In 1978, with the publication of her first novel Final Payments, Mary Gordon appeared on the literary scene, not as a promising apprentice but as an accomplished and mature writer deserving of the extraordinary amount of critical attention her work recei...

THE IMPERIALISTIC tendency to exalt a partial truth or insight into an exhaustive, exclusive explanatory principle is a permanent intellectual temptation, surrender to which always does violence to truth. In the past the chief culprit was often religion; today it is usually science....

On a recent Saturday morning at Mount Zion United Methodist Church, members of the Sanctuary Choir, resplendent in crimson robes, were marching down the aisle with the children of the Sunday School. Wise men, diminutive shepherds, angels, Mary and a strapping King Herod sorted...