Religious Book Week Critics' Choices
Cunneen, Sally
Religious Book Week: CRITICS' CHOICES Sally Cunneen THE "RELIGIOUS" writers I find most useful these days are not so much the scholarly or the pious as those who are making strenuous efforts to...
...Among other riches he has recovered here is that of the early Christian notion of work as valuable in educating and liberating the human person...
...Combining history, theology, and literary criticism, he explains why past ages exaggerated the importance of the saint as wonder-worker and uses Silone, Greene, and Bernanos to give us clues regarding the meaning of today's non-institutional but profound hunger for the sacred...
...By a-voiding empty moralizing he achieves genuine credibility for his claim that the religious understanding of the human is the only practical one to adopt if we are to avoid economic and ecological destruction...
...Finally, Lawrence Cunningham's The Meaning of Saints (Harper & Row, $10.95, 186 pp...
...Most readers will not think Marty's book "religious" because he finds similes "between friendship and the way biblical faith pictures divine-human ties" in experiences so common we have forgotten to savor them...
...In order to make recoveries like Schumacher's, perhaps we all need sabbaticals like those Brita Stendahl has enjoyed at regular intervals as a professor's wife...
...John Shea's Stories of Faith (Thomas More, $10.95, 256pp...
...in Good Work (late talks and essays organized by Peter N. Gillingham, Harper & Row, paperback, $3.95, 223 pp...
...he has fused faith and metaphysics with practical economic analysis, making us sharply aware of the loss we suffered at his death in 1977...
...is able to find present meaning in the lives of the saints by asking us to rethink the meaning of sanctity...
...Because he knows how to listen to stories, Shea can expand our understanding of faith, using a contemporary imagination to "play with the story of Jesus and resymbolize it under the influence of the present experience of the Spirit...
...Her gut-level human response to reality enables us to see it as she does, a sacred gift in which the picture of the earth seen from the moon is a holy icon and the struggle to communicate clearly and honestly with husband, child, and community is implied by the second commandment...
...One can almost hear the kind and humorous voice warning us against the dangers of large-scale technology and encouraging us to try the alternative of appropriate technology...
...is a further reminder that "we must be sensitive to the depth of the everyday, to the extraordinary that bursts from the mundane, to the marvelous ways of what we take for granted...
...sacred...
...she has organized her experiences as a woman in-between (cultures, languages, generations, world-views) so as to make visible in her own life the surprisingly positive pull of the commandments...
...Schumacher is a good example...
...Marty discovered that the spiritual writers and theologians have talked a great deal about charity but had almost ignored friendship...
...Religious Book Week: CRITICS' CHOICES Sally Cunneen THE "RELIGIOUS" writers I find most useful these days are not so much the scholarly or the pious as those who are making strenuous efforts to recover a vital connection between their lives and work and the faith of tradition...
...In her Sabbatical Reflections: The Ten Commandments in a New Day (Fortress Press, $7.95, 125 pp...
...Martin E. Marty also helps us look freshly at what is familiar in his unpretentious, sharply-observed little book, Friendship (Argus Communications, $3.50, 252 pp...
Vol. 108 • February 1981 • No. 4
