From Publishers Weekly
Columbia University literary scholar Delbanco (The Puritain Ideal) weighs in with a plea for revival not of old-time religion but of the sense of personal responsibility fostered by traditional religious notions of evil. His subject: "the incessant dialectic in American life between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back." Delbanco argues that in contemporary America, the Devil and the evil the Devil represents are stranded between the liberal tendency to explain heinous acts as the consequence of bad social luck and the fundamentalist hunger to demonize one's enemies. The author takes his most useful notion of evil from St. Augustine by way of Jonathan Edwards, Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King Jr., who, he argues, all saw Satan not as an invading other but as a symbol of "our own deficient love, our potential for envy and rancor toward creation." When we cease being able to imagine and name this evil (whether in horror movies or serious literature or daily conversation), Delbanco argues, it will have truly gained mastery over us. This is serious cultural history, as witty and elegant as it is impassioned. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
From Library Journal
That our society absolutely requires a sense of evil to maintain its cultural center forms this work's hue and cry. Irony, which now permeates our modern sensibilities, has come to dominate not only the formation of the American sense of evil but its current obsolete status. In its place is a secular liberalism, a cultural wasteland that Delbanco (The Puritan Ordeal, Harvard Univ. Pr., 1989) claims, "has deluded itself into believing that human beings can manage without any metaphor at all." Steeped in literature, history, and theology, Delbanco's critique of the unique American psyche as discerned through its sons (mainly) grapples with the reality of something we feel "that our culture no longer gives vocabulary to express." Masterly and thoroughly presented, this is a discussion, not a diatribe. Delbanco's national spiritual biography aptly chronicles the modern malaise. Recommended for specialists and informed readers.?Sandra Collins, SLIS, Univ. of Pittsburgh
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
