person and wait for that grace with sincerity. That one moment of grace becomes an eternal moment in a person's life.

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Beneficent observers reframe others’ behaviors to become more open to a range of possible meanings. Instead of assuming rudeness, we consider that the other person has a har­ried schedule. Instead of assuming coldness, we consider that the other person is painfully shy. Instead of assuming insult, we consider that the other person has no idea this is a sensitive topic for us. Instead of assuming disrespect, we consider that the other person knows little about our classroom expertise and achieve­ments. We choose to think “What else could it be?” rather than assuming a deliberate affront. When we are beneficent in the ways we see others, we change how we feel about and speak to them and the ways we speak to others about them: 1. We contribute to our own sense of calm and stability, our own good health. 2. We feel less like an adversary and more like a strong, compas­sionate, generous- of- spirit member of the school community. 3. We let them be them without taking on the negative views we have of them or that they have of us. 4. We essentially demagnetize ourselves. We are no longer pulled into others’ drama. We leave their anger, jealousy, and rude behaviors with them. 5. We realize that our own thresholds for tolerance and pre­ferred behaviors may be causing our suffering more than any intentional action by the “offending” person. 6. We are willing to give the other a moment of grace and the benefit of the doubt to see behavior as simply that: behavior 7. We devote ourselves to helping rather than hindering goodwill. 8. We ask ourselves: “What could I say, do, and think that mod­els compassion?” 9. We sometimes offer a silent benediction to those who rankle us: “May you be well, may you be happy, may you be free from suffering.” These habits of mind happen neither quickly nor easily, but they are worth the effort, inch by inch, step by step, healthy habit by healthy habit.

314 BOOK REVIEWS Second, DiGiovanni claims that "only the padroni [Italian labor bosses] and the priest had any lasting effect on the lives of the Italians in America" (p. 58) and concludes that "no other institution" (p. 206) besides the Church cared about Italians' welfare. DiGiovanni gives no evidence to support this assertion. He has not investigated the role oflabor bosses,labor organizers, newspaper editors , ethnic politicians, settlement house workers, Protestant missionaries, the Italian state, or the American state. Third, DiGiovanni concludes that "the traditional parochial structures affected only a small portion ofthe Italian community, . . . [and that] means other than those traditionally employed by the church in America at that time were necessary to assist the Italian immigrants" (p. 171). Archbishop Corrigan also came to this conclusion as he confronted intractable problems in his effort to establish national parishes for Italians. Thus, DiGiovanni provides a counterpoint to the consensus that national parishes best met the social and religious needs of immigrants. Indeed, in the NewYork Italian case the local parish was not sponsored by Italian resources, was rarely self-sustaining, was not free of provincial rivalries and dialects that undermined the very idea of a "national" parish, and was not the most common means Italians sought to educate their children. Unfortunately, DiGiovanni does not place his work within any scholarly contexts that would help the reader understand its relative significance. What does this study imply for our understanding ofthe Immigrant Church analyzed byJay P. Dolan and Dolores Liptak, or the divergent portraits of Italians and American Catholicism painted by RudolphVecoli and Silvano Tomasi? Furthermore, references to Gerald Fogarty's work on the American hierarchy and the Vatican, Henry Browne's classic on the "Italian Problem," Robert A. Orsi's work on Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and general studies of Italian ethnicity are mentioned in neither text nor notes. Notwithstanding these reservations, DiGiovanni's work provides an important contribution to the study of American-Vatican relations, the American Church, and Italian American history. Peter R. D'Agostino Rome The Moment ofGrace:One HundredYears ofSalvatorian Life andMinistry in the United States. Edited by Daniel Pekarske, S.D.S. 2 vols. Part I: 1892-1947, byJerome Schommer,S.D.S.;Part II: 1947-1992,by Steven M. Avella. (Milwaukee,Wisconsin: Society of the Divine Savior. 1994. Pp. xviii, 246;xxii, 412. Paperback.) In each of the two volumes of this centennial history of the Society ofthe Divine Savior (Salvatorians) the reader is urged by the editor to consider them BOOK REVIEWS 315 with "purity of heart," "humility," "patience," and "diligence." One soon recognizes these virtues in the study itself. "Purity of heart" is seen as the authors tell their story without pretension or preconceived agenda."Humility"is evidenced in the honesty with which they speak of the foibles as well as the gifts of the community—as a group and as individual members. "Patience" is shown in the methodologies used so as to allow the reader to benefit from the telling of the story from the "top down"and from the "ground up.""Diligence"is exhibited in the scholarly use of archival sources, including a significant number of photographs (the work might be called an"illustrated history"),as well as maps,charts, informational asides and notes within the text, and supplemental documents and demographic lists which fill out the image presented in the narrative. InVolume I,Jerome Schommer aims to show how Salvatorians worked "to inform a new culture with a vision of faith," while "being transformed in the process." He reflects on three moments within the first fifty-five years, that is: the somewhat rocky involvements in the Pacific Northwest; the foundation of a core community in St. Nazianz, Wisconsin; and the establishment of an independent North American Province in 1927. Schommer makes clear the challenges facing the community in the United States while the international society was still striving to solidify its identity within the Church. InVolume II, Steven M. Avella seeks to shed light on the remaining years as a time of expansion, financial collapse, and internal renewal. He presents a "top down" overview of the society's "Administrative Life," with a focus on calamitous financial decisions and their...

Through Martin Buber’s ‘I and Thou’, a profound philosophical reflection on the encounter between ‘I and Thou’, we can see that we can achieve true life only through true encounter. In contrast, if we live inhumanely, using each other as if we were objects, in an ‘I-It’ relationship, the value and dignity of the personality of members of our community is lost. The essence of a true encounter is a direct conversation with one's whole being. The important thing is that I cannot achieve such a meeting and conversation just because I want it and am obsessed with it. The meeting time is when you empty your heart towards the other person and wait for that grace with sincerity. That one moment of grace becomes an eternal moment in a person's life.

Neoliberal culture has exhibited two strikingly polarized understandings of contingency. Philosophers, writers, and artists have privileged the contingent event as never before. The larger culture, by contrast, has repeatedly repressed, denied, or excluded the possibility of it. The chapter traces this paradox through (a) a range of philosophers and writers, but also ecologists, climatologists, and geophysicists; and (b) the media, the culture of security, and managerialism, paying special attention to the last. Coetzee occupies a complex and very distinctive position relative to the opposition and paradox in question. As I show with reference to four texts, his work is concerned with four modalities of (rendering) the event, or what he calls grace: the debarring or death of grace, told ironically; the theoretical recognition of why grace can never be ruled out; the intellectual commitment to the thought of grace; and the moment of grace and fidelity to it.