DavidScottWritings.com: Essays and Reviews

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Essays and Reviews

	Bart’s problem “What the new atheists forget is that a world without God is not a world without evil or suffering. It’s a world with those things and no hope.” A review essay on God’s Problem by Bart Ehrman.
	A guy in the gas-chamber business and some of his clients “Leuchter tries to make products that people need. For him, creating an efficient method of execution is an entrepreneurial challenge.” A review of The Execution Protocol by Stephen Trombley.
	Watt’s up!? “Within less than a hundred years, the world was burning the midnight oil. Cities never slept again.” A review of the exhibit, Light! The Industrial Age: 1750–1900, Art & Science, Technology & Society.
	King of the Queers “Joshua grows up a confused, sensitive, young gay man with a James Dean fetish. His apostles are a drunken, libidinous band of louts.” The debate over Terrence McNally’s “Corpus Christi.”
	Inherited estates “But all the ironic humor is a foil to probing dark psychological questions, mostly about the complexities of paternity: How far can the apple fall from the tree?” A review of Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo.
	Pictures at an inquisition “As Rome correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, Allen’s reporting is usually competent and fair-minded. But this book is neither.” A review of Cardinal Ratzinger by John L. Allen, Jr.
	The pope of hope “It may be that people aren’t paying much attention because of his age—he’s almost 81 now. But this is no caretaker Pope biding time until a more youthful helmsman can be found for St. Peter’s barque.”
	Moses the revolutionary “Faith in Israel’s god relativizes every earthly power, makes it possible to separate religion and the state, and introduces ideas of liberty and freedom of conscience.” A review of Of God and Gods by Jan Assmann.
	A feminine flank in the Counter-Reformation “She was not the self-conscious feminist that her contemporary, the Mexican poet Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, was.” A review of the first-ever exhibit of Josefa de Óbidos (d. 1684) in the United States.
	Madonnas of a modernist “While nobody would claim Joseph Stella as anything like an orthodox believer, there is something biblical, even liturgical, about his Madonnas. His is the Mary of the ancient litanies.”
	Anne-theism “Perhaps if Rice had spent as much time reading the Bible as she had Sumerian agricultural myths, she would have deeper insights into the meaning of evil.” A review of Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice.
	Everybody's counting kids (but something doesn't add up) “People who wouldn’t dare the affrontery of asking what I make in a year, or what our house is worth, feel emboldened to preach to us the gospel of better living through smaller litters.”
	What are we working for? “Whether we are workaholics or work shirkers, we see work as necessary for survival, but divorced from and usually an obstacle to our ‘life.’” A review of All You Who Labor by Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski.
	More than a feminist “‘Women’s liberation,’ Dorothy Day told an interviewer, ‘is not geared to the poor but to articulate middle-class women with time on their hands.’” A review of The Moral Vision of Dorothy Day by June O’Connor.
	On the wrong day “The makers of Entertaining Angels have complained that Hollywood wasn’t ready for the hard-core religious message of Dorothy Day’s life. But neither were they.” A review of the film, Entertaining Angels.
	A life hidden with God “Charles’ beatification caps a life that for many years seemed less an imitatio Christi than a playing of the lead role in Christ’s most famous parable. Charles is among the great prodigal children in Church history.”
	He sang of the hidden God “In the end, the poet enraptured by the Word, the pope who wrote more words than any before him, left without a word. He had passed over. From words to the Word.”
	Finding joy in the darkest night “No other saint spoke or wrote as much about smiling as Mother Teresa did. But after she died and was put on the fast-track for sainthood, we learned how much we didn’t know about her.”
	Giving her life for the ant people “Each night after working in Ant Town, she returned to her parents’ elegant suburban home, where her mother would comb her clothing looking for vermin and then sterilize it all in boiling water.”
	December’s rose blooms despite the cold “Three feet down, their shovels hit upon the body of a woman. They dragged the body out, placing it carefully on the ground near the cross. Her face was shredded beyond recognition.”
	An old folks’ child with a message of unity “Convent life was ‘cold, cold and white,’ she said, and her sisters would joke in front of her about ‘nigger toes’ and ‘nigger heaven.’ At the time of her death, Bowman remained the only black woman in her order.”
	Her saving grace “In defining Mary’s Immaculate Conception he was writing a new charter for the modern world. The dogma was a piece of resistance, a defiant vow to resist the false spirit of the emerging age.”
	In her end, the promise of our beginnings “On November 1, 1950, Pope Pius XII declared a new dogma of the Catholic Church. But it was Protestants, not Catholics, who set the tone for the world’s reaction. And Protestant reaction was just this side of apocalyptic.”