Charles Davis

That the entire reform and renewal movement in contemporary Catholicism is foredoomed is only one of the many controversial judgments in this highly controversial book. It is, however, much more than merely a book about current Catholic developments; it is a book that confronts the issue of Christianity's very survival as a religious force in the modern world. This is Charles Davis's most constructive and creative theological work to date. It critiques and demolishes only that it may redevelop and rebuild.

In this book a leading theologian provides an account and a critique of contemporary thinking on the function of religion in society. Davis begins with the thesis that society is a product of human agency, which raises immediately the questions of the meaning of modernity and of the function of religion in that context. The linguistic and pragmatic orientation of modern philosophy and social theory lead to a discussion of religious language and of praxis, with a stress upon the importance of narrative and of social practice as vehicles of meaning. A connection is made here with Alasdair MacIntyre's analysis and defence of the rationality of tradition. Whether modernity is an incomplete project, as Habermas would have it, or a mistaken universalism, as the post-moderns maintain, is debated under the heading of human identity, both individual and collective, and in as examination of the formation of the modern self. The practical relevance of the theoretical analyses comes to the fore in a critique of Michael Novak's attempt to make 'democratic capitalism' into an ideal, and in an original attempt to ground religious hope in communicative rationality. The sub-title of the book in intended to indicate that one of the forms of social theory is a theology that takes its starting-point from social and political life. Paradoxically enough, as the author shows, the post-modern rejection of secularity can be interpreted as a return from the secular to the supernatural.

1938, Hitler visits Italy. An expatri-ate Irish art historian is obliged to guide Mussolini and his guest round the galleries. Half fascinated, half repelled, he watches the tyrants, wrestling with the uneasy conviction that he ought to use the opportunity to 'do something' about them yet lacking the zeal that might trans-form misgivings into action. Thirty years later, his daughter comes across a compromising clip-ping showing her father with the dictators. Exposed as a collaborator, the narrator explains what happened, what he did and did not do, and why, revealing in the process the part the girl's mother played in promoting the digestive disorders that were to influence the course of the war. To help his daughter understand, he conjures a time before the crime that would define the century, a time before these men became monsters inflated to fit that crime, showing her the tawdry little people behind the myths, the real Hitler and Mussolini, The Flatulent Windbag and The Constipated Prick. Based on historical events and using the tyrants' own words, "Hitler, Mussolini, and Me" brings the dicta-tors down to earth, describing the murkier, more scurrilous aspects of their careers, and using jokes and scatology to weave a crazed path-way toward a cracked kind of mo-rality. It is the story of an ordinary man living in extraordinary times, times when being ordinary was an act of rebellion in itself.

Growing up in Virginia's Allegheny Mountains, eleven-year-old Charlie York lives at the foot of an endless peak called Angel's Rest, a place his momma told him angels rested before coming down to help folks. In 1967 his town was a poor boy's paradise...until a shotgun blast killed Charlie's father and put his mother on trial for murder. For mysterious reasons, his mother entrusts his care to an old black man named Lacy Albert Coe. Lacy tells simple stories about the good and the bad that compose life's sweetest music. But when a reclusive Korean War veteran is linked to his father's death and Lacy is victimized by hate crimes, Charlie hears only silence. It's not until Charlie embarks on a dangerous midnight journey pitting him against his darkest fears that he finally hears his own song playing out.