This is the title of a moderately lengthy article in the 7/25 issue of The New Yorker (article not online).

What’s interesting, as one reader pointed out, that this is the second long piece on Roman Catholicism that the New Yorker has run in recent months. What other secular magazine is attempting to take this moment seriously?

Unforunately, the article is ultimately a dud. The first part is fairly interesting, as Grafton unpacks Ratzinger’s early work, particularly in relation to the ways in which he interacts with ideas and systems outside the Church, valuing them, at times for the ways in which a dialectic process works in developing theology, and other times for their more direct contributions to Catholic thinking.

You can see where this is going, eh? That, of course, after 1968 (the dreaded watershed date for Ratzinger)….things changed. The other was now to be feared and shut down, rather than welcomed into dialogue (the piece starts with an account of the Boff case):

As the organ and liturgy drown out the weaker voices of liberal critics, as the searchlight or orhtodoxy retrospectively reveals the errors of Leonardo Boff and other dissidents, the Pope and the magisterium — the centralized authority of roman Catholic wisdom — have no need to look outside for enlightenment.

Most unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, the magazine deadline came just in time to include, at the end, the Harry Potter Meme, which he says indicates:

…it doesn’t take much to startle and send him back inside the walls of the fortress. A prelate who fears that the "subtle seductions" of J.K. Rowling will stunt the spiritual growth of young Christians may find it harder than he thinks to take on modernity in all its sprawling strangeness.

The problem with this piece is that while the early work is read carefully, the only later work that’s cited, and seems to have been read at all is The Ratzinger Report. Nothing else. Which might have provided a slightly different picture than the easily read, digestible interview book did.

The piece on renewed medical interest in leeching and the James Wood review of Cormac McCarthy were, in the end..more interesting.