Harvard Diary

Presented as a soul-searching diary, this is actually an assemblage of Coles' columns, mostly on religious themes, from the New Oxford Review. As he mingles with tenant farmers in Alabama, Hispano-Americans in the Southwest and hate-filled children in Belfast, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatrist ( Children of Crisis ) makes us aware that he is motivated by Jesus the migrant preacher who heeded the lowly and exiled. In short, sometimes platitudinous sermons, he defends prayer in schools, frames teenage pregnancy as a moral issue, wishes bankruptcy upon Penthouse and deplores the gay movement insofar as it represents politicization of a private matter. Coles champions Thomas Merton, Simone Weil, Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor. He interprets George Orwell's skeptical stance as ``Christian in nature.'' The least tendentious pieces are chatty meditations on heroism, grace, forgiveness, sin, fatherhood. (September)