Religious Book Week Critics' Choices
Swidler, Arlene
Religious Book Week: CRITICS' CHOICES Arlene Swidler AN EXCELLENT Catholic contribution to Holocaust studies is John F. Morley's Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust, 1939-1943...
...Ending the White Male Monopolies" is the subtitle of Daniel Maguire's A New American Justice (Doubleday, $9.95,218pp...
...the English translation includes as postscript his responses: "Why I Remain a Catholic...
...after more facts and documentation than any non-specialist can want, concludes that this subject matter, which the author carries to the fourteenth century, is still so unexplored that conclusions and generalizations must remain tentative...
...For a pleasant and informative evening's read, try Lawrence Cunningham's The Meaning of Saints (Harper & Row, $9.95, 190 pp...
...Religious Book Week: CRITICS' CHOICES Arlene Swidler AN EXCELLENT Catholic contribution to Holocaust studies is John F. Morley's Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust, 1939-1943 (KTAV, $20, 344 pp...
...Using materials only recently available, Morley investigates the Vatican diplomatic corps, country by country, to discover whether its wartime staff worked on the two levels it is committed to: the rights of the church and humanitarian concerns, in this case the Jews...
...Morley does not ask whether the Vatican diplomatic structure, with its emphases on diplomatic channels and the rights of Catholics, is not in fact an obstacle to broader humanitarian concern, but his book supplies some disturbing facts...
...John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (University of Chicago, $27.50, 424 plus pp...
...Christ analyzes the works of five women writers as stories of spiritual quest, beginning with turn-of-the-century Kate Chopin, a Louisiana Catholic whose short novel The Awakening reveals a powerful and sensitive writer...
...He finds such paradigmatic models in contemporary fiction - works by Silone and Greene, for example - and draws implications of the ancient desert tradition from the lives of Teilhard de Chardin and the followers of Charles de Foucauld...
...gives us Hans Kiing's "theological meditation" on infallibility...
...Some of the more interesting material is somewhat peripheral: the advantages of the term "gay," the lack of clear and binding biblical prohibitions of homosexual relations, the legality of homosexual marriage in ancient Rome...
...The final section of the book deals with criteria for preferential aid...
...Here I think his assigning one disempowered group priority over others is a tactical error, but overall the book is solid and - let us hope - convincing...
...As always, a number of helpful books on women and religion appeared, though none represents an important breakthrough or synthesize as well as Madonna Kolbenschlag's Kiss Sleeping Beauty Goodbye (Doubleday, 1979, $8.95, 244 pp...
...Whereas our current canonization process still focuses on the saint as locus of power, Cunningham sees the saint as a person grasped by religious vision, a sign-event for others...
...Commonweal readers might find Carol Christ's Diving Deep and Surfacing (Beacon, $4.95, 175 pp...
...His book shows that very little was done for unbap-tized Jews...
...Still, the topic is one on which we can no longer decently remain ignorant, and readers might like to browse in the tome...
...This is the book that evoked the Vatican's declaration that Kung could no longer be considered a Catholic theologian...
...Finally, The Church Maintained in Truth (Seabury, $6.95, 87 pp...
...the most illuminating of this year's crop...
...Convinced that the weak philosophical undergirding in the Bakke and later Weber cases leaves the principle of preferential affirmative action vulnerable, Maguire has attempted to supply that theoretical base here...
...The book sorts out the historic roles of saints as model and paradigm on the one hand and miracle-worker and intercessor on the other...
Vol. 108 • February 1981 • No. 4
