…I’ll toss out a recommendation:
Casa Castillo, a Monastrell (Mourvedre) out of the Jumilla region of Spain, is reliable year-in, year-out. This year, it’s a step up from reliable. I love Mourvedre for its earthiness and tobacco; this one has a solid fruit core as well. I pay about $7 here in San Diego.
“An extraordinary thing happened a week ago. Thirty-eight Muslim scholars and chief muftis, from across the Muslim world, jointly replied to the Pope’s speech at Regensburg (and more have associated their names with this document, since). It was presented to the Vatican’s envoy at Amman; the full text in English is available through the Islamica magazine website, the Catholic website, Chiesa, and elsewhere. I look through the list of signatories, and they are a “who’s who” of the learned leaders of a faith that has always aspired to be led by its most learned.
One of the points the Pope has made, about the difficulty of engaging in dialogue with Islam, is to know who speaks authoritatively for it — as, for instance, the Pope can speak for Catholic Christians. The document answers that question. In effect, the signatories reply, “Here we are.” Here, for Muslims as well as Christians to read, is an authoritative contemporary statement by men who DO speak for Islam. Not for “moderate Islam”, whatever that could mean, but for the living religion itself. And they speak in forthright contradiction of the welter of idiotic fatwas issuing from Afghan caves, the Sunni Triangle, and the North London Central Mosque.”
…and I was glad to see this AP story got the last quote just right:
“Jim doesn’t want to be the issue,” said Sebastiani. “He wants the issue to be the issue.”
The issue being the parental-notification initiative that is California’s Prop 85,
The best of the series of books published by The New York Review of Books are all the works of J.F. Powers, who died in 1989. Powers’ novels and stories are almost entirely concerned with Catholic clerical life in the midwest. I hadn’t read his last novel, Wheat That Springeth Green, and I was happy to find that the new edition contained an introduction by the author’s daughter, Katherine Powers. Wheat That Springeth Green is every bit as fine as Morte D’Urban, his first and only other novel written some 25 years earlier, and a National Book Award winner as well. In its treatment of character and plot the latter novel is theologically perhaps even more complex.
I was a little confused about the ending – let me make that clear from the beginning. While I found the last chapter interesting for the scene in which Father Joe Hackett has moved outside the fictional space he has occupied for most of the novel, I have no idea what this is supposed to mean for him. The last word of the book is “Cross,” as in “Holy Cross,” the parish to which he has been assigned, but I don’t remember this being mentioned anywhere else in the novel. Does it refer to the Cross that Father Hackett has finally learned to bear? Hasn’t he been bearing it all along? Or in this last chapter has he come to a realization which I myself lack the insight to attain? I felt like I was grasping at straws here, and several rereadings of his earlier interaction with the characters that comprise the final chapter haven’t helped me.
While I’m not sure what is being conferred upon us at the end of the story, Joe’s character is cast from the first pages: as a toddler he gets attention from his parents’friends merely for declaiming at a party “I go to church!” We also learn of his parents’ antipathy towards the parish priest’s intoning on the subject of the “Dollar-a-Sunday Club,” an attitude that Joe will inherit, and which becomes a theme that will be played out in a number of surprising ways. We also sense something of his aloofness in these first chapters as well. He doesn’t keep up with many friends, but he does seem to know the value in keeping up appearances: “Joe just smiled at Frances and everybody, so they couldn’t tell how he really felt about being in the sack race…” Joe is a good athlete, even in grade school, and the race he really wants, but doesn’t get, is the sprint.
Much of the story revolves around Joe’s relation to money, so that even an early adventure (described in nearly pornographic detail) involving his first adult relations with women is later understood to be subsumed by his larger pecuniary obsessions. His sexual sins, or at least the memory of them, turn out to be something of a red herring: at the seminary he asks his instructor, “Father, how can we make sanctity as attractive as sex to the common man?” a question that (rightly) earns him nothing but mirth from his fellow seminarians. We are given hints that as Joe grows older he succeeds in overcoming his youthful scrupulosity. After a stint at Archdiocesan Charities he is assigned to the parish of St. Frances – a name shared by his childhood infatuation and a co-traveler in the youthful adventure already mentioned. So as far as sex is concerned, here in his maturity there is a sense that all is right with Joe, if not the world. That this is the case is dramatically reinforced by the nearly hopeless entanglements of an ex-seminarian, some of which leads to misplaced retribution that Joe patiently, even faithfully endures. These episodes are magnificently structured, displaying in Joe’s life a kind of fate that is worked out through choices made less in freedom than with a concern for propriety and in service to principles that are neither his own, nor of the church in which, as he says in other circumstances, he does so much hard time.
Other obstacles to holiness, as perhaps they always must, remain. Although his basic attitude is good, the reader realizes that the young Father Hackett has refused one halo in favor of another when he refuses to toady up to either the priest in his parish or to the archbishop in his archdiocese. Money matters are everywhere in evidence: the rectory built by Joe; bribes offered by parishoners; purses collected on behalf of retiring priests; inheritence; a collection drive that is farmed out to a private firm – in which Joe will take no part. All this points to beyond the contradiction in one man’s character to a paradox that is funamental to our very being. How do we care for an abundance which is most fully ours when we least consider it our own?
Joe’s misappropriation of his own nature, and indeed human nature, leads to a truly heinous transgression in one of the final chapters. That this transgression is committed and then resolved in secret, without comment from Joe or even the narrator, points toward a God who is as truly all merciful as he is unnoticed even by lesser beings working on his behalf. I would guess that the true thorn in Joe’s side is also Powers’, and while reading I several times wondered whether the crux of the story wasn’t inspired by his frustration at watching baskets and plates passed through the pews, week in and week out, for a lifetime. Perhaps the last word makes some sense after all.
During these serious times, people of all faiths
should remember these 4 religious truths:1. Muslims do not recognize Jews as God’s chosen
people2. Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah
3. Protestants do not recognize the Pope as the
leader of the Christian world.4. Baptists do not recognize each other at
Hooters.
[From Fred]
Speaking of Richard Russo, he gave a fine little Commencement Address awhile back:
“Rule # 1: Search out the kind of work that you would gladly do for free and then get somebody to pay you for it. Don’t expect this to happen overnight. It took me nearly twenty years to get people to pay me a living wage for my writing, which makes me, even at this juncture, one of the fortunate few. Your work should be something that satisfies, excites and rewards you, something that gives your life meaning and direction, that stays fresh and new and challenging, a task you’ll never quite master, that will never be completed. It should be the kind of work that constantly humbles you, that never allows you to become smug – in short, work that sustains you instead of just paying your bills. While you search for this work, you’ll need a job. For me that job was teaching, and it’s a fine thing to be good at your job, as long as you don’t confuse it with your work, which it’s hard not to do.”
The other rules: Find a loving mate, have kids, keep a sense of humor.
Back in 1997, when the Internet was just picking up steam, Richard Russo published the wonderful novel Straight Man. It included the following paragraph:
“…the campus rag contains little but letters to the editor, which I scan first for allusions to myself and next for unusual content, which in the current climate is any subject other than the unholy trinity of insensitivity, sexism, and bigotry, which the self-righteous, though not always literate, letter writers want their readers to know they’re against. As a group they seem to believe that high moral indignation offsets and indeed outweighs all deficiencies of punctuation, spelling, grammar, logic, and style. In support of this notion there’s only the entire culture.”
And this was before blogs (Godsbody and its perfectly brilliant coterie of commentators excepted, naturally…)
…and you paint yourselves another!”
– Hamlet
Again, thanks to the Manhattan Reader
I used to fall in love with a book and then devour the rest of the author’s work in the space of two weeks.
I stopped doing this in my twenties when I ran through Walker Percy’s novels, first to last, after picking up The Moviegoer on the advice of a friend. I ended up nauseous with boredom behind a copy of The Thanatos Syndrome, wishing all the characters would hurry up and overdose on heavy sodium.
Why am I getting recorded-message phone calls from the International Obesity Commission about a wonderful new dietary supplement?
Barb Nicolosi, late of Act One, has hopes for this one:
“My sense is that Dallas’ films won’t be the stuff that will be intelligible or desirable to FOX Faith and Sony Inspirational and Lionsgate ‘Whatever they are calling their holy stuff division’ and Newline ‘Whatever they are calling their holy stuff division’. At least not this week. I think Dallas’ style of films is more what the future for Christians in Hollywood will look like. More difficult. More ambiguous. More stylistic. Definitely less Pollyanna and more Flannery O’Connor.”
Here’s the preview.
…there’s no real contradiction here, but it was still curious to hear the two sentiments so close together:
From yesterday’s Responsorial Psalm: The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord
From yesterday’s Gospel Antiphon: For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ.
The earth: full of God’s goodness, so much rubbish.
…waiting on things.
Meanwhile, CM checks out Grace Before Meals.
I, on the other hand, am left wondering, “Out of stock? How am I going to fulfill Father’s penance?”
And finally, a slightly bawdy but very funny meditation on romance and the familiar: Business Time.
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