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Cortnac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories. By Matthew Potts. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Pp. 232. $39.65.According to Matthew L. Potts' Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament, McCarthy's novels since the 1980s employ sacramental signs-moments of goodness and vulnerability-in order to instill a moral and ethical charge in the reader. Potts, an Associate Professor of Ministry Studies at the Harvard Divinity School and an ordained Episcopal priest, seeks in this book to overlap theory, theology, and contemporary literature. Potts' work on McCarthy not only presents the positive potential of McCarthy's writings to an audience that may only be slightly familiar with them, but seeks to make a considerable contribution to McCarthy studies by developing and expanding the religious aspects of McCarthy's writing, which, according to Potts, other critics have dealt with superficially (4).By arguing that McCarthy uses the sacramental to instill his ethical charge, Potts seeks to fill a gap he sees in the critical conversation as well as argue how significant it is that theologians could learn much from McCarthy (188). Potts organizes his analysis around seven novels and their characters using different organizing concepts (knowledge, fate, action, story, and sacrament). His argument progresses by employing a variety of philosophers, theorists, and theologians. In his first chapter, Potts looks at both Blood Meridian's Judge Holden and No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh to demonstrate how these psychopathic antagonists push the limits of the Nietzschean idea that one can impose his or her will on others and the world through reason. In the second chapter, the ideas of chance and fate enter to make possible the acts of kindness and forgiveness, which allows for a resistance to the bad guys as per Hannah Arendt. Following the idea of such actions, chapter three looks at the different acts of goodness S u ttree's titular character creates despite his misogyny and cowardice, showing even a gray character can give the possibility of good, and it reads Cornelius Suttree's problems with identity through the lens of Judith Butler. Chapter four looks at McCarthy's The Border Trilogy and borrows from Erich Auerbach's Mimesis in that it sees the potential for storytelling and the narration of ethical actions and identities as having the primary power for creating morality (122). In the fifth chapter, Potts shows how the sacrament stands out strongest in the small actions the father takes for his son to create goodness in an extremely hostile world in McCarthy's postapocalyptic horror, The Road.Thus, Potts shows that McCarthy's work is far more than the violent nihilism it gets filed under in popular understanding, and at the same time he argues that the religious elements of McCarthy have not been adequately understood by the critical conversation generated by his corpus.Potts aims to show that the monsters McCarthy is known for depicting, characters like Holden and Chigurh, are monsters of reason. Thus, "despite the overwhelming violence of his works-McCarthy means to defy rather than to embrace the cruelty of the world" (14). Potts even reads the western as the perfect place for McCarthy "to make monstrous a form of instrumental reason that mythologizes reason toward violence" (25). Potts sees Holden and Chigurh's ability to use reason "toward the violence of [their] own will" as a criticism McCarthy makes against the misuse of enlightenment thought (42). So, while Potts admits that these two characters are extremely violent, McCarthy does not seek to glorify violence, for these men are deplorable. In No Country for Old Men, it is Carla Jean whom Potts locates as the important heart of the book since her "vulnerability to others and to the future" is the exact opposite of these monsters of reason, and this vulnerability is one of the signs of the sacrament.Another novel well known for its violence, The Road, Potts finds full of sacramental signs such as acts of goodness, acts that take place in the most hostile world imaginable. …

Cormac McCarthy and the signs of sacrament: literature, theology, and the moral of stories