Word: steinberg
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...RECORDS. An even farther-out commentary is The Incredible Shrinking God, a long-playing collection of "sermons" by Manitoba-born David Steinberg, 27, a rabbi's son who studied Hebrew literature before becoming a comedian with Chicago's Second City troupe. Not religious in a formal sense, Steinberg's comic oratory is a pop version of God-is-dead theology. Steinberg explains that he picked that title for the record because "the traditional God is becoming harder to find in modern society all the time...
...Steinberg knows enough about the characters of the Bible to put them down with learned insight. Joshua, he says, was "the first real pushy prophet"; Lot was "the first Biblical voyeur"; Jezebel "was immortalized by Frankie Laine." As for the Jonah story, "the Gentiles-as is their wont from time to time-threw the Jew overboard." If Steinberg debunks God as well, it is not the real God but the "pompous image of him created by the clergy." Solemnly, Steinberg intones: "The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. The Lord God is an Indian giver." When suffering Job calls...
Many clergymen have applauded Steinberg's non-homilies, on the ground that his satirizing of the wrathful, capricious God of legend is good theology as well as good fun. Steinberg keeps being invited to preach in churches and synagogues. Is he irreverent? Perhaps. But, argue his fans, who can question that God, too, has a sense of humor...
...Evelyn Waugh's, has gone on long enough: too long. An era of great public works is as much needed in America as any other single element in our public life. Magnificence does not mean monumental. That seems to be a point to be stressed. I have heard Saul Steinberg quoted as saying that the government buildings of Washington seem designed to make private citizens realize how unimportant they are, and there is much to what he says. But that seems to me simply to define the special requirements of this age of enormity: to create a public architecture...
...Steinberg, who does not pretend to speak for CBS management, never defines precisely what he means by conventional wisdom. Still, the effect of his argument can be seen in the CBS program lineup. Like NBC and ABC, Steinberg's network devotes a lot of time to news, public affairs and respectable, "cultural" programs (Death of a Salesman, the Young People's Concerts series). But CBS's regular programming emphasizes situation comedy and old-wave adventure; the Lucy Show, Comer Pyle and Gunsmoke, all more or less tell "linear" stories. The NBC and ABC standard schedules could...