It's hard for me to call this a "review," as it's one of the most poignant and moving things I've ever read. Please write a book -- the world needs it.This was a most moving review. Like poetry, it spoke of what I feel but cannot express. Thank you.
and my un-fans:
This is one of the most annoying reviews I've ever read. There is nothing worse than a person who reviews something using a bunch of obscure language and references, leaving it without proper context, and often arguing some precise point that is wasted on virtually anyone other than the book's author, perhaps, who doesn't even care about Lay Joe's opinion. So why do we even need to read this review?
8 comments:
This was my favourite, and made me regret the 'road not taken' in terms of the remark that oldster made of your Swedish and Irish ancestry:
»I have a lot to say about this book because I found it so poor. But I will limit myself. I have no interest in minimizing the array of griefs that Europe's Jews had to endure and no interest in protecting Roman Catholicism from critique. But this text is a form of what Jungians call "negative inflation". The point of the text comes at the end, where Caroll describes his reformed Catholicism, purified of the roots of anti-Semitism. What he describes is simply sacramental Unitarianism. For one who has such contempt for the Anselmian doctrine of Christ's death, where the Son gives up his life to atone for the outrage to the Father, Caroll simply prescribes atonement by suicide for Catholicism. His much vaunted "love" and "devotion" to the Church are a cover for his desire to see it evaporate into the Democratic party at prayer. I simply ask this one question: if the roots of anti-Semitism lie in Christian orthodoxy, then why has America, a country with a robust Christian population, both Protestant and Catholic, been the Western country most hospitable to Jews? Caroll's beef is with Europe, not with Rome. But that would never sell. The smug self-righteousness and fake grief in this book make it hard to read.«
But then again, there is excellent theological discourse by the Irishman James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Poignant and poetic, no?
You, or Joyce?
P.S. According to a reviewer/commenter at Amazon.com, there's an "impressive Hibernian and Catholic intellectual tradition."
You never wrote a review of my book, though. I will just have to boo-hoo till I'm blue.
--Nathan
I'm lazy. But I can be motivated by guilt. Keep crying.
ExC
Would you be any more motivated if I said I would rend my raiment with rage?
--Nathan
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