Word: coxes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...goes Cox's argument. If it sounds somewhat simplistic or at least unrefined, the problem lies only partly with the retelling. As an initial staking out of a position the argument is at least bold, and it suffices. That, after all, is what one must expect of a manifesto. The trouble with the book is that it manages to cover well over 300 pages without significantly deepening, refining or even making much use of this foundation...
...COX'S rationale for his rambling discursive style is compelling, but at the end one finds it has failed him. Personal "testimony" or telling one's story is a crucial and restoring activity that Cox feels has degenerated in our culture. Bearing witness to one's own experience can be downright healthily subversive, he argues, since it reasserts the value and power of unique, individual expression over and against the manipulated and prepackaged garbage the commercial culture foists on us. All this is profoundly true. Cox points to the spiritual autobiography of Augustine and to the journals of Kierkegaard...
...Cox's case, the closer his writing gets to personal experience the more distant and nebulous and disturbingly superficial he seems to become. His depiction of a multi-media Easter celebration that he and others organized and held at the Boston Tea Party reads as though it were poured from a Waring Blender. It is not that Cox is slick or simple-minded. But rather, "bearing witness" or simply telling one's story does not come as easily or simply as Cox would like to believe...
Nonetheless, in one instance--a few short paragraphs, composed of short, fragmented sentences describing a radical priest and a folk mass in Mexico--Cox does achieve a purity and simplicity of style that enables one to fully graps and appreciate the event he is describing. In fact it comes closer to defining what Cox is trying to say than any other passage in the book...
...Perhaps Cox should alter and humble his aspirations and concentrate on this type of fine personal narrative. But he seems to see himself more as the harbinger of a new committed theology. At times Cox seems to be playing with the image of the Young Marix, echoing him in phrases like, "Theologians have interpreted; the time has come to change." If that is so, then like Marx grown older, he should quit with manifestos and get down to serious writing with its requisites of analysis and disciplined argument...