Religious Book Notes
Sawicki, Marianne
Religious booknotes New books & 'Strange Loops' Marianne Sawjcki IT was Douglas R. Hofstadter who a couple of years ago gave us the concept of the Strange Loop. In GMel, Esch&r, Bach, his zany...
...It is possible to meet oneself com...
...Kiing sees an emancipatory dimension in art whereby it guides humanization and symbolizes what is yet to be consummated...
...Richard Woods's Mysterion is Mysterion: Ah Approach to Mystical Spirituality, by Richard Woods, Thomas More, $14.95, 371 pp...
...Needleman says that the human soul is a rare achievement, not a universal endowment...
...The core of Christianity, we learn, has something to do with being "open" at the liturgy., and with forsaking emotion for the sake of feeling . . . but, why spoil the story...
...John A. T. Robinson does so in The Roots of a Radical (nice circularity to the title), wherein he doubles back.over his The Roots of a Radical, by John A.T...
...Jacob Ncedleman is convinced that the secret of this loop, the mysterious hidden core of Lost Christianity, by Jacob Needleman, Doubleday, $9.95, 237 pp...
...He is enlightened about the centering prayer thanks to some cassette tapes he happened to buy in a monastery gift shop...
...His quest for it is an adventure story that engages Needleman and engrosses the reader...
...Had he but world enough and time, this material were better edited into Christ and the third volume of the christology...
...There are several in The Spirit of the Earth, a volume of The Spirit of the Earth: A Teilhard Centennial Cekbratiw, edited by Jerome Perlinski, Seabury, $6.95, 159 pp., paperback...
...This encyclopedic but readable work takes account of other scholarly literature and sets the material in historical perspective...
...a solid introductory textbook of the cultural and religious phenomenon of mysticism, "a map rather than a travelogue...
...work in die 1970s in a pleasant representation of some of his essays from that period...
...Prayer, one might say, completes the strangest loop of all...
...There is a more urgent pace to Edward Schillebeeckx's Interim Report, where the Nijmegen theologian gives himself another chance to say what he really meant in the 1,700 pages of the first two installments of his christology, Jesus and Christ, and also replies to some of Interim Report on the Books "Jesus" & "Christ," by Edward Schillebeeckx, Crossroad, $9.95, 157 pp...
...In Frederick E. Crowe's estimation, die thought of Bernard Lonergan is more than a mere toot of theological method...
...Its secret is its simplicity...
...because through it the creature interacts with his or her Creator...
...Robinson, Crossroad, $10.95, 176 pp...
...essays celebrating the hundredth birthday of Teilhard de Chardin...
...For Woods, there is somednng democratic and non-elite about mysticism...
...MARIANNE SAWICKI (Marianne Sawicki, a Washington theologian, writer, and editor, will in the Fall become director of the Master's program in religious education at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles...
...7.95, 71 pp...
...He has (or dreams he has) a conversation with an anonymous monk in an airport on the other side of the world, and a year later lo...
...By contrast, although lacking the cinematic potential of the Needleman book...
...Recall the Escher lithograph of two hands drawing each other, and you'll get the picture...
...If Crowe is correct in his contention that Lonergan has provided an organon, that is, a tool that shapes its user, then there is a Strange Loop in Loaergaii's thought...
...Teilhard's vision is such that to glimpse it helps it come true...
...This insight is die spark of modern critical consciousness, a spark that has lit many a brush ftre across the landscape of religion, most notably the one called liberation theology...
...unt University in Los Angeles...
...In GMel, Esch&r, Bach, his zany treatise on logic, he coined the phrase for those occasions when an element within a system jumps out and acts upon the system...
...his critics...
...Lucky the dreamer whose imaginary friends write his books for him...
...otherwise sleepyhead essay Art and the Question of Meaning...
...This book gives us a chance to look in on the noosphere and see how Teilhard's evolutionary vision is evolving itself among Testhard's disciples...
...The volume's editor, Jerome Perlinski, and the other contributors tell what encountering Teilhardianism has done to diem, and what they in turn have done to the thought of Teilhard...
...While the essays are not equally matched, one or another of them will likely lasso the reader in a Strange Loop and tie him or her into its own micronoosphere...
...Teilhard is the thinker who thinks that thinking results from evolution and then helps evolution along by spurring the hominization of the world and ehristogenesis...
...The only Strange Loop lurking here is the mystical itself...
...The Lonergan Enterprise compares Aristotle, who stands for deductive logic, and Francis Bacon, who stands for induction and the scientific' method, with Tht Lonergan Enterprise, by Frederick E. Crowe, S.J., Cowley, $5, 143 pp., paperback...
...Hofstadter finds Strange Loops in music, in mathematics, and in the perceptually tricky drawings of M. C. Escher...
...a tattered manuscript arrives bearing Egyptian postage stamps but no return address-a strongly Gurdjieffian manuscript which he quotes at length...
...Lonergan, who calls us to fidelity to the innate structures of consciousness itself...
...Once you know about Strange Loops, they start turning up in the darnedest places...
...Christianity, has been lost to the mainstream...
...It is easier to accord the status of organon to critical theory, the Marxist persuasion that all knowledge has an interest in-doing something-in other words, that every theory (theological ones included) has its practical ax to grind...
...It is exciting to see it happening in this book, as Sehillebeeckx pushes ahead with his argument while attempting to secure die territory which fie has already besieged and conquered...
...His scholarly credentials notwithstanding, Needleman's story in Lost Christianity is indeed a flight of fancy, the tale of a jet-set religion researcher whom we see now in London, now on Mount Athos, then in Bangkok, Cambridge, and Berkeley...
...But Schillebeeckx is 67, and his work during the last decade is a late-breaking revolution in theology ana theological method...
...J. B. Mctz proposes a similar function of expectation for prayer in The Courage to Pray, a short book The Courage to Pray, by Karl Rahner & Johann Baptist Metz, Crossroad, $3.95, 93 pp., paperback...
...Needleman sets greatest store by that data which he unearths unwittingly...
...which is eagerly awaited...
...ing and going without having to execute a full-tilt Strange Loop...
...It constitutes an "organon," a programmed relationship between theologian and theology...
...conglomerating Metz's essay and a discussion of the communion of saints by Karl Rahner...
...One might well demurffom this conclusion, however, and concede only that Lonergan has provided an adept phenomenology of the ordinary self-understanding of theologians that reinforces what it discloses...
...The spark of critical consciousness brightens Hans Kiing's Art and the Question of Meaning, by-Hans Kung, Crossroad...
Vol. 108 • July 1981 • No. 13
