CRITICS' CHOICES FOR RELIGIOUS BOOK WEEK
Traxler, Sister Margaret Ellen & Cohen, Arthur A. & McDonnell, Kilian & Dohen, Dorothy & Neuhaus, Richard John & McCauley, Michael F.
Selections for Religious Boole Week CRITICS' CHOICES Dorothy Dohen In a year which saw religious trendsetter Harvey Cox come full circle from his celebration of the secular, through his...
...if God is not responsible, does one need such a God...
...In this context will I be accused of monastic nepotism if I comment on a confrere's book...
...11.50), a collection of essays in which the religious concern is usually explicit and is never far from the surface...
...Ostensibly intended to enlighten misinformed nonCatholics, it is a brilliant social portrait that is equally valuable to believers...
...Unnuanced broadsides are directed against the historicalcritical method.How does °ne react on a book in which the introduction dompares the authors of the Myth of Michael F. McCauley Surely the most talked-about book of'the past year—even the New York Times carried an editorial about it— was the study commissioned by the Catholic Theological Society, Human Sexuality (Paulist Press, $8.95...
...Shannon, a former director of that organization, covers its history from 1941-1975...
...Even if he were not my friend, I would have to mention Peter Berger's Facing Up to Modernity (Basic...
...Now that this glaring division over morality, this separation of official preachment and daily practice, is out in the open, we have the authors to thank—for their courage and, still more, for their sensitivity and honesty...
...Some are asking, "If we have Jesus and the Bible, do we need the church...
...His powerful defense of personal worth and destiny is marred by an antireligious animus that is as regrettable as it is, in my view, unnecessary to his argument...
...Our knowledge of Jesus Christ is much too serious to be left to theologians and exegetes alone, who have monotonously neglected art and imagination as guides to religious truth...
...MonsigJ...
...The principal recurrent themes of this work—the holocaust, the perduration of Israel, the despair of the word—impart an obsessional quality to Jabes's thought which is betimes atmospherically dense, betimes needlessly rhetorical, but is always to my mind addressing the living theological center, about which all post-holocaustal theology must turn: if God is responsible, in what measure the responsibility...
...The antidote: reinstate mystics, clowns and artists...
...Finally, however, the book that has brought together my own theological thinking, pressing me at last out of the fitted mold of a generation, and turning me loose to address questions I knew to have been unanswered and virtually unasked...
...My choice of Hans Kiing's On Being a Christian (Doubleday, $12.95) may seem surprising, but there are two sections especially relevant to my theme of neo-orthodoxy...
...For some, the person-centered approach is virtually condemnatory...
...12.95) is a further offering of ethical wisdom and insight from Stanley Hauerwas...
...His anthology drawn from Martin Buber's periodical, Der Jude (1916-1928), will be published at the end of the year...
...Fortress Press...
...It is not a return to some illusory inwardness...
...19.95...
...Just Because gives a story which must also be a challenge to other groups, precisely because of the global caring and sharing of Church Women United...
...Mary for Today...
...Also voided is the unique character of Christ...
...there is nothing left but iwral aphorisms...
...Johnson's worldview and convincingly portrays what is rarely celebrated in our culture devoted to 157 the base and mediocre—a life worthy of emulation...
...PauIJst Press...
...With some sympathetic translation, however, the Christian reader should be able to recognize this book as a significant re-engagement of philosophy in the discussion of the "ultimate questions" that has suffered from a too exclusive relegation to the realm of theology...
...Hauerwas, a Methodist on the Notre Dame faculty, continues to be one of the most consistently rewarding guides to a wide range of ethical problems troubling the Christian community today...
...tends that there is more to New lestament revelation than experience but if one simply cuts and lifts oat the experiential dimension, one has not only impoverished but has de-natured the original reality...
...It is both...
...Karl Rahner called this the best book of the year, Sister Margaret Brennan, IHM, the book of the decade...
...Each in his own Way k involved in a grisly murder case...
...oorothy dohen, professor of sociology, currently chairs the interdisciplinary division at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus...
...One is embarrassed...
...Ellen and Mary Lukas's Teilhard: The Man, The Priest, The Scientist (Doubleday, $10...
...By the year 2000, half the world's Catholics (1.2 billion) will be in Latin America...
...Most noteworthy in this study—certainly most controversial—are the extensive pastoral guidelines...
...9.95...
...The fe* tagonists, Homicide Lieutenant To Spellacy and the Rt...
...What's more, Teilhard emerges as a socially engaging Frenchman who was irresistible to women, some of whom fell in love with him and pursued him on his worldwide travels...
...is a careful, scholarly symposium contending that heirs of the Enlightenment cannot accept the two-naturj doctrine formulated at Chalcedon, and opts for a Christianity without incar*nation...
...terchangeable...
...Paulist, $1.75) is very helpful...
...SISTER MARGARET ELLEN TRAXLER IS Director of the Institute of Women Today, an inter-faith faculty of 100 professional women based in Chicago...
...The second church flourished in Europe of which the U.S...
...These nineteen women give the impression that they are in touch with the Living God...
...each in his own way becomes a victim, True Confessions delves into the coia...
...is a fascinating, revealing look at the legendary Jesuit ¦who "believed man is descended from the apes...
...Though on the side of the angels, the Truth of God Incarnate,edited by Michal Green (Eerdmans, $2.45) is an unworthy response...
...22.50) in a roundup of outstanding religious books will not be lost on the author...
...This book goes well beyond its design to serve as commentary for the document...
...Margaret Ellen Troxler Women and the Word: Sermons...
...The Coming of the Third Church is a fact of a quiet revolution, for CRITICS FATHER HERBERT MCCABE, O.P., iS the editor of New Blackfriars, Oxford, in which his review-article first appeared...
...The book includes his explanation of the Hartford Appeal, in which he shows that it was not aimed at straw men but very real theologians, and that, moreover, it did not imply a withdrawal from Christian social action...
...It is a fine book...
...Bate is wonderfully alert to the part of religion in Dr...
...Moreover, the book shows his superb assimilation of social-science literature...
...What will people say if . . .? Oh, who cares...
...Brown shows that, far from being romantic and naive, they present a theology of Christ which is all of a piece with the rest of Matthew's and Luke's Gospels...
...Selections for Religious Boole Week CRITICS' CHOICES Dorothy Dohen In a year which saw religious trendsetter Harvey Cox come full circle from his celebration of the secular, through his celebration of the exotic (and erotic) in Eastern religions and new Western semi-religions, to the rediscovery of his Christian heritage, I may not be out of fashion recommending books which I think are excellent in building up a neo-orthodoxy...
...12.95...
...Martin Buber in praise and criticism...
...2.50) Among more exactly theological works, Wolfhart Pannenberg has given us a little paperback with the formidable title, Human Nature, Election and History (Westminster...
...Possibly the church which John Gregory Dunne portrays in True Confessions (E.P...
...and women theologians as Sandra Schneiders, Pheme Perkins, and Sonya Quitslund give compelling and complete commentaries on "The Vatican Declaration on the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood...
...Omega Books...
...Despite widespread zealous enthusiasm which enshrined Teilhard as a cult figure, little has been written about his personal life...
...Cardinal Suenens's Essays on Renewal (Servant, $2.95) is not on Christology but it is clear that the charismatic renewal does not intend to displace the centrality of Christ with one of the Spirit...
...The face of the next century church may be shaped by how the West welcomes this new coming...
...American Catholics, contrary to the stereotypes, are more dovish, less racist and less anti-Semitic than others in the general population...
...He is associate pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Manhattan...
...The blurb on the book speaks of a "reinterpretation" of the incarnation but evacuation is more acdurate...
...In the Cardinal's perspective, the renewal is as broad as the gospel and touches the whole of life...
...155 Human Sexuality merely expresses the moral values they have been counseling for some time...
...158 half the world's Catholics are in the southern hemisphere...
...Church Women United is a unique matrix...
...Now, however, after ten years of research and interviews, the Lukases reveal a man of uncompromising loyalty to the church who, nevertheless, once called his ecclesiastical superiors "dolts and ignoramuses...
...The Joyful Christian: 127 Reading from C. S. Lewis (Macmillan, $7.95) could introduce lovers of the Nardian chronicles to his theological and devotional works...
...Eminent social activist of the sixties and signer of % Hartford Appeal, Coffin evidently saw the necessity for reaffirming Christian transcendence considerably before Cox...
...Her conclusions may not be persuasive but she relentlessly asks the right questions and thus contributes to the understanding of an issue that has a continued claim upon our thinking about a just society...
...A neo-orthodoxy, I hasten to add, purged of triumphalism in attitude and fundamentalism in approach...
...richard john neuhaus is Senior Editor of Worldview and the author of Christian Faith and Public Policy (Augsburg...
...and just before the bitter exchange with Hannah Arendt...
...Building upon the findings of Franz Rosenweig (and his roots in German mysticism, as well as Jehuda Halevi and Ludwig Steinheim) and employing Scholem as the near-canonic cicerone who has identified where the questions are to be found and liberated, I believe there is a remarkable period ahead for world Jewish thinking...
...Women of diverse faiths, races and academic disciplines have each contributed a sermon to this readable book...
...clearly it is not Roman Catholic...
...His discussion of the existence of God is masterful apologetics, especially for those ex-Christians or would-be Christians who find themselves still in the peculiar position of wanting to follow Christ while not believing in God...
...4.95...
...Patricia Noone does this simply and clearly using scriptural and classical background which helps to make Mary for Today one more gift for the United Nations-designated Decade of Women, 1976-1986...
...The author claims she may not even be able to pray the whole rosary without being prompted...
...The homilies are filled with Scripture, anecdotes, application and meaning...
...How barren it is, how desperate it appears, how hopeful, in fact, it may be regarded...
...Dulles goes on to indicate how rooted in that tradition he is...
...Once again, Magda Denes's In Necessity and Sorrow (Basic...
...Edmond Jabes, an Egyptian Jew, obliged to leave Cairo after 1956, now settled in Paris, undertakes in The Book of Yukel and Return to the Book (constituting the second and third volumes of his trilogy, Le Livre des Questions, but published as a single volume, Wesleyan University Press, $5.95) to develop a mystical semantics, a primary language which undergirds speech, which often renders speech beside the point...
...Arthur a. cohen is completing a new novel, Acts of Theft...
...Richard J. Neuhaus The oddness of recommending David L. Norton's Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (Princeton University Press...
...The Myth of the God Incarnate, edited by John Hick (Westminster, $4.95) (Review-article page 150—Ed...
...mately, Dunne writes about the ambiguities of life that line the road to salvation...
...In this detense of the incarnation, not learning but Propriety is wanting...
...Finally, for somewhat lighter read, ing I would recommend two books, One is William Sloane Coffin Jr<'f absorbing memoir Once to Every Man (Atheneum, $12.50...
...She concentrates on the real Mary, the woman who had a strong, realistic self-concept, the Mary who was both motherly and forceful...
...of Notre Dame...
...159...
...And with good reason, Authors Anthony Kosnik, William Carroll, Agnes Cunningham, Ronald Madras and James Schulte have deliberately—defiantly, say some—eschewed the tunnel vision of earlier Catholic moralists...
...Further, the data regarding educational, occupational and economic status indicate that Catholics have quite simply arrived...
...It is a valuable compendium for on-going discussion of a crucial issue facing the church...
...Dunne has masterfully constructed a raucous, foul-mouthed IrishCatholic world of cops and priests, church fund-raisers and brothel-keepers, scheming monsignors and conniving Knights of St...
...In our day when complaints are heard about poor sermons, perhaps this book Classified will help churches "not to forget the ladies...
...The Christological headlines this past year were made by two British books...
...Kiing's treatment of the Passion of Our Lord is in the best tradition of Christian devotionalism...
...regarding her Eichmann in Jerusalem, the single most imporatant essay of the postwar period on the crisis of Jewish theology...
...God is embodied in speech (in a certain sense physicalized)—the Word is both a portion of the self and the other of God, the dialectical affirmation and denial which is the electrostatic field of creativity, judgment, salvation, and the end of history...
...Chalcedon was not the last word but a new beginning and the quest continues...
...Kung uses sociology, but never as a substitute for theology, nor because he has lost confidence in the theological tradition...
...Forty-five essays by as many writers provide a library of resources...
...Jerome Theisen, in The Ultimate Church and the Promise of Salvation (St...
...Deserving the same attention, for altogether different reasons, is Andrew Greeley's The American Catholic (Basic Books, $15...
...plex lives of these two brothers, o^, posing the guilt and hostility fc^ separate, yet finally unite them...
...However unacceptable the central thesis, the book does lerve to illuminate again the weakdenses...
...Editor Helen Crotwell has such writers as Nancy Hardesty, Valerie Russell, Nadine Foley, Cynthia Wedel, and Letty Russell each contribute a sermon to serve the worshipping communities...
...Orbis...
...FATHER KILIAN MCDONNELL, O.S.B., iS Executive Director of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at Collegeville, Minnesota...
...Just Because...
...Beyond the excellence of the narrative lies an important story of women's witness to what women's bonding has achieved...
...More than this, he deserves the gratitude of American Catholics for the positive reinforcement he so ably provides...
...Mixed in with solied insights and material of valu are hnomtletic, hortatory and whimsical asides...
...Thomas More Press...
...There is no other example like it...
...The au...
...The Third World gives us the third church which is got coming but is already here...
...It is a pleasure to welcome Thomas J. J. Altizer back to a mode of theo156 logical address, wholly uncompromised by the necessities of defending oneself far out on the limb (that is, having to cope with the discomforts of unpopularity by polemical exaggeration...
...penetrating examination of S. Y. Agnon, the Hebrew novelist of the diaspora...
...ence...
...thor, a Swiss missiologist gives a clear picture of the shape, color and tenture of this new creative presence, the third church in Africa, Asia and Latin America...
...is part...
...michael f. mccauley is executive editor of the Thomas More Association newsletters and the author of A Contemporary Meditation on Doubting...
...As one expects from Pannenberg, who continues what is, I believe, the most impressive individual theological enterprise in our time, the book is a carefully wrought argument that leads the reader through a comprehensive vision of biblical and classical theology...
...Altizer, like myself an admirer of Jabes (although I think him wrong to interpret Jabes as an apocalyptist, since apocalypse comes hard to Jewish lips, for we are forbidden to force the end, only to describe it), is at his best in The Self-Embodiment of God...
...Others, however, find that the God Incarnate with Communists...
...In the light of such excellent scholarship, the Vatican might even grant women tonsure...
...Women Priests...
...Refirst on Jewish Theology" is the employ the findings and ina lifetime spent gathering and winnowing the harvest of two millennia of Jewish mysticism and turning its criteria to the devastation that passes as Jewish theology...
...and one arrives at a churohless Christianity...
...Just as Jesus is translated for each age, so also must be Mary translated for each new day...
...For setting the record straight in a conclusive manner, Father Greeley deserves accolades...
...It moves from an extended giographical interview with Scholem, conducted with great Wit and penetration, through Scholem's bitter examination of the so-called German-Jewish symbiosis, one created by the naivetee and trust of Jews, and thoroughly betrayed by its ostensible Collaborators...
...The fact that my desk is adjacent to that of the editor of this next volume in no way colors my opinion...
...The first church was the church of the East where the first eight ecumenical councils were held...
...Some of the essays elaborate themes about "mediating structures and public policy" that were set out in our joint effort, To Empower People (available from Mediating Structures, 170 E. 64th St., N.Y.C...
...Gregory...
...Patricia Noone...
...Truthfulness and Tragedy (Univ...
...Walter Benjamin in love admiration, and sorrow...
...Desmond Spellacy, though brother, profess conflicting loyalties*—sanqk monious Des, soiled Tommy—yet to somehow remarkably similar, even fa...
...She provides a thoroughly modern, affirmative treatment of Mary that is honest and pragmatic, neither enshrining Mary in theological obfuscations nor sequestering her in pious devotions...
...This is not to make a small concession...
...The imaginable is the believable...
...Every character, every situation in this black humorous, cynical, gutsy novel completely contradicts the old-fashioned "Catholic novel...
...Finally, for sheer joy and edification, there is W. Jackson Bate's biography, Samuel Johnson (Harcourt Brace...
...Arlene and Leonard Swidler, eds...
...Summarizing a massive series of surveys which represent fifteen years of research, the book is neither objective nor dispassionate, but then why should it be...
...4.25...
...Self-described as a moderate, Dulles writes in The Resilient Church: The Necessity and Limits of Adaptation (Doubleday, $7.95): "How can anyone who is forced to call into question the whole basis of his spiritual life become an effective witness for the tradition within which he stands...
...His new book, The Self-Embodiment of God (Harper & Row, $6.95) is a splendidly difficult, but not in the least obtuse, meditation on divine selfembodiment in the metaphor and language of Scripture...
...Not only does Buhlmann present the problems of adaptation such as tribal customs, mores and folkways of "adjusting" Christianity to this new pres...
...Walbert Buhlmann...
...Forty-five authors including such men as Carroll Stuhlmueller, John McKenzie, and Thomas Thompson...
...Of special interest is the focus on the one covenant shared by Jews and Christians and Pennenberg's exploration of the idea of election as it relates to communities and nations in our kind of world...
...His treatment of the virginal conception, his a priori rejection of miracles, and his snubbing of the Johannine scriptures, made me turn to the work of two scholars whose criticism of Kung I found at once empathetic and lucid: Avery Dulles and Raymond E. Brown...
...Patricia Noone's Mary for Today (Thomas More Press, $8.95) is an exceptional book, one that could only be written in our consciousness-raised times by a woman who brings to her understanding of Mary an acute awareness of her own Christian womanhood...
...The Coming of the Third Church...
...Brown's The Birth of the Messiah (Doubleday, $12.50) is splendid exegesis of the Infancy narratives...
...Those of us who never forgot The Screwtape Letters will be reminded that Lewis left us a legacy of solid, genial Christianity...
...Dutton, $9.95) is not the Catholic Church you grew up in or ever read about...
...Noone is straightforward without being flippant, frank without being irreverent...
...Helen Gray Crotwell, ed...
...He also gives some possible ways in which the new church cap remain itself with such procedures as the "bride price" and others, while at the same time embracing Christianity and over the generations, becoming the whole family, true to each man and woman...
...Arthur A. Cohen The most remarkable departure among religious books is not explicitly a religious book, but a book of reflections, responses to questions which need not be asked and virtually defy answer...
...Margaret Shannon...
...10021...
...This is an enjoyable biography of an extraordinary thinker...
...4.50...
...One reason why Marian devotion falters may be that a feminine principle has not been used to adapt Mary's gifts and meaning for this age...
...is not a specifically religious book but she illuminates the everyday life-and-death realities of abortion with stunning compassion and moral sensitivity...
...Disdaining sentimentality and superficiality, Sr...
...John's University Press, $7.50), sees the continuing necessity of the church not as an ark containing all who will be saved, but as a sign of God's presence, who prays for and witnesses to others outside her visible structures, even if she is not their direct agent of salvation...
...If one is looking for a quick insight into the re-examinations of the classical doctrine concerning Christ and a look at new emerging themes, Gerald O'Collins's What Are They Saying About Jesus...
...Readers new to modern scriptural commentary, or who are wondering how Brown's work relates to the present state of the Church, would be well-advised to read first his Biblica Reflections on Crises Facing a. Church (Paulist Press, $2.45...
...long known, of the Chalcedonian formulation...
...Her devotion to Mary as shown in Mary for Today gives us a portrait of the author not only as a professor of English which she is but also a faithful daughter of Mary and a woman who knows and appreciates her womanhood...
...8.95...
...This is a history of the Church Women United, a nation-wide organization of Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish women...
...Gershom Scholem's On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (Schocken Books, $16.50) appears to lack unity, although its unity is real and implicit...
...Are we drifting towards a Jesus-cult in a narrow sense...
...Could anyone else but this saintly, blustery, non-Roman British Christian make even the idea of Purgatory palatable...
Vol. 105 • March 1978 • No. 5
