Religious Book Week Critics' Choices
Marty, Martin E.
Religious Book Week: CRITICS' CHOICES Martin E. Marty As A fiercely monogamous contentedly heterosexual modern church historian who lacks a crusading spirit, I have good reason to avoid a history...
...It is a book of the decade, for the decade, not a timeless setting forth or an aspiration to outclass Rahner, Schillebeeckx, and other norm-setters...
...we have by far the best-yet history of the reactionary Protestant movement that took shape between 1870-1925 and is so potent today...
...I also liked Hans Kung, Does God Exist...
...Religious Book Week: CRITICS' CHOICES Martin E. Marty As A fiercely monogamous contentedly heterosexual modern church historian who lacks a crusading spirit, I have good reason to avoid a history of homosexuality in the ancient and medieval church, especially one tinged with special pleading...
...something of what Catholicism is about today...
...more than I was supposed to...
...Whatever its flaws, the work is a refreshing re-exploration of a history everyone thought was settled...
...Now numerous issues are open...
...The author is George Marsden, a professor at Calvin College (and hence a conservative, but not a fundamentalist...
...Not a book of religion, but one rich in religious implications is the best-yet history of women in American history, Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (Oxford, $19.95, 527 pp...
...Christianity, in Boswell's account, was ambiguous or silent for the most part on the matter of homosexuality, until around 1150 when cultural change and social pressure produced hardlining...
...the classy, though not classic, exposition of the many dimensions of Catholicism...
...an impossible-to-describe reflection on evolution, biology, and mental activity...
...Equal time for other sides: since in 1980 the New Christian Right made many of its points by scoring homosexuality, I should mention a book that helps account for that Right historically...
...As usual, he drops and throws away more thought-provoking lines than most authors fit into their books...
...Like most over-praised books, it will soon be dissected by specialists, some of whom bring counter-ideologies of their own...
...This is Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell, $14.95, 231 pp...
...After this, laity and non-specialists need no longer ask, "Why was I not told...
...In Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford, $19.95,320 pp...
...Even where Kung fails, he does so interestingly...
...Just as secular feminism is sometimes "blamed" for producing a new consciousness of women in America, so a kind of non-Christian social pressure led to stigma against homosexuals...
...Until historians of religion write more than little bitty essays on the subject of women in America, Degler will serve best...
...Louis University...
...How account for tastes...
...The one is Richard McBrien's Catholicism (Winston, 2 vols., $29.95, 1186 pp...
...Departing from the historical line, I will mention two books that I would have blurbed, were I still a blurber...
...But it is hard to avoid John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press, $27.50, 424 pp...
...Doubleday, $17.50, 839 pp...
...The other blurb prospect is vastly different, as you would expect anything to be from the hand of Walter J. Ong, Jesuit Renaissance scholar and Renaissance man at St...
...And if advanced academics sometimes say that Kung covers familiar ground, which he does, each generation has to re-cover it for itself, and in that necessary project he is a great aid.eat aid...
...After Marsden there are no excuses for either misuse of the Fundamentalist past...
...This story is unfamiliar to most Americans and distorted by most others...
...If one loses the plot line here and there, as I must, and did, enough is left over to make the book well worth while...
...Ong helps account for the macho spirit, agonistic life in the academy, and male combativeness...
Vol. 108 • February 1981 • No. 4
