The Journal News from White Plains, New York • Page 51

mm LoHud.com A The Journal News Sunday, March 19, 2006 3E Memoir ABCs, with 'B' for Bible 131 My Fundamentalist Education A Memoir of a Divme Girlhood 0mJrei "The Scream," shown here as an 1895 lithograph with water-color additions, is a cry for the modern age. Christine Rosen i i 'i' iM 4 The poignant "The Sick Child" (1896) was inspired by the death of Munch's beloved older sister, Sophie, from tuberculosis. M. A Turner For generations that did not come of age in wartime, Catholic school has come in rather handy. A few years in the trenches at St.

So-and-So or Our Lady of Such-and-Such yield endless war stories, of knuckle-rapping nuns and itchy woolen uniforms and purloined communion wine. Catholic childhoods may have begotten goofy gag gifts (the I survived Catholic school" T-shirts, the boxing nun puppets), but they've also provided the raw material for writers from James Joyce to Frank McCourt, Mary McCarthy to Alice McDermott, whose works describe a world where cruelty and compassion, repression and intellectual curiosity, pain and humor walk side by side. And, quite often, like the garrulous old vet at the VFW hall, the "survivor" looks back at the experience with at least some degree of appreciation, even affection. Those were the kinds of stories I was thinking of as I found myself engaged in Christine Rosen's "My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood (Public Affairs). There's a twist, however: Rosen (and yes, that is her married name) did not wear the plaid kilt of Catholic school but of Keswick Christian, a fundamentalist school in her hometown of St Petersburg, Fla.

Rosen was a fundamentalist by chance; her father and stepmother were not religious, but rather opted to send her and her sister to Keswick because the local public school "was in a part of town where everyone had bars on their windows and commercial activity was limited to pawnshops and liquor stores." Rosen, nonetheless, dove into the faith wholeheartedly. To secular adults, this world, where the Bible was a textbook and assemblies might feature Christian folk singers one week and terrifying movies about the Rapture the next, might feel like another universe, but to an imaginative kid like Rosen, it made sense especially in a climate like Florida's. "The Bible was helping me make sense of the world I already knew," she writes. "The Bible stories I heard every day stories about burning bushes, plagues, and other freakish expressions of God's power over nature seemed sensible in a place where we shared our world with sharks, scorpions, stingrays, snakes, fire ants, mosquitoes, alligators, opossum, armadillos, and raccoons." Later, she adds, "The Bible offered me endless exotic insights into human nature. In the Old Testament, for example, people often act on immediate and sometimes unusual impulses.

A situation understandable to children, who find themselves at the mercy of baffling adult whims." This was especially useful as Munch's troubled relationships with women no doubt led him to depict them as engulfing sirens, as in the 1896 lithograph "On the Waves of Love." I don't think I'm ruining any surprise to reveal that the now-adult Rosen is no longer a fundamentalist Christian; indeed, she writes, "I no longer even consider myself religious, and lead an entirely secular life." While Rosen now sees the absurdity in much of what she once accepted unquestioningly, there is nothing mocking or disrespectful in her tone; indeed, "My Fundamentalist Education" derives most of its considerable humor from Rosen's willingness to cast her geeky, over-credulous and over-eager young self as the comic relief. And she credits, unexpectedly enough, her religious training with providing her the tools to eventually reject many of its teachings. "My fundamentalist education gave me a profound respect from my fellow human beings; it taught me the dangers of pride and the joys of helping others; it gave me a love of the Bible and a lifelong devotion to language and music," Rosen writes. "Perhaps I would have done better hearing more about Darwin and less about harlotry, as my peers in public school did. Instead, my guidance came from Scripture, but it, too, taught me to examine, to question, and to criticize even if this questioning eventually led me away from fundamentalism." "My Fundamentalist Education" couldn't have less in common with another recent Christian-girlhood memoir, Julia Scheeres' wrenching "Jesus Land" (Counterpoint).

But it hardly seems fair, or accurate, to blame Scheeres' bleak childhood on religion; the real villains are her monstrous, hypocritical parents, who espoused "Christian" values to the outside world while practicing shocking cruelties at home. Rosen, in contrast, had the great luck to have a supportive, loving family that both balanced her education's excesses and recognized its virtues. While other former Christians might describe their shed faith as a "straitjacket," she writes, "I experienced it more like comfortable swaddling it protected me from all that was cold and harsh while I was still vulnerable." M.A. Turner is a writer who lives in Northampton, Mass. Photo by Matthew Cavanaugh Christine Rosen writes about her early education at a fundamentalist Christian school in St.

Petersburg, which emphasized strict morals and Bible belief. The author now leads "an entirely secular life." Munch: Mixing his paints with angst MUNCH, from IE theory taught in school liked the simplicity and literal-minded-ness of it," she writes) her sense of certainty was forever shaken. Later, she began to question the paternalism that colored her education, whose insistence on women obeying their husbands and obsession with stamping out "harlotry" did not jibe with the "Free to Be. and Me" album her stepmother played at home. "Peace now reigneth within a phrase from our school song described the serenity one achieved after finding salvation," she reflects.

"But it could just as well describe the collective hope of Keswick Christian School, which wanted to wall us off from mainstream culture and all of its evils, and create an alternauve society for us, one based on strict morals and Bible belief. The only trouble was, the longer I spent inside this closed world, the more eager I was to see what was on the other side of that wall." Rosen tried to make sense of her mother, who abandoned the family when Christine was a baby, only to reappear when she was 5, espousing a new-found faith (a speaking-in-tongues, laying-on-of-hands Pentecostalism that was viewed as suspect by staid fundamentalists and as mortifying by her young daughters) and exhibiting erratic behavior that the adult Rosen now recognizes as mental illness. This is not to say Rosen's faith did not have a certain dramatic flair. She fretted that the universal bar codes at the local Publix supermarket might be a sign of the world government her teachers warned would signal the End Times, and she worriedly compiled a list of possible Antichrists, a list that included, reasonably enough, Michael Jackson and Ronald Reagan. For a time, she fancied herself a budding prophet, albeit one whose prophesies ran to the mundane.

brother," her ex asperated older sister responded to one of Rosen's less spectacular auguries. "We have chicken cacciatore every other week. You just got luckyl'O Rosen's father and stepmother viewed their daughters' religious fervor with a mix of amusement and bemusement; while they weren't about to abandon their secular life for fundamentalism, they apparently saw no harm in the girls getting a heavy dose of religion at school. When Rosen, confused by her teacher's dismissal of the evolution theory she had learned at a summer science camp, turned to her father for help, she writes, "he gave me a brief but sympathetic description of Darwin and said that when I got older I'd have to read something called The Origin of Species. 'But listen to your teacher for now, he advised, 'and do what she Rosen could not put the matter aside so easily.

While she eventually accepted the creationist Joe McCarthy bio seethes in red panic, echoing 'War on Terror' red hair is matted on the pillow. Her pale face and sad, rimmed eyes no longer look to the woman but rather seem to be glimpsing eternity. Munch himself suffered from various physical and mental illnesses that had him in and out of sanatoriums. His relationships with women were no more fortunate. His romance with Tulla Larsen, daughter of a wealthy Kristiania wine merchant, came to a sensational end in 1902 when she accidentally shot him in a suicide attempt.

(As a result, Munch had to have the tip of the middle finger of his left hand amputated.) It will come as no shock that Munch portrayed love as an all-consuming experience. In "Vampire" (1893-94), the woman's long red hair spills like blood over the bowed figure of her lover as she prepares to kiss or bite his neck. In The Kiss" (1892), the lovers indistinguishable features meld together. For Munch, women were inextricably linked with nature, and nature, while irresistible, was also fragile and cruel. The MoMA show includes the 1896 wall panel "Mermaid," which Munch designed for the home of Norwegian art collector Axel Heiberg.

The panel depicts a flame-haired mermaid rising from the sea, her tail whipping around a shaft of moonlight. It encapsulates the two aspects of mermaids, who are often helpful to sailors in mythology but can just as capriciously drag them to their deaths. Munch's ambivalence toward women and his personal suffering affected the way he painted. He turned from art that was at times impressionistic, realistic and naturalistic to rely more on emotion and personal meaning. This made him the perfect artist for the Symbolist movement.

Munch stated his artistic philosophy in the "St. Cloud Manifesto," which he wrote outside Paris in December 1889 after the death of his father sent him into a deep depression. "I do not believe in an art which is not forced into existence by a human being's desire to open his heart," he once said. "Art is your heart's blood." In the brilliant "Night in St. Cloud" (1890), Munch gives us a hotel room as the chamber of the heart, the moody blues of the Seine spilling onto the floor and all but obscuring the top-hatted figure by the window.

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Craig Copetas Bloomberg Joseph "Tail-Gunner Joe" McCarthy swelled to power in America after the Allies defeated fascism only to find themselves locked in a Cold War with communism. The Republican senator from Wisconsin "shrewdly exploited the dark places of the American psyche" to expand his influence, former New York Times columnist Tom Wicker writes in "Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy" (Harcourt, 212 pages, $22). Wicker's book is required reading for U.S. voters at a time when President George W. Bush is waging a "War on Terror." With fascism crushed and the Soviet Union buried, Bush has gripped the country in his own brand of fear and loathing.

"Shooting Star" offers a brisk weather report on the political climate that McCarthy generated from his rise to national attention in 1950 until the Senate censured him and his methods in 1954. Wicker describes those years as a time when politicians wrangled more about patriotism than policy. It was a time when Republican and Democratic politicians alike claimed "traditional" values, even as they trampled on cherished American rights. "Across the nation," Wicker writes, "millions feared and denounced Joe McCarthy and his techniques of smearing opponents with charges of distorted or fictitious misdeeds." Sound familiar? 'Ingenious Enemy' As Wicker tells it, McCarthy browbeat the nation into having "faith in a wickedly ingenious enemy, whose reach for evil goals threatened America's inner security, and a blustery overconfidence in U.S. power and resources: the combination made it easy for many Americans to be lieve that any setback to U.S.

interests had to be the consequence of that enemy's unceasing efforts to subvert and control American policy to its own advantage." Wicker opens "Shooting Star" with a chilling recollection of his first encounter with McCarthy along a deserted corridor of the Senate Office Building. It was a January morning in 1957, and Wicker was a cub reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal. "Glad to see you, sir!" Wicker recalls McCarthy saying. "Always glad to see real Amer'cans here'n these fancy halls!" Wicker, both repelled and fascinated, was ready to go mano a mano with a politician he had "held in contempt." "But his wide grin, his shaky but hearty grip, his unconcealed eagerness were somehow intriguing. He pumped my hand again, asking, 'Anything I can do for as if he really wanted to know." 'Known Communists' "Shooting Star" records the dramas and deceptions McCarthy used as chairman of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, from which he launched attacks on what he called "known communists" within the U.S.

government. Wicker doesn't linger on the often-told story of the hearings. He instead navigates the depths and shallows of those stormy times like a seasoned Potomac riverboat captain, showing how McCarthy sought to scuttle the integrity of anyone who got in his way, including George C. Marshall and even U.S. President Dwight D.

Eisenhower. So heavy was McCarthy's ham fist on the nation that he compelled the U.S. State Department in 1953 to purge books by Langston Hughes, Dashiell Hammett and Jean-Paul Sartre from American-run libraries abroad. Eisenhower was obliged to endorse this practice, which Wicker compares to Nazi "book burning." Bloomberg News "Shooting Star'looks at the political climate fostered by U.S. Sen.

Joe McCarthy. "They can do what they please to get rid of them," Eisenhower told the country during a press conference. Ike Explodes Later, in a private talk with White House Press Secretary James Hagerty, Eisenhower lost his "barracks-room" temper over the book incident and McCarthy's tactics, Wicker reports. "McCarthy is making exactly the same plea of loyalty that Hitler made to the German people," Eisenhower said. "Both tried to set up personal loyalty within the government while both were using the pretense of fighting communism.

I think this is the most disloyal act we have ever had by anyone in the government of the United States." "Shooting Star" is packed with goose bumps, starkly validating the adage that in a democracy people usually get the government they deserve..