Harvard Diary: Reflections on the Sacred and the Secular.

HARVARD DIARY is not really a diary at all, nor does it contain much about Harvard. Instead, it is composed of 56 vignettes: agreeable tidbits, at times insightful, but essentially touchedup versions of magazine columns Harvard professor Robert Coles has written over the years. He knew in their time the kinds of people whose friendship confers prestige in the leftist religious milieu: Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, Martin Luther King Jr., Paul Tillich. He has also mingled with, and interviewed, people in Rio's favellas, in Alabama, in Nicaragua. All good stuff for a columnist. Coles leaves the reader with the impression of a decent and religious man with common-sensical views. His book is finally disappointing, however, because books on How to Be a Decent Man in the Midst of a Corrupt World require for their success that an author on the order of Montaigne hold the pen. Thus, centuries ago, the great religious conflicts produced a literature of piety; today, the ideological wars are creating a literature of social consciousness, since in the interval we have absorbed a new religious sensibility, God no longer beingout there, but inside the individual, inspiring decent thoughts and actions. Coles devotes himself to the task of locating those decent men and women-Flannery O'Connor, Simone Weil, Orwell, Bernanos, Ignazio Silone, Edith Stein, and above all Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Tolstoi-who have been the moral leaders of our time. The problem is that his -three-page tributes are too short to allow any real probing. Even if he had permitted himself more space, though, one suspects his resources would not have allowed him to penetrate deep enough. But there are moments of illumination. We have Anna Freud, for example, relentlessly pressing an elderly widow to explain her troubles in psychological terms, when suddenly the daughter of the father of psychoanalysis bursts out: "What she needs is forgiveness. She needs to make peace with her soul, not talk about her mind. But of course, she cannot find God in our circle." I call such a vignette ample justification for Harvard Diary.