{"id":2100,"date":"2006-05-13T16:40:08","date_gmt":"2006-05-13T16:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/grappling-with-god.html"},"modified":"2006-05-13T16:40:08","modified_gmt":"2006-05-13T16:40:08","slug":"grappling-with-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/grappling-with-god.html","title":{"rendered":"Grappling with God"},"content":{"rendered":"

A review of a new book on Auden and Christianity<\/a><\/p>\n

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All these deviations from orthodoxy had something in common, however. They all flowed from Auden’s passionate belief that Christianity, rightly understood, was the truest of the great world religions because it consistently affirmed the flesh. The doctrine of the Incarnation, that the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us, was the font of all his Christian inspiration. Any ideas or doctrines that disparaged the body and its functions, exalted the idea of disembodied spirit, or that required the faithful to withdraw from the world to be holy, were anathema to him.<\/p>\n

Devotion to God should be ever-present, but should not crowd out our appreciation of the fleshly world given us; instead, such devotion should be the cantus firmus <\/em>of our lives, against which we play the sweet and sad counterpoint of our lives and works. Manicheanism and Platonism and Gnostic heresies were frequent targets, precisely because of their flesh-denying propensities, which fell short of the full Christian vision. So, too, did pure scientism or naturalism. The Incarnation meant, for Auden, "the coinherence of spirit and flesh," so that "materialism and manicheanism are mirror images of one another," the one by denying the spirit, the other by denying the flesh.<\/p>\n

The flesh and spirit were in perpetual tension, yet they were also meant to be conjoined. As he wrote in 1963, "Our bodies cannot love: \/ But, without one, \/ What works of Love could we do?"<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A review of a new book on Auden and Christianity All these deviations from orthodoxy had something in common, however. They all flowed from Auden’s passionate belief that Christianity, rightly understood, was the truest of the great world religions because it consistently affirmed the flesh. The doctrine of the Incarnation, that the Word became Flesh…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nGrappling with God - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/grappling-with-god.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Grappling with God - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A review of a new book on Auden and Christianity All these deviations from orthodoxy had something in common, however. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. 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