Christian Brothers Research Articles

John Baptist de la Salle: The Spirituality of Christian Education (review)

Reviewed by: John Baptist de la Salle: The Spirituality of Christian Education Ronald Eugene Isetti John Baptist de la Salle: The Spirituality of Christian Education. Edited by Carl Koch, Jeffrey Calligan, FSC, and Jeffrey Gros, FSC. [The Classics Western Spirituality.] (New York and Mahway, New Jersey: Paulist Press. 2004. Pp. xvi, 266.$26.95 paperback.) This slim paperback volume on the writings of John Baptist de la Salle, the founder of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, is part of a larger series on the "Classics of Western Spirituality." It contains an elegantly-written preface by Thomas H. Groome, a pithy biographical sketch, and an introduction to his spirituality, but it is devoted mostly to de la Salle's "foundational" writings and letters. The most important of them is a collection of meditations he wrote for his Brothers during the time of annual retreat. They express best of all his advanced thoughts on the vocation of lay religious to announce the Gospel to the poor, comparing their role to that of the early apostles and to their descendants the bishops. Other documents such as Rules, memoranda, and personal notes and letters are of considerable historical value and interest, [End Page 420] but do not pertain directly to matters of theology and spirituality. The translations of the documents reprinted in this book are scrupulously faithful to the original texts, which is both their strength and their weakness, if only because de la Salle's own prose style was lawyer-like, sometimes convoluted, and only rarely poetic. His personal letters to his confreres, as the editors rightly note, were "brisk" and even "curt," in contrast to his longer treatises. Readers will have to transport themselves back to the spirituality of seventeenth-century France to fully appreciate both the theology and vocabulary of the selections included in this volume. Although de la Salle made an original contribution to the life and ministry of the Church by founding a religious order composed exclusively of consecrated lay religious, the bulk of his of his writings were directed to grammar school teachers who are warned against "teaching truths with scholarly words"; and urged to serve as "substitutes" for the mothers and fathers of their students. Today in the United States, the Christian Brothers teach mainly in college preparatory high schools and in liberal arts colleges and universities. Indeed, the editors, two of whom are Christian Brothers and one a former Brother, all hold numerous advanced degrees, including doctorates, a development that would have shocked de la Salle, who explicitly forbade his followers to learn Latin and Greek, which in his day meant studying the classics or the liberal arts. Although essential components of de la Salle's theology of teaching may still apply to men and women even at the highest levels of education, they will need to be restated and adapted to an academic environment that stresses critical thinking, freedom of thought, and advanced scholarship. This is the challenge facing the present-day followers of an educational reformer whose revolutionary ideas got him constantly in trouble with the civil and ecclesiastical authorities of his time and place. Ronald Eugene Isetti Saint Mary's College of California Copyright © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press

Little Black Book of Stories (review)

Little Black Book of Stories. By A. S. Byatt. New York: Vintage International, 2005.240pp. Once upon a time 1 met a man who told me that he had seen a person turn into stone. He had been six years old, sitting alone on front porch of his grandparents' house in Norway when he had witnessed transformation on road in front of him. Only later did I find that Scandinavian folk narratives are replete with becoming stones and with huldufolk or huldrefolk ones) inhabiting boulders strewn across rocky landscapes. A Stone Woman, literally central story in A. S. Byatt's collection of five stories, elaborates this folk motif into gothic tracery. Ines, a woman grieving over recent death of her mother, finds herself slowly turning into stone: One day she found a cluster of greenish-white crystals sprouting in her armpit. . . . Jagged flakes of silica and nodes of basalt pushed her breasts upward and flourished under fall of flesh, making her clothes crackle and rustle (119). Befriended by a young Icelandic stonemason named Thorsteinn, who tells her tales of laughing weightless elves, hidden heavy-footed, heavy-handed (138), Ines asks him if Katla, troll-woman of an Icelandic saga, was a stone woman too. He responds that, although there were trolls in Iceland who turned to stone, like Norse trolls, if sun hit not all did so. 'Personally,' said Thorsteinn, 'I do not think you are a troll. I think you are a metamorphosis' (143-44). His last words encapsulate Ines's transformation and its unexpected effects (hidden like huldrefolk so readers will be surprised) but also symbolize defining principle of Little Black Book of Stories as a whole. This metamorphic principle, developed on several intertwining levels, is what makes blurb on book's cover so true: Like Hans Christian Andersen and Brothers Grimm, Isak Dinesen and Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt knows that fairy tales are for grown-ups. And in this ravishing collection she breathes new life into form. Magical transformation is hallmark of folk- and fairy-tale structure and content, and Byatt transforms transformations, spinning them out in some stories overtly connected to fairy tale and in others much more covertly with just a hint or a trace of tradition threaded through narrative. A Stone Woman, example of most explicit use of traditional tales in collection, not only refers to Scandinavian story telling about but also transforms obvious troll-to-stone frame in what Frank de Caro and Rosan Jordan might call its exoskeleton in their Re-Situating Folklore: Folk Contexts and Twentieth-Century Literature and Art (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004). Only one other story-the lead story, A Thing in Forest-makes an explicit reference to a classic fairy tale, specifically to and in a brief analogy embedded in a tale ostensibly about two women's different choices in life, in what de Caro and Jordan would call its endoskeleton. In story's opening sequence, Penny and Primrose, two little girls being evacuated with other children from London to a country estate during World War II, notice that train taking them from city passes rural stations whose names were carefully blacked out: The children did not know that namelessness was meant to baffle or delude an invading army. They felt-they did not think it out, but somewhere inside of them idea sprouted-that erasure was because of them, because they were not meant to know where they were going or, like Hansel and Gretel, to find way back (6, emphasis added). Once arrived at their destination, two girls cross great house's terrace, lawns, and then enter estate woods. In forest, liminal space in many fairy tales, and Gretel prototype, two girls encounter the thing, not conventional witch in gingerbread house, but A crunching, a crackling, a crushing more akin to American Indian windigo whose acts remain unspeakable (once again so readers will be surprised) (13-14). …

From ‘apprentice’ to professional: The training of New Zealand Catholic teachers 1945‐65

This article draws on my doctoral research into the expansion of the Catholic educational mission in New Zealand in the years from 1945 to 1965. The project utilised archival and documentary sources and interviews with thirty three Catholic educators: twenty one female religious from the Sisters of Mercy, Dominican Sisters and the Religious of the Sacred Heart and twelve male religious from the Marist Brothers, Christian Brothers and the Society of Mary (Marist Priests) and two former diocesan directors of Catholic education.

Les Franciscains en Terre Sainte (1869-1889): Religion et politique: Une recherche institutionnelle (review)

Reviewed by: Les Franciscains en Terre Sainte (1869–1889): Religion et politique: Une recherche institutionnelle Romano Stephen Almagno O.F.M. Les Franciscains en Terre Sainte (1869–1889): Religion et politique: Une recherche institutionnelle. By Giuseppe Buffon. (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf and Les Éditions Franciscaines. 2005. Pp. 604. €58.) Giuseppe Buffon, currently a member of the Franciscan Order's Rome-based Antonianum (recently designated a pontifical university), has authored a study that is among the latest in a recent, and ongoing, spate of books about the Franciscans and the Holy Land. Coming on the heels of Giovannelli's La Santa Sede e la Palestina—La Custodia di Terra Santa tra la fine dell'Impero Ottomano e la Guerra dei Sei Giorni (2000), Pieraccini's Cattolici di Terra Santa 1333–2000 (published in 2003), and Fabrizio's Identità Nazionali e Identità Religiose. Diplomazia Internazionale, Istituzioni Ecclesiastiche e Comunità Cristiane di Terra Santa tra Otto e Novecento (2004), Buffon makes a substantial contribution to the unraveling and clarification of perennial and ever-present issues (some still unresolved or partially resolved) concerning the almost 800-year Franciscan presence in the Holy Land. [End Page 836] In what amounts to a well thought-out and well documented modern Apologia Pauperum, the forty-two-year-old Franciscan scholar (doctorate in history from the Gregorianum and in anthropology from the École des Hautes Études, Paris) begins by candidly admitting and then asking why—for centuries, and to this very day—the Franciscans have been perceived and judged (by some) to be "Moines inutiles . . . enfoncés au fond de leur monastère . . . incapables de faire du bien dans leur mission et de conserver plus longtemps les sanctuaires qu'ils se sont laissé enlever par les schismatiques" (p. 11). At the end of the nineteenth century, France—which had been the Order's protector for so very many years—tried to discard the friars and replace them with French religious (Carmelites, Christian Brothers, White Fathers, Assumptionists, Sisters of Charity, and Dominicans) who, in France's mind, would be much better in combating the Protestant efforts sponsored by England and Germany. Moreover, with the help of Cardinal Lavigerie, French diplomats had even convinced Rome (Italy and the Vatican) that it was time to replace the Franciscans. The friars, in turn, fought French nationalism with Franciscan internationalism. And the Franciscans won! Buffon, then, devotes the rest of his study to show just how and why the Franciscans were successful. In his opinion, the survival of the Holy Land Custody—at a time when political-religious forces were working for and predicting its elimination—did not occur because of good luck and a smiling fortune. Rather, the author demonstrates (and I think his adroitness in presenting historical documents proves) how, the Order's very organizational structure (or lack thereof, which Buffon describes as a kind of "anarchie rationelle") served as the bedrock of its successful resistance to European politics and ecclesiastical manoeuvres. Romano Stephen Almagno O.F.M. Holy Land Monastery Washington, D.C. Copyright © 2005 The Catholic University of America Press

War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans (review)

Reviewed by: War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans Frank Buscher War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans. By Ben Shepherd. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-674-01296-8. Maps. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography of primary sources. Index. Pp. 300. $29.95. This important book marks the confluence of several relatively recent historiographical trends that have influenced military history in general and accounts of Nazi Germany's war in the east in particular. Military historians have shown a growing interest in the experience of the common soldier. Omar Bartov and other specialists have devoted much of their work to studying the motives and actions of the average German soldier on the eastern front. Christopher R. Browning's study of the members of a German reserve police battalion who had participated in the murder of Polish Jews further drew the historian's attention to the involvement of "ordinary men" in the Hitler regime's crimes. [End Page 867] Ben Shepherd contributes to this tradition by focusing on the officers and, to some degree, the soldiers of the five security divisions assigned to the Army Group Center rear area in the context of the Wehrmacht's war against Soviet partisans. Concentrating on the 221st Security Division, which operated primarily in German-occupied Byelorussia, he sets out to explain how soldiers and particularly field officers executed the German army's war of annihilation. Shepherd correctly describes the ruthlessness of the German campaign as "preordained" (p. 224) and the Wehrmacht's antipartisan fight as particularly brutal. Given the German army's institutional history, the attitudes and prejudices of its senior officers, Hitler's genocidal goals, and the chronic shortages of resources and manpower, it should not be surprising that midlevel officers adopted a harsh approach. At the same time, Shepherd's research shows that the Wehrmacht, an army in which eleven million Germans served during World War II, was not a monolith. The author detects considerable differences in the conduct of the different security divisions. Some relied on brutality at all times, while others, especially the 221st, sought to cultivate the civilian population for at least part of the occupation. Similarly, officers at the regimental and battalion levels often acted decidedly more harshly than those at the division level (the 221st may have been an exception because several of its regimental commanders did not resort to particular harshness). Furthermore, officers working in divisional intelligence sections preferred cultivation to the brutal methods favored by operations officers. The author posits that the officers' own proclivities and the conditions they encountered are vital to evaluating their behavior. Shepherd also finds that the anti-partisan campaign consisted of several phases. The brutality was at its worst in 1941, when the security divisions participated in the murder of Soviet Jews and other groups targeted for elimination by the Nazis. The next two and a half years witnessed a varying mixture of ruthlessness and attempts to cultivate the indigenous population. Shepherd demonstrates his mastery of the considerable literature in this area. For primary sources, the author relies on documents in German and American archives. There is, however, no evidence that the author visited archives in the former Soviet Union which have sizeable holdings of captured German records. Shepherd's monograph is well written, and his arguments and conclusions are sound. This book will appeal to experts as well as general readers with an interest in the Soviet-German war. Frank Buscher Christian Brothers University Memphis, Tennessee Copyright © 2005 Society for Military History

Waiting for Elijah: a History of the Megiddo Mission

Founded in the late nineteenth century, the Megiddo Mission is an apocalyptic religious movement that continues to claim a small but dedicated following. Waiting for Elijah is the first book-length study of this unusual sect, which commands attention both for its powers of survival and for its unique blend of faith and practice. Over the course of the church s history, its adherents have combined patriotism, redefinition of gender roles, perfectionism, and communitarianism with elements of middle-class capitalism. The church originated in the itinerant ministry of a Civil War veteran named L. T. Nichols, whose controversial preaching led to his being shot and wounded. Originally known as the Christian Brethren, Nichols and his followers relocated from Oregon to the Midwest in 1883 and some years later embarked on an evangelistic ministry that entailed traveling up and down the Mississippi River system on a large steamboat. In 1904, the group moved to its present home of Rochester, New York, from which its missionaries traveled throughout the United States and Canada. They took the name Megiddo from a strategically located city in ancient Israel, which to them signified a place where soldiers of God gathered to renew their strength and courage. Drawing on diverse sources including the writings of Nichols and his charismatic successor, Maud Hembree; newspaper accounts; and interviews with present-day Megiddos Gari-Anne Patzwald traces the group s intriguing history and analyzes its core beliefs. As she shows, the sect s roots can be found in the Restorationist movement of the early nineteenth century, which sought to recapture biblical truth and practice. A focal point of Nichols s preaching was the assertion that the Hebrew prophet Elijah would return in bodily form prior to the second coming of Christ and the final culmination of history. Certain Megiddo practices such as conservative dress and celebration of Christmas in springtime have, to some in the American mainstream, marked them as outsiders. And indeed, as Patzwald notes, the group displays many characteristics of an enclosed communal society. Yet the Megiddos have always rejected a community of goods in favor of individual initiative and entrepreneurship, and these attributes, Patzwald argues, have done much to ensure the group s survival well beyond its original generation of followers. The Author: An independent scholar, Gari-Anne Patzwald holds master s degrees from the University of Wisconsin Madison and the Lexington Theological Seminary. She is the associate editor of the Historical Dictionary of the Holiness Movement.

The Christian Brothers and the Second Reformation in Ireland

The Christian Brothers and the Second Reformation in Ireland

Research Note: The Religious Life of Ex-Religious: A Study of Former Christian Brothers in Old Age

This report forms one part of a larger research project on the early formation of Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic religious order. This study describes the religious convictions and practices of a group of men aged 60-90 who departed a Catholic order of teaching Brothers in the decades 1940-1980. It covers their departure from the order, their subsequent religious development, and their current beliefs and practices today.

Uncanny Realist: John T. McIntyre and Steps Going Down (1936)

One of America's most talked about literary figures in 1936 was a sixty-five-year old Irish American named John T. Mclntyre, who had just published the novel Steps Going Down, an idiosyncrastic amalgam of H. P. Lovecraft-style super naturalism, Thomist theology, mysticism, and realism in the tradition of James M. Cain. Steps Going Down crowned John T. Mclntyre's career and earned the obscure novelist and playwright his first national acclaim. He was celebrated in Time, the Nation, and the New Yorker; newspapers across the eastern seaboard reprinted dramatic publicity portraits; prize money and royalties made him financially secure for the only time in his life. His success, however, was ephemeral, and the brilliance of his brief celebrity made his subsequent fall into poverty and anonymity all the more poignant. Indeed, Steps Going Down might well have served as the title of its author's biography; as mesmerizing as the novel is, John T. Mclntyre's life probably makes a better story. He was born in 1871 to Patrick and Sara Walker Mclntyre of Philadelphia. Lie grew up in the city's Northern Liberties district and attended St. Michael's School, and then the Harrison Grammar School. Years later, he would recall that his mother had withdrawn him from the parochial school because of the cruelty of the Christian Brothers who taught there. This is certainly plausible, although the only one of Mclntyre's novels to use autobiographical materials, the unpublished and undated Some Days in the World, portrays the Christian Brothers affec tionately. It seems equally plausible that some misfortune had put parochial school tuition beyond the family's reach. Mclntyre appears to have lost his father, either by death or desertion, at a very early age. In any case, his exertions in pub lic school were no more successful than those with the Christian Brothers. It is

Joyce among the Brothers

Noting James Joyce's famous remark that You allude to me as a Catholic; you ought to allude to me as a (2), Kevin Sullivan writes in Joyce Among the Jesuits that Joyce received the whole of his formal education from the Jesuits. Only once during these fourteen years [between the ages of seven and twenty] was his study with them interrupted, and during this period--from the beginning of the year 1892 to April, 1893--he seems not to have attended any school (7). It is an abundantly documented commonplace of Joyce criticism that the Society of Jesus played a major role in his life and works. On the other hand, it has long been assumed, from one reference in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that the Brothers figured little in Joyce's life and that, in fact, his admiration for his Jesuit teachers was complemented by a contempt for the Brothers who educated many of his contemporaries. An examination of references to the Brothers in Joyce's texts, however, leads to the conclusion that he respected them, whatever he may have thought of them as educators. The Brothers appear at least briefly in each of Joyce's major fictional works, and the only negative remark is that of Simon Dedalus in the second chapter of Portrait: Christian be damned! [...] Is it with Paddy Stink and Mud? No, let him stick to the jesuits in God's name since he began with them. They'll be of service to him in after years. Those are the fellows that can get you a position (72). Dedalus draws a very clear line between the Brothers and the Jesuits. Because Joyce himself suppressed the detail that he spent some months in 1893 as a student of the Brothers at their school in North Richmond Street in Dublin, Sullivan logically assumed that Joyce's schooling was entirely with the Jesuits, but Richard Ellmann finally revealed the truth: [When the Joyces moved into] Fitzgibbon Street off Mountjoy Square, the last of their good addresses[,] the children were not sent to school at once, but eventually John Joyce, with the greatest reluctance, sent them to the Brothers' school on North Richmond Street. James Joyce chose never to remember this interlude with the Brothers in his writings, preferring to have his hero spend the period in two years of reverie, and he did not mention it to [his first biographer] Herbert Gorman. It was Joyce's one break with Jesuit education, and he shared his father's view that the Jesuits were the gentlemen of Catholic education, and the Brothers (Paddy Stink and Micky [sic] Mud;' as his father denominated them) its drones. (35) Ellmann is quoting not Joyce's father but Stephen's father in Portrait. When Simon Dedalus returns home one day to report that he has managed to place Stephen with the Jesuits at Belvedere College, Mrs. Dedalus says, I never liked the idea of sending him to the christian brothers (an interestingly ambiguous remark that could reflect Joyce's own brief experience with the Brothers), and Simon responds with the words already quoted. Although James Joyce and his father John may have agreed with Simon Dedalus's characterization, the names have stuck ever since as a handy description of Joyce's view of the Brothers. So famous did the phrase become that Joyce seems to be parodying himself in a section of Finnegans Wake characterized as students' class notes. One parenthetical passage begins: Sure you could wright anny pippap passage, Eye bet, as foyne as that moultylousy Erewhig, yerself, mick! Nock the nickers! The second sentence is footnoted, Excuse theyre christianbrothers irish? (301). Here Mickey Mud of Portrait becomes muddy nickers. The phrase itself, however, was not uttered by Joyce or by his father but by a fictional father who is not a very attractive or intelligent character. Ellmann ignores the distinction, and Barry Coldrey, an Australian Brother, blurs the fact/fiction distinction even further when he writes that Joyce himself recoils from the prospect of being educated 'with Paddy Stink and Mud' at a Brothers' School (69). …

The Christian Brethren and the Dissemination of Heretical Books

The illicit influx of William Tyndale’s vernacular New Testament and other reforming works into England in the late 1520s was considered an affront to the ecclesiastical authorities and an encouragement to lay heretical thought. No one was more vitriolic in condemnation than Thomas More, the lawyer-turned-polemicist, who was to become Chancellor from 1529. He declared, ‘Nothynge more detesteth then these pestylent bokes that Tyndale and suche other sende in to the realme, to sette forth here theyr abomynable heresyes.’ As Chancellor, More was renowned for his zealous persecution of heretics and booksellers, which he justified as a moral and legal imperative in order to uphold the Catholic faith. He also wrote several works, initially at the request and licence of Bishop Tunstall in March 1528, and thereafter in reply to the treatises of Tyndale and other Antwerp exiles. These writings provide tantalizing insights into the activities of Tyndale and the Christian Brethren as seen through the eyes of their chief protagonist. It was not only the New Testament, emanating from Cologne and Worms, that worried More, but Tyndale’s polemical works from the printing press of Johannes Hoochstraten in Antwerp, especiallyThe Parable of the Wicked Mammon, The Obedience of a Christen Man, andThe Practice of Prelates. Fellow exiles, such as George Joye, John Frith, and Simon Fish, were also writing popular and doctrinal works, includingA Disputation of Purgatorye, The Revelation of Antichrist, David’s Psalter, andA Supplication for the Beggars. Thomas More regarded William Tyndale, the Antwerp exiles, and their ‘Brethren’ in England as the most active producers and distributors of vernacular heretical books. However, his perceptions of the Brethren, their sympathizers, and their organization have been under-utilized by historians, who often rely more on the post-contemporary reflections of John Foxe. There perhaps remains the suspicion that More was conveniently coalescing all sedition under a single banner as a rhetorical device, or due to prejudice and unfounded conspiracy theories. Indeed,The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answeroutlined a smuggling network as an attempt to demoralize Tyndale’s supporters, by describing how various individuals had renounced their doctrines and betrayed their fellows. These were his tools of polemics, but More’s testimonies should not be dismissed as the mere delusions of a staunch anti-heretical zealot. He had studied the reforming works and interrogated significant figures in the Brethren. His conspiracy theories, it can be argued, were based on fact.

Hawthorne and Sin

[This solicited essay is published with the kind permission of its author, Henry James Professor of English and American Letters and University Professor at New York University, who presented it on 29 December 2002 at session in his honor arranged by the Conference on Christianity and Literature for the 118th MLA Annual Convention. On the preceding day CCL recognized Professor Donoghue with its Lifetime Achievement Award, as described in the News and Announcements section of this issue.--Ed.] I When I first read The Scarlet Letter, I found it bewildering. That impression has not entirely receded, but I think I understand how it came about and why it has to some extent persisted. The title of the book implied story about sin, scarlet woman, and indeed the book often refers to sin and sinfulness; none of the characters, however, has convinced sense of sin. Nathaniel Hawthorne seems to equivocate among the values he brings forward. I acknowledge, without regarding the acknowledgment as major concession, that my understanding of sin is the one I was taught in Catholic elementary and secondary schools in Northern Ireland. In the Christian Brothers School in Newry, where I was day pupil, I was instructed that sin is any thought, word, or deed contrary to the Law of God. A mortal sin is a thought, word, or deed which violates one of the essential prescriptions of God's law, and results in the loss of His friendship and of sanctifying grace (Kelly 25). By committing sin I break my relation to God, which remains ideal, an axiom of faith, till it is activated by prayer and the sacraments, especially penance and the Eucharist. I estrange myself from God in the most drastic way by committing mortal sin. Three conditions are required that sin mortal: grave matter, full advertence to what one is doing (perfect knowledge), and full consent of the will (Kelly 26). When I left secondary school, I went to Dublin as an undergraduate student at University College. There I exacerbated my sense of sin by reading with notable intensity the novels of James Joyce, Graham Greene, Francois Mauriac, and Georges Bernanos. I had not yet read Andre Dubus's Adultery, story that might have had much the same excruciating effect on me. I recall with particular clarity The Diary of Country Priest and the conviction of sin it exposed. Joyce was even closer to home. In the fourth chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, Stephen Dedalus is pondering the priest's suggestion that he might have vocation to the priesthood, but he reflects at the same time that the priest's appeal has not really touched him: [...] He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world. The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard: and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would at some instant to come, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen but about to fall. (188) Those sentences had for me the true scholastic clarity. They enforced sense of sin that survives every urge on Stephen's part to make it yield to the aesthetic swoon of syllables, falling but not yet fallen. The snares of the world were not merely figurative, as if fulfilling the logic of wandering; they waited to trap you into sin. When I read Greene's The Heart of the Matter, I found Scobie's sense of sin so acute, unbeliever as in many respects he is, that I could even understand the moment in which he feels as temptation the possibility of doing the right thing: giving up his mistress, going to confession, and taking communion. His mistress Helen Rolt is so blank that she can't appreciate what it means for Scobie to doomed to believe that he is in state of sin: Well then she said triumphantly, be hung for sheep. …

Napa and Sonoma Valleys: More Than Vines and Wines

Napa and Sonoma Valleys: More Than Vines and Wines

Voices of Vietnamese Boat People, Nineteen Narratives of Escape and Survival, Mary Terell Cargill & Jade Quang Huynh

This book provides stark and moving narratives of the Vietnamese boat people’s flight in the years following the fall of Saigon (1975). The life stories were collected and edited by Mary Cargill, an associate professor of English at Christian Brothers University (Memphis, Tennessee), with Jade Quang Huynh, assistant professor of English at Appalachian State University (Boone, California). The people escaping from the Communist regime and various forms of oppression set sail on rickety boats o...

Remembering Ireland’s Architecture of Containment: “Telling” Stories in The Butcher Boy and States of Fear

REMEMBERING IRELAND’S ARCHITECTURE OF CONTAINMENT: “TELLING” STORIES IN THE BUTCHER BOY AND STATES OF FEAR JAMES M. SMITH patrick mccabe’s third novel, The Butcher Boy (1992), describes the eventful life of Francie Brady, a traumatized schoolboy in a small town in late 1950s and early 1960s Ireland.1 Irish society deems Francie mad and resorts to confining his deviant behavior at a variety of different institutions—an industrial school, a mental hospital, and a prison. Hidden away, out of sight and out of mind, McCabe’s protagonist evokes the many real-life victims of Ireland’s architecture of containment.2 In its concrete form, this architecture encompassed an array of interdependent institutions—schools, hospitals, mother-and-baby homes, adoption agencies, and Magdalen laundries —that obscured the less desirable elements attached to a number of interrelated social phenomena, including poverty, illegitimacy, and infanticide .3 In its more abstract form, this architecture comprised both the legislation that inscribed these issues as well as the numerous official and public discourses that resisted admitting the existence and function of their “TELLING” STORIES IN THE BUTCHER BOY AND STATES OF FEAR 111 1 Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy (New York: Delta Books, [1992] 1997). All further references to The Butcher Boy refer to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. 2 My understanding of the State’s investment in institutional containment is influenced by Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995) and The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 3 The Magdalen was an institution for women deemed socially deviant or sexually promiscuous. In Ireland, women religious operated Magdalen institutions. Those committed invariably spent their days laboring in industrial laundries—the philosophy being that having been “stained” by the sin of immorality they could cleanse themselves by constant labor, prayer, and isolation. Thousands of Irish women were committed to the Magdalen by other family members. Many remained incarcerated for the rest of their lives and were denied all civil and legal rights. affiliated institutions. What remains incontrovertible, however, is that this bureaucratic apparatus and the discourses surrounding it served the nation-state: its function, to confine and render invisible segments of the population whose very existence threatened Ireland’s national imaginary, the vision of Ireland enshrined in President Eamon de Valera’s 1937 constitution .4 As a result, among those incarcerated were unmarried mothers, illegitimate and abandoned children, orphans, the sexually promiscuous, the socially transgressive, and, often, those merely guilty of “being in the way.”5 The Butcher Boy participates in the formation of a narrative that excavates the elided history of Ireland’s architecture of containment. In 1999, only seven years after the publication of The Butcher Boy, Mary Raftery’s three-part documentary States of Fear, examining the history of Ireland’s residential child care practices, aired on the national broadcasting network.6 It remains, to date, the most significant representation of the nation’s containment infrastructure. The first episode concentrated on Ireland’s industrial and reformatory schools prior to 1970, when the recommendations of the Kennedy Report indicted the whole system and resulted in the closure of many larger institutions.7 Thirty years later, seven witnesses challenged Irish television audiences with memories of neglect and abuse.8 John Prior revealed that he was “sadistically sexually abused” on the day he made his First Holy Communion. Barney O’Connell told how the Christian Brother in charge of the nationally “TELLING” STORIES IN THE BUTCHER BOY AND STATES OF FEAR 112 4 My use of the term “national imaginary” reflects the influence on my work of Benedict Anderson’s seminal text on modern nationalism. See Anderson’s Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Press, 1991). 5 The use of the term “illegitimate” throughout this article refers only to society’s rendering of the birth as transgressive of social norms. It does not, obviously, refer to the child itself. 6 States of Fear, three episodes, narr., Áine Lawlor, writ., prod., dir., Mary Raftery, RTÉ, Ireland, 27 April to 11 May 1999. Raftery together with...

Enhancement of Undergraduate Materials Education through Research and Industry-Academia Interactions

ABSTRACTThe Chemical Engineering Department at Christian Brothers University (CBU) offers an introductory courses on materials at the sophomore level followed by a course on polymer science and engineering at the senior level complete with laboratory. Students desiring further exposure to materials processing are connected with local polymeric materials companies where they work as interns. These students have the opportunity to be involved in undergraduate materials research in the CBU Polymer Laboratory with the author funded by the university or local polymer companies. Their works are acknowledged in terms of student paper presentations at local or regional research seminars. In 1998, CBU Engineering School's research involvement with the polymeric materials industry was expanded when local polymer company personnels were allowed to conduct proprietary research at the institution's Polymer Engineering Laboratory with the help of paid undergraduate chemical engineering students. Recently the Chemical Engineering Department at CBU initiated collaborative research with the engineering school of a local university and a local biomaterials company. In order to meet the growing needs of packaging engineers in this area, local companies (polymer and others) that have packaging departments and the School of Engineering at CBU recently joined forces to develop a packaging teaching and training program for students as well as employees of these companies. This program would include packaging materials and engineering. The details of Phase I and Phase II of this joint venture are described in the main body of the paper that follows.

‘A strange mixture of caring and corruption’: residential care in Christian Brothers orphanages and industrial schools during their last phase, 1940s to 1960s

‘A strange mixture of caring and corruption’: residential care in Christian Brothers orphanages and industrial schools during their last phase, 1940s to 1960s

CHRISTIAN PRESENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST

PETER E. MAKARI [*] At the close of the second millennium since the birth of our Lord, much attention around the world is focussed on the Middle East, and particularly on the historic land of Jesus Christ's life and resurrection, the land of Palestine and Israel. Pilgrims have for centuries come to the so-called Holy Land to visit the places where the events of the scriptures took place. The biblical lands are indeed special. They offer the Christian visitor a spiritual journey endowed with many meanings and a sense of immediate connectivity with our faith history. It is to this context that so many have come and this that so many have sought. The number of pilgrims expected to come to the Middle East, and particularly Palestine and Israel, during the Great Jubilee year 2000 is staggering. They will visit the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem; they will go to Egypt, where the holy family sought refuge from King Herod; they will wet themselves along the Jordan river banks in which Christ was baptized; they will retrace Christ's steps on the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem as he carried his cross; and they will look inside the tomb from which Christ emerged, resurrected in full glory. They will never forget the experience, or the place; but will they have encountered any of their Middle Eastern Christian sisters and brothers who are struggling to maintain their lives and livelihoods in the land of Christ? The Christian population of the Middle East is often overlooked, forgotten, or simply unknown. Those not familiar with today's Middle East correctly associate Islam with it. Islam is the overwhelming majority religion throughout the Middle East and North Africa's twenty-two nations. From Morocco to Iraq and Iran, Islam is the numerical majority. It is interesting to note, though, that the highest concentration of Muslims is not in the Middle East, but rather in South and Southeast Asia, in Indonesia and Malaysia. As for Christians in the Middle East, we have inhabited the lands of the region continuously since the days of Christ himself. The first people to be called Christians lived in Antioch. The first church, established by the apostle James, was in Jerusalem. This is our heritage. This is our history. Our roots are here. The numerical presence of Christians in the Middle East is proportionately low. The percentages vary from country to country, and estimates vary from source to source. There is no accurate and reliable census or study that offers statistics. We can say that the number of Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, the geographical distribution of churches that are members in the Middle East Council of Churches (MECC), is approximately fifteen million. Percentages of Christians vary from less than 2% in Iran, to about 10% in Egypt, to more than 40% in Lebanon. Virtually all of these Christians belong to one of the four ecclesiastical families represented in the MECC: Oriental Orthodox, Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical (including Anglican and Protestant churches). The Environment of the Middle East As we have already mentioned, the prevailing culture and environment in the region is Islamic. That has not always been the case, however. It is imperative that we call to mind that Islam was introduced just less than 1,400 years ago, in the early 7th century. Before that time, Christianity was the main religion of the Middle East. Even on the Arab peninsula Christianity was present and significant. As the Arab armies moved north and west, they conquered much land and important capitals for Islam before the end of the 7th century. Islamic rule was the political norm throughout, but did not immediately become a majority religion throughout the land of political rule. Christianity remained the majority for some decades and even centuries in some places. The fact that Islam eventually became the majority religion can no doubt be attributed to its appeal as a liberating political force from the oppressive Byzantine empire. …

MISSION THROUGH THE EYES OF THE EIGHTH ASSEMBLY OF THE WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES

The Eighth Assembly of the World Council of Churches affirmed for me the importance of the body of Jesus Christ. It is only within the body of Christ, as it brings together all Christians of every culture and land, that we can catch a glimpse of what we are to be as the living community of faith. The witness of any and every Christian denomination is incomplete without the testimony, challenge and encouragement that comes from other Christian sisters and brothers as they experience faith in their own life context. I went to the assembly expecting to have my ecumenical commitment strengthened, and it was. What I did not expect was to hear and see that in the complexity and multiplicity of the situations that the body of Christ is called to be in mission there are some fundamentals which do not change. Those fundamentals are prayer, ministering to people wherever they are, and placing one's faith in the transcendent power of God. I remember very little about the prayers we prayed during the assembly worship services. I know that they touched me while we prayed together, prepared me for the days of meetings and decision making. At night they enabled me to set aside work and weariness for rest and renewal. These were blessed prayers, but the prayers that most affected me were the prayers that persons lifted up as the very prayers that had been sustenance for them in their struggles and vision bearers in their efforts to be faithful to God's calling in their lives. At a commemoration of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, a brother from Chile spoke about the horror of the downfall of the Chilean President Salvador Allende, and the repression that followed. He himself had been detained and tortured. Family, friends and colleagues had also suffered, many of them had been murdered. He lauded the Declaration of Human Rights as a strong arm of justice and advocated for its continuance. As much as he appreciated the human rights efforts made in behalf of his country and his people, he stated that what had most sustained him were the prayers of persons from all over the world. They had provided for him a sense of care in the midst of the beatings by those who sought to destroy him, a measure of confidence in knowing that he was not alone, and an unwavering hope in the One who hears all prayers. A woman came and assumed the vacant delegate seat next to me one afternoon. Her church had just been accepted as a new member of the World Council of Churches. During a recess I asked her about her church. Her enthusiasm and her reports of a young church experiencing phenomenal growth led me to ask her how the church had come to be. Her answer was simple. prayed and God gave us a vision of what we were to do. Not all persons and churches at the assembly were experiencing the joy and growth that the sister from this new member church was experiencing. There were persons from declining churches, others from divided churches, and others who felt their church had lost its direction in ministry and mission. The divisions and tensions among member churches of the WCC were also quite evident. This was the stuff of conversations at the meal table, during recesses, and late into the night. Histories were shared, concerns were unpacked, ideas and strategies were considered. Sharing and struggling and thinking together helped, but in all the conversations that I was a part of, there always came a moment in which it became obvious that human explaining, planning and effort were not sufficient to renew spirits, overcome brokenness, or provide a clear vision for our mission together. Transformation, reconciliation and clarity of vision for witness and mission are possible only through the grace of God. We all committed to continue working for the wholeness of the body of Jesus Christ and for its witness. In every expression of commitment there was the primary commitment to pray with and for each other, that God would look down upon us, and guide us and fill us with divine grace for healing and faithful discipleship. …

Magnificat: The Life and Times of Timothy Cardinal Manning by Francis J. Weber

670BOOK REVIEWS the same time, they were committed to liberal social action. For the next fiftytwo years, until its demise in 1993, Christianity and Crisis was an important part of the Protestant left. Mark Hulsether's new book is a well-written and well-organized account of the history of this magazine. Hulsether's primary interest is in the way that Christianity and Crisis shifted "paradigms" from Christian realism to liberation theologies. In its first decades, the major emphases of the magazine were "anticommunism, New Deal type economic reform, and pro-western international development," and the magazine consistently worked in conversation with the secular elite. Sometime in the late 1960's, however, the magazine began to focus more on contextual theologies and to stress "possibilities for radical change from the standpoint of oppressed communities" (p. xvii). Hulsether describes this paradigm shift as a real transformation, and yet he also discerns continuities within the magazine across the decades. He notes that the magazine adopted a dialectical style in which articles typically affirmed "X, but at the same timeY." Even in the early years of the magazine, the kinds of emphases that the magazine developed later appeared on the "Y hand," as Hulsether calls it. Hulsether is thus able to describe both the gradual extension of early themes and the dramatic transformation of the magazine at the same time. This sensitivity to complex developments sheds helpful light on the "shattering of consensus" and the magazine's subsequent "picking up of the pieces." Hulsether is effective at describing the history of the magazine, but his goal is more ambitious as well. His book aims to use "Christianity and Crisis as a case study to tell a larger story about trends in postwar Protestant social thought and political activism" (p. vii). He stresses three trends: "the simultaneous upsurge of fundamentalism and stagnation of liberalism in postwar Protestantism, the explosion of multiculturalist approaches to U.S. religion, and controversies about Niebuhr's legacy in light of critiques launched by liberation theologies" (p. xxviii). Hulsether does a nice job of describing the impact that these trends had on the magazine. He says less about what his particular case study can tell us about the larger story, or even how Christianity and Crisis played a role in shaping the larger story. As a result, his work is less effective at his more ambitious goal. Nonetheless, it remains an engaging and informative piece. Harvey Hill Berry College Mount Berry, Georgia Magnificat: The Life and Times of Timothy Cardinal Manning. By Francis J. Weber. (Mission Hills, California: Saint Francis Historical Society. 1999. Pp. iv, 729. $35.00.) Timothy Manning was born in Ballingeary, County Cork, Ireland, where children and adults all spoke Gaelic. His father was a blacksmith,who suffered from BOOK REVIEWS671 the Irish Curse and thereby incurred his son's permanent disapproval. His mother was a daily communicant, and the cardinal later said that his earliest memory was the way she taught him to make the Sign of the Cross. The family's food came from the garden and the domestic animals, and the boy's clothing was made of wool taken from their own sheep. It was a good place for training in Christian simplicity. Young Timothy's education was received in a two-room school, where the master insisted that all the pupils learn their lessons by memory, including the entire text of several Shakespearean plays. Later, Manning studied with the Irish Christian Brothers and in the Jesuit college at Mungret. Influenced partly by a priest-cousin in California, young Manning applied to Bishop John J. Cantwell and was accepted as a student at Saint Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park. A story about the trip to America says a good deal about the personality of young Timothy Manning. During the ocean crossing he saw another boy from Ireland and noticed the fellow again on the train going west. Saying a brief hello, one of them admitted that he planned to enrol in a "private Institution," while the other said he was going to California for "research." Spotting each other again on the ferry from Oakland to San Francisco, and later on the train to...