Word: parallels
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...working of divine grace in them, not their personal contributions to their own salvation. Christ is the only Savior. One does not save oneself." An international Lutheran-Catholic commission, exploring the basis for possible reunion, made a joint statement along these lines in 1980. Last month a parallel panel in the U.S. issued a significant 21,000-word paper on justification that affirms much of Luther's thinking, though with some careful hedging from the Catholic theologians...
...PARALLEL LIVES: FIVE VICTORIAN MARRIAGES by Phyllis Rose; Knopf; 336 pages...
Victorian writers, observed G.K. Chesterton, "were lame giants; the strongest of them walked on one leg a little shorter than the other." That remark has been amplified by Phyllis Rose in her lively study of five 19th century couples. The title, Parallel Lives, has two meanings: the disparate views of marriage held by husband and wife, and the juxtaposition of twittering romantic expectations and tragic neuroses. Reading Rose's work is like turning a valentine to find graffiti underneath: not a pleasant experience, but a compelling one. The couples could not have been better chosen. Each contains one famous...
Rose is hard on Dickens for his responsibility in this, the most modern of the bad marriages described in Parallel Lives. Her conclusion: "It is a story of survival merely and proves only, as Jung said about his own reprehensible behavior to a young woman, that sometimes it is necessary to be unworthy in order to continue living...
Rose's earlier book, A Woman of Letters, a study of Virginia Woolf, led her to examine Woolf s passionately propounded notions of sexual equality. Seeking a unifying principle that would link the couples in Parallel Lives, she looked for the dynamics of power within Victorian marriages. Not surprisingly, she concluded that "traditional marriage shores up the power of men in subtle ways." Eliot and Lewes, Rose hypothesizes, may have achieved equality because "sanctioned marriage bears some ineradicable taint which converts the personal relationship between a man and a woman into a political one." An interesting thesis...