CATHOLIC TASTES.

OD'd on confessions

In recent years, Joseph Parisi, the editor of Poetry magazine, has seen a great increase in submissions of confessional-style poetry. And to tell the truth, he has just about had it.

"I really don't want to hear about your hateful mother or dreadful father or Sister Mary Applamarian who beat you up in school," Parisi says. "I know now how Catholic priests must feel after being in the confessional. How tedious it must be to hear the same tired sins week after week.... It's like a sitcom except, of course, it isn't nearly as funny, but totally predictable.... Sometimes I want to say to them, `Oh, for God's sake, why don't you go out and take a walk?'" (Chicago Tribune, Nov. 25, 1997)

Don't worry, be happy

Much of the current New Age spirituality fad can be traced to a popular formula for "liberal spiritual bubbles" that was invented in the mid-1970s, reports Newsweek (Oct. 20, 1997). The magazine quotes author George W. S. Trow: "People had for ... years brooked no authority whatsoever on any subject, and [Werner] Erhard [founder of est seminars] realized that the time had come to insert within the realm of total permission ... some little bit of discipline."

Since then, Newsweek says, this formula has been a road much travelled: "Anything that limits personal freedom is darkness--except for these seven spiritual laws, these ten celestine insights, this map of your erogenous zones.... [Spirituality guru Deepak] Chopra offers an appealingly well-padded path to nirvana. `They say you have to give up everything to be spiritual,' he says, `get away from the world, all that junk. I satisfy a spiritual yearning without making [people] think they have to worry about God and punishment.'"

The things that you're liable to read in the Bible

"I never pitied my fifth-grade teacher as much as the day when a defiant classmate insisted on reading out loud from the Song of Songs," recalls Valerie Weaver. "Selecting some juicy section like `Your navel is a rounded bowl that never lacks mixed wine' or `Your two breasts are like fawns,' the student proclaimed with glee, `It's in the Bible!' while the rest of us either snickered or blushed.

"How could something `so naughty' and yet so satisfying to the sexual curiosity of prepubescence come straight from the pages of the Holy Writ?" (Gospel Herald, Oct. 14, 1997)