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Murphy and Steinfels

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from: Cullen Murphy

Of Roach Revisionism and Wrinkled Mandarins

Posted Wednesday, Feb. 17, 1999, at 12:53 PM ET

You put me to shame: Your files are so much classier than mine are. Iris Murdoch! Her collection of philosophical essays, Existentialists and Mystics, continues to stare down at me from the Shelf of Reproach, where it sits unread next to Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death.

However, I did go check the "Roaches" file, which appears to reflect an area of mutual concern. Do you have the Wall Street Journal piece on the subject of "roach revisionism"? (Makes the point that cockroaches are ecologically useful, and also that pesticides may be more dangerous than the pests themselves. Calls cockroaches "underdogs", and makes reference to a weapons-testing facility maintained by Raid in Racine, Wisconsin.) Or the USA Today item about the Black Flag Hit List of "most-infested" cities? (New York isn't No.1, I'm sorry to say; it's Miami.)

I'm a little bleary-eyed this morning. I'd like to say that I had to drag myself over to Harvard last night for the Kung talk, but I never actually have to drag myself over there: It's always a little exhilarating. I enjoy watching the whole Cambridge spectacle, especially when it's distilled into a crowd of a few hundred at a venue like the Lowell lecture hall: the scruffy contentment, the implacable open-mindedness, the wrinkled mandarins in the plush seats, the earnest pretenders with their notebooks, on the steps in the aisles. Also, the ten-minute drive from Boston was spectacular last night. As I came down Mount Vernon Street, on Beacon Hill, the steeples and townhouses glowed against a purple sky. Lights had already been turned on indoors, bringing books and paintings into view. A distant ribbon of the Charles showed as a flash of reflection in the setting sun. The year might have been 1890.

Kung himself was lackluster, at least for anyone with memories of how his dissident Catholicism ("I am a little sometimes not so rigorous....") and edgy arrogance used to unnerve the thought police. For awhile, the Vatican regularly hurled anathemas at him across the Swabian Alps. Now his cause is building linkages among the world's great religions, essentially by stressing the lowest common denominator: "the minimum necessary values, standards, and attitudes." Kung's argument was so abstract as to be unexceptionable. Memorable comments came only later, from others. The theologian Harvey Cox observed at one point: "The most interesting fact about Christianity at the end of the twentieth century is that it isn't a Western religion." And Bryan Hehir, S.J., the acting dean of the Harvard Divinity School, noted that whereas the moral problem of Cold War foreign policy was how to limit the use of violence, the moral problem of post-Cold War foreign policy may be whether we can persuade ourselves to use violence at all, even when it is necessary.

Hehir was making his remarks just as you were composing your thoughts about Saddam. And I'll bet you were a skeptic about harmonic convergence.

Nothing to report on the Forehead Watch as of 7:11 a.m. I'll stay on top of this situation.

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314151617
from: Cullen Murphy

Of Roach Revisionism and Wrinkled Mandarins

Posted Wednesday, Feb. 17, 1999, at 12:53 PM ET
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Cullen Murphy is the managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly and the author of the comic strip Prince Valiant. His book The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own was published last fall. Margaret O'Brien Steinfels is the editor of Commonweal, an independent biweekly journal of political, religious, and literary opinion.
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