THE BIRTH OF GOD

Our time might be called, so far as religion is concerned, the Age of Emotion; and Mr. Kavanaugh, in his small way, is its prophet. His first excursion into print was the best-selling A Modern Priest Looks At His Outdated Church, which, on the basis of ""gut feeling,"" recited the ills of the Catholic Church. This book, his third, on the basis of ""gut feeling,"" recites the ills of the Catholic Church. What is wrong with the book is what was wrong with the first one: it is an exercise in glandular theology. That is, we are asked to accept the principle that, because a belief ""feels wrong,"" it is wrong; but we are not allowed to investigate the possibility that it is the feeling, and not the doctrine, that may be wrong. If one is willing to go along, then all the rest falls into place: traditional views of the Bible, salvation, morality, sex, death are all immeasurably off-base. The strange thing is that Kavanaugh, for all his illogic, for all his jumping back and forth between the metaphysical and the real, for all his moaning and breastbeating, intuitively arrives at the same conclusion to which a more rational, logical sortie would have led: that God, somehow, has survived his churches. The book should do well; it tells people what they want to hear.