Making Friends of Enemies Reflections on the Teachings of Jesus

Essays discuss Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, Thomas Merton, Reinhold Neibuhr, William Carlos Williams, Tolstoy, women's liberation, homosexuality, sin, the spiritual life of children, suffering and faith

Presented as a soul-searching diary, this is actually an assemblage of Coles' columns, mostly on religious themes, from the New Oxford Review. As he mingles with tenant farmers in Alabama, Hispano-Americans in the Southwest and hate-filled children in Belfast, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatrist ( Children of Crisis ) makes us aware that he is motivated by Jesus the migrant preacher who heeded the lowly and exiled. In short, sometimes platitudinous sermons, he defends prayer in schools, frames teenage pregnancy as a moral issue, wishes bankruptcy upon Penthouse and deplores the gay movement insofar as it represents politicization of a private matter. Coles champions Thomas Merton, Simone Weil, Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor. He interprets George Orwell's skeptical stance as "Christian in nature." The least tendentious pieces are chatty meditations on heroism, grace, forgiveness, sin, fatherhood.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Published in New Oxford Review from 1981 to 1987, these 56 essays by the child psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Children in Crisis effectively illustrate the deep humanity, self-critical reflection, and compassion of their author. The range of Coles's concernsfrom social issues, the poor, religion, abortion, children and their spiritual life, school prayer, sin, and grace to Thomas Merton, Leo Tolstoy, and experiences in Brazil and Nicaraguareveal a sensitive and original perspective that is never doctrinaire or stereotyped. Easily accessible, well-written, humble, these essays ponder life's questions, paradoxes, and mysteries. Carolyn M. Craft, Longwood Coll., Farmville, Va.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.