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THE NEW MEN

INSIDE THE VATICAN'S ELITE SCHOOL FOR AMERICAN PRIESTS

The North American College in Rome, an all-male bastion of Catholic seminarians from the US, provides the setting for this uncritically admiring narrative of evolving priestly vocations. Murphy, a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist with the Associated Press in Rome, follows the spiritual paths of six seminarians entering the North American College—the New Men of the title—as they unfold over the course of a year. The narrative, based on personal interviews with the students, sets the story of their lives against the looming but deliberately muted backdrop of Rome and the Vatican. The drama of the stories lies in the conflict they show between the calling of a parish priest and the opposing lures of secular achievement, romantic love, or—in the one intriguing case here of seemingly dual vocation—life in a Benedictine monastery. In their self-questioning, some of the students uncover for both themselves and the reader how fine the line can be between the purely self-willed and the purportedly God-given; but whether by authorial design or the students' own omission, their thoughts go oddly unillumined by the Catholic Church's rich intellectual heritage, which seems to play hardly any role in their spiritual lives. By contrast, a whole chapter is devoted to the college's yearly flag football game, and part of another to the grisly story of a school-prankish slaughter of chickens. Perhaps such stories, too tedious to tell about a college fraternity house, gain interest from their seminary context. But secular readers curious about the moral psychology of priestliness, and the vocation to goodness in the modern world, will do better to read the classic work of fiction on these topics: George Bernanos's The Diary of a Country Priest. Murphy wants to show the humanity and dignity of priestly calling; but the mood he favors, in so doing, of sentimental machismo—heartstrings loosened by a can of beer—will appeal to only a limited audience.

Pub Date: Oct. 13, 1997

ISBN: 0-399-14328-9

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997

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THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.

Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955

ISBN: 0679733736

Page Count: 228

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955

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THE ART OF SOLITUDE

A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.

A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.

“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.

A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.

Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0

Page Count: 200

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019

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