Word: priestly
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...remains of Herod's masterpiece are scarce. But they tend to support descriptions in the four surviving written sources from approximately the same period: the Gospels and the biblical book of Acts; the part of the Jewish Talmud called the Mishnah; and the histories of Flavius Josephus, a Jewish priest and commander turned Roman military aide who lived in the years A.D. 30 to A.D. 100. For instance, a stone found later near the Temple's likely site was inscribed with the words TO THE PLACE OF TRUMPETING, which corroborate Josephus' description of the signal for the beginning...
Accept that odd premise--Erdrich makes it seem marvelously plausible--and the novel's overarching theme becomes poignantly clear. From 1912 to 1996, Agnes, disguised as Damien and thus a sham as both man and priest, tries to bring Roman Catholicism to the Ojibwes of Little No Horse reservation on a lonely patch of North Dakota. These people have been deprived of their ancestral lands and hence the sustaining spirits of their culture; they are stalled between past and future. What help can a missionary from the conquering side bring them...
Small, vivid answers emerge in Erdrich's episodic narrative. The daily contacts between priest and parishioners deepen over the decades into an enduring, if unconventional, love story, thoroughly reciprocal. At last, those friends who don't know the truth about Damien see his long devotion to Little No Horse as saintly; the few who have sensed Agnes inside the impostor believe the same, with even more conviction...
Erdrich, who was raised a Catholic, admits that making her main character a woman priest has a feminist aspect, but adds, "I don't really think it is about gender in the larger sense. I think it's about a search for identity." The possibility of being more than one sort of person comes to Erdrich as a birthright: she is German on her father's side and French and Ojibwe on her mother's. She spent her childhood in Wahpeton, N.D., where both parents taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. Those years drew Erdrich strongly toward...
...their search for more enduring gratification in life, many people are seeking spirituality, if not a born-again commitment to organized religion. ''Spirituality is in,'' says theologian Marty, ''so much so that I get embarrassed by it.'' Says Milton Walsh, a Roman Catholic priest who is pastor of St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco: ''People want some kind of direction and purpose, the basic 'Who am I? Where am I going...