Look How the Fish Live

Here again, we find ourselves in quotidian, heartland America, where the absurdities of family life abound, where cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking, mildly opportunistic clergy still go about their chosen work...but with a difference now. Something has happened to the world of ordinary people, of imperious pastors and downtrodden curates, to the certain landscape of the Country and the Church...where a young father, entangled by his children in the fate of a baby bird, despairs of Nature's (and God's) failures...where a serious-minded young priest, arriving on the last ripple in the long incoming tide of converts, finds himself adrift on the choppy seas of feminism and ecumenism...where a lonely and convivial if not always congenial pastor wants to be both pal and mentor to the new breed of curates ("not too bright and in love with themselves")...where an aging bishop, whose pastoral letters often mention "the keystone of authority," builds a new cathedral...one, unfortunately, without a keystone...but who, later, in another story, rediscovers his true vocation, in retirement, while in the course of investigating miraculous visions. There is a story about a pastor who can't find out his curate's name. There is a story, set in Ireland, about "Americas thriftiest living author" and his family. There are also two cautionary tales, about wife swapping and hypocrisy, and a short play about the first American expedition to the moon.