In this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Darcey Steinke reviews Mary Gordon’s Circling My Mother: A Memoir, what seems like another really excellent book by a really excellent Catholic writer. In the review, Steinke, the daughter of a Lutheran minister, reminisces about the days when priests were not just respected but revered.
A time, frankly, when American Catholicism seemed to have something to offer to America. In literature, AC gave us Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy; in politics, the Kennedys; in Hollywood, the convert Gary Cooper; and in the world of service, reform, and activism, two more converts, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day.
Today, sex scandals, outmoded approaches to birth control and abortion, and, says Steinke, a lack of writers with the religious imagination and literary command of Merton or O’Connor (except, perhaps, Gordon), have diminished AC. (And while I agree that AC has diminished, for my sake, and the sake of a few other Catholic writers I like, I hope she’s wrong on the last point.)