CRITICS' SELECTIONS FOR RELIGIOUS BOOK WEEK
Mclnerny, Ralph & Marty, Martin E. & Bandler, Michael J. & Cardman, Francine & Spear, Lois & Higgins, George G. & Zeik, Michael
000 Selections for Religious Book Wee& 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 CRITICS' CHOICES O0 Michael J. Bandler Despite critical grumblings about the mediocrity of the publishing year just past,...
...Indeed, there is very little on the subject that she does ignore---providing, as she does, both an historical outline of classical Sufism, as well as a philosophical and spiritual analysis of the works of its leading figures...
...In The Church and the Homosexual (Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, $10...
...June 19-24...
...While he does not deny the 'salvation' capacity of the World Religions, and while he finds each of them impressive in ways that the Catholic Church might well emulate, he is, nevertheless, alert to their very serious defects...
...COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., New York...
...David Edwinn Harrell, Jr...
...end I~[IOfl, InO wflr tn4l Currmlt 8sue, Money ~ If not plimgKL (Allow a weeks...
...Looking back, one is struck by the unifying sense of relevance pervading the list, for contemporary and future audiences alike...
...In his Commonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...
...Simone P&rement...
...Drane seeks to discover within man's social predicament intimations of the need for religion...
...Louis Dupr6's Transcendent Sel/hood (Seabury, $8.95), as its subtitle suggests, is concerned with the rediscovery of the inner life and is palpably the work of a professor...
...I trust others in this week's symposium to say more about Kiing, but my list would not be complete without him...
...We regret the printer's error...
...Mouw brings Christianity to bear on the political...
...Stentorian at times and over-preoccupied with the propositional character of revelation, the author does not let slip the existential side of faith...
...its central action is the sharing of food...
...For those only beginning to ponder the questions raised by women's liberation, Ruether's book will be an eye-opener...
...Neither turning on the printing presses nor tax reductions is going to stimulate us into prosperity...
...May's book is distinctively Catholic...
...The morning-after reality will show that the disillusionments of Vietnam and Watergate, our shortages and wastage of resources, inflation and unemployment are not going to be solved by traditional methods of monetary manipulation...
...Simon & Schuster, $7.95, paperback...
...I cannot stand to watch another person be humiliated much less executed...
...The author is William B. Helmreich, whose career has straddled two worlds--the secular and religious...
...We know that Carter during the campaign condemned unequal administration of justice, corporate bribery, urban decay, governmental inefficiency, .unemployment and inflation...
...I add to my list Patrick Gaffney's Mary's Spiritual Maternity (Montfort Publications, $2.95) and Thomas Merton's Thoughts in Solitude, reissued last year (Noonday, $2.95), and the pattern emerges...
...Each is an indispensable source book, filled with essential data for living the cultural and/or religious Jewish life...
...We need to explore further whether that influence improved or depressed women's position in our culture, Even more tenuous, perhaps, than Warner's thesis is the one by Arthur Koestler in The Thirteenth Tribe...
...The Second Jewish Catalog (Jewish Publication Society, $7.50, paperback...
...All these books finally bear on both...
...Messengers of God, Biblical Portraits It Vou Low tUotd0, s age...
...It is this facet which is limned in this series of capsule reflections on Biblical household names (a companion volume to his Souls on Fire, portraits of Hasidic solons...
...Elie Wiesel is inexorably linked with the Holocaust, a storyteller determined to keep the world from forgetting the lessons of the immediate past...
...I prefer his early work and Thoughts in Solitude is early...
...Sticking to themes, Richard Mouw's Politics and the Biblical Drama (Eerdmans, $2.95) and James Drane's The Possibility o/ God (Littlefield Admans, $3.50) adopt a sweeping social perspective, although the former is theological and the latter philosophical...
...Perhaps the most striking aspect bf this discussion has been the rev.elation of how little is certain about either topic...
...It is the first-hand account of a young Dutch student who enters a monastery in Kyoto, and whose spiritual pilgrimage ends, not in satori, but depression...
...Cleaning debris of the centuries from old myths or installing new ones in their place may seem like wasted time during Religious Book Week when one can choose from a more attractive array of books dealing with more pleasant topics...
...C l a s s i f i e d RATES: 60c a word, one time...
...olics can agree with Warner's further observation that Mary "represents a central theme in the history of Western attitudes toward women...
...Four titles are especially worth mentioning: To Jerusalem and Back (Viking, $8.95...
...Would its author have been able to imagine himself writing on race and war...
...The dust jacket says that she broke with Judaism, but all the evidence indicates that she never had any ties to the Jewish faith and, in fact, entered a synagogue only once in her life, and then not for liturgical or credal purposes...
...Canon C i t y , ~ o co...
...He remains his own man...
...20057 (202) 625-3001 Georgetown University is an Equal Opportunity/ Affirmative Action Institution in Employment and Admissions i Commonweal: 157 about the only way in which we can see reality is through myths, we need accounts making Biblical and other historical subjects understandable and meaningful for our generation...
...finally, an edifying effect...
...Both of them know what Catholic traditionalists do not, that the Catholic tradition is a flowing stream, not a stale pond into which one dips...
...At least once during every lifetime, we need to explore the background framework of our favorite myths...
...Bernard Cooke...
...159...
...Cain, as seen through the Midrashic text, represents suffering mankind...
...Religious Book Week seems as good a time as any to look at some of the cherished ones playing key roles in our Catholic culture...
...If you really want to learn Spanish quickly, fluently and correctly, and if you have the courage and stamina for intensive and disciplined study, come for at least one month to Cuernavaca Language School of CIDOC...
...and informative...
...I am glad I overcame that petty prejudice, for Ryan's labor of love, which he has been working on for a lifetime, is certainly, as the subtitle puts it, "a" if not "the" definitive biography of Brownson...
...Martin E. Marty Living dangerously is the first delight of regular reviewers...
...Getlein did a splendid job...
...Brother John C.S.C.A...
...The unprecedented success of the first do-it-yourself guide to Jewish practice --arising out of the counterculture movements of the Sixties---has resulted in this sequel, again compiled and edited by Sharon Strassfeld and Michael Strassfeld...
...We are all invited, by means of this important publication, to join in their dialogue in the hope, as the Editor puts it in her moving Introduction, that the effort of common reflection "may help us understand, assume the past for the sake of the present . . . . In the face of the Holocaust neutrality becomes apathy, noninvolvement becomes guilt...
...The record of his seven-month retreat to a Trappist monastery, this is not Nouwen's best book...
...Anyone who has struggled with these passages in other editions will appreciate the service he renders...
...The wealth of factual material on pentecostals, from earlier spellbinders like William Branham and Aimee Semple McPherson to contemporaries like Jimmy Swaggart and David Wilkerson, makes the book valuable as-a reference...
...Commonweal...
...But perhaps, tike love and marriage, we can't have one without the other...
...A recent review (in Saturday Review) of a new biography of Mahatma Gandhi says, in criticism of Gandhi, that sanctity is "a selfish enterprise...
...4, 1977, a transposition of several lines of type marred the sense of a portion of the article "The Multifarious Horses of Instruction," by Doris Grumbach...
...8 1 2 ; 2 - pros e n t ~ ROOTS TO TRA~S- -" ,,' FOR]VLATION--on Ch~/ss r_j Community, Aug...
...Commonweal: 155 one of the best informed and most astute Catholic journalists in the English-speaking world...
...CHARLES CICERALE Political Reprieve Toledo, Ohio To the Editors: The excellent article, "Campaign '76---Crisis Ahead" by Carny McWilliams in the December 3 issue deserves the attention of all alert Americans...
...Brown, Co ms, MacKentakes over as Secretary of State...
...I am in agreement with his just position...
...Wilkinson's notes and appendices are invaluable, the result of many years in Jerusalem, and his translation is lively...
...7-12, ' 77~ _9 Write for Information*~ -~ IA*NOIH9FIVH A~tVN3SO~ ways in which this pattern extends to other spheres of human life, so that racial and ethnic subordination, economic and ecological exploitation all relate to and reinforce the hierarchical relationship of male to female...
...Marina Warner...
...Private tutor available at $3SO for SO hours...
...In exploring the treasures of Sufism, Professor Annemarie Sch'tmmel in her work, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Univ...
...for others who've begun the journey to the new land, it will make clear how much ground there is to be covered while it offers an encouraging glimpse of the goal...
...Rosemary Radford Ruether's New Woman, New Earth (Scabury, $8.95) is a collection of essays that provocatively draws the connections between sexism and other ideologies of domination...
...But his account does serve to affirm Kiing's warning: we would be naive to go around hunting for a World Religion without warts...
...Yet, while he left some of the heart of Christianity out of his story, he brought scope and flair to his humanist vision of the faith...
...Unfortunately, it lacks a conclusion, perhaps because the author was deeply indebted to Oral Roberts University for the use of its Pentecostal Collection...
...Finally, for youngsters, Isaac Bashevis Singer has produced a typically joyous short story collection set in Eastern Europe a century ago---Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $6.95...
...In an age given to guru-seeking, this latter may be one of the best gifts that he can offer to his many friends and followers...
...In my judgment, this is the most sophisticated, most nuanced, most urbanemin short, the best---of all the books that have been written in English on the changes that have taken place (and the changes still to come) in the post-Conciliar Church...
...John J. McNeill, S.J...
...George G. Higgins Ministry to Word and Sacraments: History and Theology...
...Orestes A. Brownson: A Definitive Biography~ Thomas R. Ryan, C.PP.S...
...Yet the process may, in Hellwig's words, tell us "whether the Christian gospel has anything to say in response to the social questions of our day...
...B. M. Ahem, Richard C ifford...
...She was undoubtedly a genius of sorts, but was she also a saint...
...Warner concedes that Mary may be regarded either as the apotheosis of our striving toward the ideal or as the nadir of our ignorance and superstition...
...Carroll College He p CARROLL COLLEGE, Helena, Montana S%01 finish new library...
...The crazy idea that seeing starving babies, burning houses, flooded towns, dead earthquake victims and young soldiers dying in a ditch and now "live and in color" executions will deter us from crime or motivate us to do something about evils of our world is fantasy...
...S7c, three times...
...Howard M. Sachar's A History o] Israel (Knopf, $20), a lucid one-volume chronicle of the Jewish state from the first stirrings in some pamphlets in the mid-1830's to the realpolitik of the mid-1970's...
...The book is extremely valuable, not only for its massive evidence, but also for its numerous color plates...
...I leave off some obvious choices for some obvious reasons--Bernard Cooke's Ministry to Word and Sacrament (I'm in medias res), or Hans Kiing's On Being A Christian (haven't even started yet)--and I hope that others will comment on them...
...The historian in me feels on safer ground with recommendation of A History o/ the Jewish People, edited by H. Ben-Sasson (Harvard, $40), a collection by the historians most expert in the various eras of Jewish history...
...But for ~he ex-Chief as well as the whole Watergate crew, as well as other crimes of personal desperation, there is really no such thing as a deterrent theory of capital punishment...
...The latter, while written by a somewhat less~well known Catholic world citizen, does not suffer by comparison to Kiing...
...Monika K. Hellwig...
...Fortress Press, $25...
...Two Roman Catholic works, both giants, neither of which I have yet finished in a busy season, are Hans Kiing, On Being a Christian (Doubleday, $12.95) and Bernard Cooke, Ministry to Word and Sacraments, (Fortress, $25...
...The Lord Jesus has made me sensitive to the inner harmony in all of nature...
...for years he meditated on it...
...Ralph Mclnerny Responding to a request to write about religious books, I discover that, like speaking prose, I have indeed been reading some, unwittingly if not perhaps witlessly...
...Whether inadequate or not, his magnum opus, which was ten years in the 'making, is in a class by itself and is likely to remain so for years to come...
...Simone Weil was admittedly different and sometimes rather difficult--perhaps a bit odd by contemporary standards-but her form of sanctity was anything but a selfish enterprise...
...One could go on...
...Language LEARN SPANtSH...
...07029...
...i FranciBe Cas-dmau From the odd assortment of books that I've read in the past year, not all of them current, not all of them of wider interest, it has been an intriguing exercise to select those that ! liked best and/or would recommend t o others...
...4 March 1977:154 I was put off at first by the fact that Father Ryan's 872-page biography of one of the great figures in American Church history bears the imprint of a "churchy" press which traditionally has never specialized in scholarly publications...
...Taking the subordination of women by men as the basic pattern of oppression, Ruether suggests the :~ HELLWIG * AIDAN KAVANAGH I vuS~e, m Holy Cross...
...The Chinese call it the Ying and Yang found in all things...
...That question is ultimately insoluble...
...Sic, thirteen times, Twelve words minimum...
...Some have said pretty much the same thing about Simone Weil who, much to her chagrin, was often referred to as a saint even during her lifetime, but the author of this fascinating biography gives her ungenerous critics the lie...
...Kelly's study of Jerome's life, writings and controversies goes a long way toward remedying this basic lack, and will quickly become a standard work...
...Gaffney's book is a study of St...
...Jerome, fourth century church father and subject of J. N. D. Kelly's excellent biography, Jerome (Harper & Row, $15), would have approved of neither women's liberation nor gay liberation...
...On the one hand, he finds it patronizing to the Hindus and Buddhists, etc...
...Human misery with which identification is hardly possible creates strong negative feelings in me...
...EDWARD LAMB Correction In the issue of Commonweal dated Feb...
...A number of books this year have swept away the background from some of these beliefs...
...Louis de Montfort's teaching on Mary's motherhood and, though replete with scholarly apparatus and based on wide reading in Mariology, it has...
...a stunningly expansive and then smartly focused book...
...His vigorous mind and lively style are evident throughout a discussion which considers politics in the light of man's original condition, fall, redemption, and the future age...
...Following four weeks, $200...
...Robert Karrls...
...Indiana University Press...
...The author found a great deal impressive in Zen...
...On page 87, the eight lines at the top of column three should have appeared at the bottom of that column...
...A final book that is not recent but which I found fascinating is Egeria's Travels (SPCK, $15--a paper version is out of print), John Wilkinson's translation of the diary of a fourth century woman's pilgrimage to the Holy Land...
...Painstakingly etched, it is at times a trifle antiseptic, in terms of his family's daily lifestyles...
...But when he asserts that we have already wrestled with (and to some ex, tent, been purified by) higher criticism, secular humanism, etc., I agree with him...
...Elie Wiesel...
...The queue began forming last February, led by Irving Howe's awesome sociocultural opus on East European immigration, World o/ Our Fathers (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $14.95...
...Her biographer carefully reexamines but does not resolve the perennial question as to why she wavered so long on the brink of Roman Catholicism without ever coming in...
...We're increasingly dependent on the other nations of the world...
...Koestler attempts to prove that the ancestors of Western European Jews were not the Semitic tribes dating back to Ur in Mesopotamia...
...Monumental" is the only word to describe this massive but very readable synthesis of the history and theology of Christian ministry, which "is not an incidental item on the agenda of the church today (but) is basic to everything Christianity claims to be and attempts to do...
...Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., $29.95...
...For box numbers add SOs: par Insertion...
...Again, one finds an orchestration of many points of view~a portrait of current Catholic moral thought is in these pageswwhile May himself 4 March 1977:156 usually arrives at a recognizably traditional position...
...S e e r e t a r y Social Secretary--Rellable, Mature, Female seeks employment NYG Area, Box :;~:34H...
...his own master included...
...Outside of grains and coal, we have few, if any, resource surpluses...
...Press, $14.95) has ignored neither the 'Mysticism of Infinity,' nor the 'Mysticism of Personality...
...Kiing mercilessly rejects both the phrase and the concept...
...and it shows Henri Nouwen as a human being who is as neurotic as the rest of us...
...Its impact, I suspect, will be fully evident in the future in Jewish demographic tables...
...Random House...
...It rounds out a healthy year for Jewish books...
...Two books do that in commendable fashion: Elie Wiesel, whose sufferings under the Nazi regime clarified his vision of the human condition, gives us a new insight into some of the Old Testament figures...
...No better thinking person's introduction to ev.angelicalism today exists...
...Auschwitz: ,4 Beginning o/ a New Era...
...Getlein becomes most truthful when he speaks of the Nixonites...
...Isaac Herzog, that applies Talmudic scholarship to a variety of Commonweal: 153 judicial, scientific and philosophical concerns, and stresses the sage's awareness of the applicability of ancient wisdom to contemporary developments...
...This personal, precious, provocative journal is more than Saul Bellow's first flirtation with non-fiction and his first set of declarative thoughts on Jewish history and destiny...
...The Eucharist and the Hunger of the World...
...Her selection of Zen stories and anecdotes is, similarly, well chosen...
...Irmgard Schloegl came to Buddhism by way of the natural sciences, spent 12 years in Japan undergoing rigorous Zen training, and is presently the librarian for the Buddhist Society in London...
...More space would allow for a fairer, and fuller discussion of New Lives (Knopf, $8.95), Dorothy Rabinowitz's landmark survey of the path carved in America by surviv.ors of the Holocaust...
...The author, a former Jesuit and former Editor of the British Jesuit periodical, The Month, is a friend of mine, so I may be prejudiced, but let me say it anyhow--he is Provocative new guides to total Christian living...
...06426 USA P and Legends...
...A spirituality much different from Jerome's is offered by Henri J. M. Nouwen's Genesee Diary (Doubleday, $6.95...
...If she wasn't, may God have mercy on the rest of us...
...If I have any suggestion for the expansion of Carny McWilliams's thesis, it is that a very real fact of life in America is underplayed...
...In van de Wettering's account we learn of a monk who was given a modern version of the ancient koan: "Stop a wild horse which is charging straight at you...
...Troublingm as Bellow searches desperately for resolution and reconciliation, it is, ultimately, an uplifting book, imbued with a multi-hued beauty that only a literary genius like Bellow can create...
...8.95...
...From a wide societal sweep, through the ethical~ to the spiritual life...
...Mouw's political theology is balanced, informed and, above all, biblical...
...4 March 1977:158 OeeOOOeOe CORRESPONDENCE (Continued/ram page 131) Mr...
...Not a book for the idly curious...
...When someone suffers, and it is not you, he comes first . . . . To watch over a man who grieves is a more urgent duty than to think of God...
...Thomas Merton needs no commendation...
...Everyone will recall his famous phrase, "anonymous Christian...
...Call it a spectrum rather than a hierarchy...
...Charisma, with or without the Spirit, is a subject explored by the historian Harrell in his 1975 work, All Things Are Possible...
...There is not a direct connection between the women's liberation movement and the movement for gay liberation, but the two are, nevertheless, related...
...The prices on all these volumes are high...
...54c, seven times...
...Wake Up, Wake Up, To Do The Work O/ The Creator (Harper & Row, $8.95...
...No matter...
...They, too, 'have a history...
...Sincere thanks to Our Sunday Visitor for making it available to the general reading public, even at the obvious risk of losing money on it...
...10016...
...Most of them have yet to come to terms with progress, individualism, higher criticism, and the like...
...CDF REPORTS, Dept...
...Harrell allows "a leading authority on Roman Catholic pentecostalism" to have the last word: "Both the more specific prophetic function and the more general desire to be 'led by the Spirit,' as all Pentecustals know, have been abused by willful or vain pers o n s . " Unlike Harrell's work, Warner's book contains a strong thesis: Through the centuries, the cult of Mary aided in the subjugation of women...
...First month $300...
...I think so...
...absence, Mr...
...While I found Ryan's style a bit stilted or, if you will, archaic in spots and would quarrel with a few of his conclusions, I do not regret having spent the entire Christmas season, morning, noon and night, reading his impressive work...
...Some of the following books could be discussed in such a course...
...The new respect for Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, etc., expressed in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, was due largely to the work of Karl Rahner...
...Pre-reg|stretion necessary...
...Arthur Koestler...
...Different books, they do not however arrange themselves with reference to orthodoxy and orthopraxy...
...For some men the possibifity of losing the presidency with personal disgrace, as well as losing personal credibility as a world leader and bringing disgrace upon one's country would be a deterrent...
...This record of a dauntless traveler and relentlessly curious observer is both de...
...REV...
...Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, $I0...
...Professionally, first: what self-respecting church historian would own up to the fact that he profited from Paul Johnson, A History o/ Christianity (Atheneum, $13.95), written as it was by a journalist without background in the field...
...The family tree of contemporary Jewry means little to most of us, yet it emphasizes the fact that no one has a "pure" background, free of outside racial or cultural mingling...
...D*etails: Apdo, 4SO, Cuarnavaca, Mexico...
...who know they are not anonymous anything...
...Classified payable with order...
...The individual vs society...
...Edited by Eva Fleischner...
...The reexamination of malefemale relationships in the context of the women's movement has led to a reconsideration of sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular...
...In a split second there was neither monk nor koan...
...John J. McNeill, S.J., reexamines the Christian tradition in regard to homosexuality, making use of current biblical, theological and ethical reflection as well as recent biological and psychological research...
...Louis Dupr~'s book is scholarly yet it involves the reader as doubtless good philosophy should...
...In short, she was neither a Jew nor a Catholic, but a restless, brilliant, and truly mystical searcher for the truth and for God amidst the misery and suffering of the poor...
...Pantheon Books, $15...
...Alone of All Her Sex, The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary...
...C, Box 244, Harrison, N.J...
...An attempt at re-interpretation on the New Testament level is the slim volume by Monika Hellwig, reminding us of two points obscured by the pedantic controversy over Transubstantiation: The Eucharistic change was meant to be on the part of the congregation...
...Seabury Press, $8.95...
...While on this spending spree, let me finally include Myths, edited by Alexander Eliot, with the help of Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, and others (McGraw-Hill, $39.95), an illustrated portrayal of the way people have looked at the mythic world in many religions...
...At last someone has written a detailed, sensitive memoir of an Orthodox Jewish upbringing, with all its caveats, customs and temptations, filled with the wonders and pleasures that too often are blurred by an overemphasis on the proscriptive mores...
...Story o] My Li/e (Morrow, $15), by Moshe Dayan, and Yigal Allen's My Father's House (Norton, $7.95), two complementary views of the three-generational struggle to create and preserve Israel...
...Your gift, large or small, needed, appreciated...
...Institute singer steps out with his unilateral doBIBLICAL INSTITUTE Trlni~ Collage I Burlington, it-yourself approach and Cyrus Vance Vermont 0~401...
...From its motto from Marcel ("The devise of the person is not sum but sursum...
...Her 36-page introduction to The Wisdom o~ the Zen Masters (New Directions, $5.95) says more about the origin and background of Zen than some entire books I have read on the subject...
...Let this one risk professional and ideological credentials in the first two choices of books that stayed with me after I read them in recent months...
...The titles that follow arc ihe results of chance as much as choice...
...Lenny Bruce, rest his soul, would have had a field day with the hypocrisies of the Connally program...
...How did he fuse his two worlds after age 157 That is the stuff of a sequel...
...Rays...
...Yet rising above them all are two volumes (Word, $12.95 each) that begin a conservative systematic theology, Carl Henry, God, Revelation and Authority...
...Blessed by its author's gifts of narrative and imagery, this is a vibrant, loving piece of literature, laced with the politics that is inescapable when inhaled during several months in Israel...
...Indeed, he catalogues these in much greater detail...
...Lois Spem" The Church and the Homosexual...
...And ideologically, people identified with mainline Protestantism are not supposed to notice the pesky but proliferating evangelicals, who notify you of their existence in an oceau of junky books...
...In Becoming Human (Pflaum, $4.65), William E, May has written a Christian ethics which, while concerned with a number of vexing social issues, focuses on the individual moral agent...
...Though clinging to the former assertion, Cath...
...He is correot in suggesting that our political free enterprise system has won a reprieve rather than a rebirth of freedom...
...There seems to be a general assumption that it is good for people to be exposed to the ,pains and the miseries of the world...
...The clever wit and social criticism of Mr...
...Like Mouw, he acts as broker among a vast number of opinions, developing his own with a tentativeness that is never mere indecision...
...Peter Hebblethwaite...
...Since Georgetown University SCHOOL FOR SUMMER & CONTINUING EDUCATION Summer Workshops 14th Annual Institute on Sacred Scripture Adult Education in the Church Completing a Vocation: Retirement & Religious Life Toward a Peaceful, Human World Order Creative CateChesis ]or Children Please Contact: SSCE, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C...
...This situazle, Mowry, Pritchard...
...But it is intriguing and significant for at least two reasons: it offers, almost unintentionally, a reflection on the subtle interrelationship between psychology, counseling, spiritual direction and religious growth...
...His may not be the only way to write theology, but it is a classic casebook for a way to write it when so many of his colleagues have fallen silent, repeated themselves, or walked away from life and death questions...
...Butnthe weigh~ of Kiing's admonition still heavy on m e - - I cannot close without mentioning van de Wettering's The Empty Mirror (Houghton Mifitir $3.75...
...By blending ancient texts with commentaries and legends, Wiesel removes the patriarchs and prophets from the pantheon--as it were---and enables us to see them as ordinary men, with all their shortcomings and strengths---a contemporary view of what they were in their time, as well as what they would become in ours...
...and Judaism: Law and Ethics (Soncino, $9.75), a rich lode of essays by the late Chief Rabbi of Israel, Dr...
...A formative figure in western church historymtranslator of the Vulgate, fierce promoter of asceticism, and zealous controversialist--Jerome has been surprisingly neglected in the English-speaking scholarly world...
...Alfred A. Knopf...
...Llbrarian...
...With this admonition, we may now turn to consider a few books which I consider outstanding in their field...
...The modern version was: "Stop the Inter-city train, coming from Tokyo...
...Some may quibble with the emphasis or tone of the book...
...In the context of the book (poignant, but not cynical), such stories do not constitute a smear...
...of N. Car...
...We are not even in the running...
...And what's left of my theological heart and mind was addressed most intelligently in John Hick, Death and Eternal Li/e (Harper and Row, $15...
...Carey McWilliams has pointed out that neither candidate, Ford nor Carter, presented "a coherent statement Of what he thought the United States should be doing in the world in the last quarter of this century...
...Mouw writes out of the Christian Reformed tradition, but he develops his position by a fair and judicious consideration of a great number of mutually antithetical views...
...McNeill's book reminds us that the Sodom story interpreted as punishment for homosexuality has no basis in the Bible account which tells only that the city was punished for wickedness, especially for its sins of inhospitality...
...To the conIrary, she was one of the most unselfish and most charitable people I have ever read about...
...Reflections on the Holocaust...
...There will certainly be a renewed sense of our interdependence and an effort to get nuclear disarmament back on the tracks...
...The Runaway Church: Post-Conciliar Growth or Decline...
...and on the other, he agrees with the conservatives who felt that this formula rendered Christianity superfluous for half of mankind...
...That is the real crisis we face...
...Write: Director...
...monthly in advance for-more than three times...
...So we are cautioned not to compare the tranquil beauty of their classical scriptures with the pockmarks of our human history...
...Hick draws on resources of many religions in his contribution to global theology, but in the end he helps provide new understandings of Christian thought about life unconfined by mortal coils...
...You will keep them all your 1,ire...
...Keep up the good writing...
...The author, who is currently teaching at Calgary University, is being overly modest when he states in his Preface that the present crisis "seems to demand that we run the risk of . . . scholarly inadequacy...
...Anonymous Christianity" is, for Kiing, mere theological sleight of hand...
...Even before his inauguration he turned his back on the promise of wage-price controls legislation...
...000 Selections for Religious Book Wee& 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 CRITICS' CHOICES O0 Michael J. Bandler Despite critical grumblings about the mediocrity of the publishing year just past, 1976 clearly produced an abundant crop of volumes of Judaica...
...While certainly not the last word, McNeill's attempt to formulate a pastoral and moral response of the church to the homosexual community is a needed intermediate word...
...Metton and Mouw would have gotten along fine...
...i Institute Sacred Scripture: Ninth Annual Institute August 7-12, 1977...
...Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends (Random House, $8.95...
...Paulist Press...
...Not for a moment does Kiing deny our own problems...
...considered for purchase...
...It represents an appropriate OSV contribution to the Catholic observance of the Bicentennial...
...He finds them variously plagued with unhistoricity, cyclical determinism, pessimism, passivity, caste spirit, and social disinterestedness...
...His association with the Chicago Declaration and the Hartford Appeal confused Procrustean categorizers...
...Perhaps...
...certainly all of them influenced this philosopher of religion...
...The balance and scholarship she displays throughout are remarkable...
...Writers FREE LANCE WRITERS: Self-help reports In Psychology, Personal Growth end Awareness, Health Care, etc...
...Exposure to human misery on a mass scale through ,the media has led to psychic numbness and also to hostility...
...8.95...
...A 469-page collection of papers given at the multi-disciplinary International Symposium on the Holocaust held at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York City, June 1974...
...Removing the background of one set of myths may merely leave room for another set, more dangerous than the first, to grow in its place...
...Write Sister Marianna, COLLEGE MISERICORDIA, Dalels, Pennsylvania |!K,12...
...The saint is a man so neurotically absorbed with his soul's state of health that he becomes a kind of spiritual hypochondriac, one who, at bottom, would really rather be sick...
...While Ford's negativism in office upset us all, we may see a change in our foreign policy as Henry Kisteen compels us to sit down and negotiate our own survival...
...But there is another side to him --that of Biblical and Talmudic scholar --known largely to his students and lecture attendees...
...The young monk, as prescribed, put his heart and soul into solving his koan...
...Without presenting a clear-cut thesis, Harrell nevertheless raises questions about the authenticity of the Charismatic movement...
...The article is right on...
...Michael Zeik The fascinating chapter on the World Religions in Kting's new book, On Being a Christian (Doubleday, $12.95), provides a perspective for the books I have chosen...
...A joint effort by a representative cross section of Jewish, Protestant and Catholic scholars who came together to speak of one of the most unspeakable crimes in human history...
...Letters of not more than 250 or 300 words naturally have a better chance o] being published...
...This volume, though, tends towards a more selfless approach, concerned as it is with contemporary medical issues, the handicapped, and drawing others closer to the faith...
...S~mone Well: ,4 Li/e...
...V J ~ K . I ] , . / ~ . . I . L/V~ 'w r't,lr'~ *.~A~t~v m , . IPob~r OFFICIE BOX ISTCX ESSEX, CONN...
...Is it odd that I exclude from consideration the many things read in conjunction with a course on Philosophy of Religion...
...Gotlein's comments reveal to me a man who cares deeply about dishonesty and injustice, but where do we go from here...
...Paperbound $8.95...
...They were, instead, descendants of the Khazars, a Turkish tribe living in the Caucasus near the site of present-day Georgia...
...Random House...
...The Thirteenth Tribe, The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage...
...a heavy burden of fault lies on the shoulders of Abel who turned away from his brother's suffering...
...KTAV Publishing House, New York...
...neither the "Voluntaristic,' nor the 'Gnostic' approach...
...One day he awoke, walked to the tracks, and threw himseelf at the Inter-city train...
...1.65...
...Clothbouad $17.50...
...All Things Are Possible, The Healing & Charismatic Revivals in Modern America...
...Yet overall, it is honest and thorough, as it carries its hero through the formative years...
...Patterns can be discerned in almost any random selection of books, some stemming from the interests of the selector, others from the themes and styles of the books...
...Geoffrey Parrinder's introduction to this book on the Upanishads, The Wisdom of the Fathers (New Directions, $6.50), does not contain quite as much matter as Schloegl's, but his special service to the beginner is to provide straightforward English translations of some of the more crucial passages of these most difficult, obscure scriptures...
...The United States is rapidly becoming a have-not nation...
...Carter will find that we'll have no alternative to life in tomorrow's world than to join as responsible members of the United Nations, the legal representative of the international community...
...On the other hand, the publisher's blurb to the contrary notwithstanding, there is no great mystery about her relationship to Judaism...
...to its final discussion of the mystical experience of the self, it catches and holds the reader with its meditative style...
Vol. 104 • March 1977 • No. 5
