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On March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered while celebrating Mass in a hospital chapel in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. In 1988, this chronologically arranged selection—drawn principally from Romero's homilies—was published by Harper & Row. We owe a debt a gratitude to Plough for its reissue.

During his tenure as archbishop (he was appointed in 1977), Romero spoke out frequently against the greed of El Salvador's ruling elite and the brutality of its military, whose death squads (many of them led by U.S.-trained officers) killed and raped with impunity. He spoke on behalf of the poor and the oppressed, and he defended the "right of just insurrection" as recognized in Pope Paul VI's 1967 encyclical, Populorum Progressio. For such courageous stands Romero was murdered.

To that extent, the received account—the "myth of Archbishop Romero"—is accurate. But Romero was not, as he is often portrayed by tendentious commentators, a convert to liberation theology.

"It's amusing," he said in a homily on June 3, 1979: "This week I received accusations from both extremes—from the extreme right, that I am a communist; from the extreme left, that I am joining the right. I am not with the right or the left. I am trying to be faithful to the word that the Lord bids me preach, to the message that cannot change, which tells both sides the good they do and the injustices they commit." On September 2 of that same year, he observed: "Those who do not understand transcendence cannot understand us. When we speak of injustice here below and denounce it, they think we are playing politics. It is in the name of God's just reign that we denounce the injustices of the earth."

Passionate, unpretentious, and deeply moving, The Violence of Love is a manual for the Christian life, calling us—whether in San Salvador or Chicago, Sarajevo, or New York—to reveal the presence of Christ.—JW

The Provincials: A Personal
History of Jews in the South
By Eli N. Evans
Free Press
391 pp.; $16, paper

My father has often remarked that reading The Provincials is like reading his own autobiography. It is, I suspect, praise that Eli Evans hears often. When The Provincials, which grew out of a series of articles for Harper's magazine, was originally published in 1973, Evans became the spokesman for southern Jews. (His eloquence has since been rivaled only by Alfred Uhry, author of Driving Miss Daisy and The Last Night of Ballyhoo.)

For the new edition, released on the book's twenty-fifth anniversary, Evans has written five additional chapters, which disappoint: Evans's tales of burying his parents and of attending the Atlanta Olympics, where the Olympic committee acknowledged the Munich 11 for the first time, lack the pathos, and the flair, that mark the rest of the book. The first 21 chapters, however, remain, after two and a half decades, insightful and illuminating. There, Evans knits together personal memoir with a broader history of southern Jews. Interwoven with discussions of Jewish confederates and Leo Frank's lynching and the 1958 bombing of the Temple in Atlanta are Evans's recollections of his father's (successful) 1951 bid for mayor, of his black maid's unmatchable matzo balls, and of the Jewish singles scene at the University of North Carolina.

Evans's struggles as a Jewish child in a deeply Protestant environment are both funny and gut-wrenching. When asked by his schoolmates why he didn't believe in Jesus, young Eli would reply, "I believe Jesus was the greatest man who ever lived," or, "Well, he sure was a great prophet, just like Isaiah, Moses, and Paul." (Evans dropped this later answer after an interlocutor asked him if he therefore accepted Moses as his personal savior.) When Christmas carols and hymns were sung in school assemblies, Evans would chime in loudly with his classmates, singing all the words except Christian, and substituting Moses whenever Jesus appeared in the lyrics. Thus, at his sixth-grade graduation, we find an 11-year-old Eli belting, "Onward hum-hum soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Moses, standing at the fore."

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