Religious Book Week Critics' Choices
Higgins, George G.
Religious Book Week: CRITICS' CHOICES George G. Higgins MERTON: A BIOGRAPHY. Monica Furlong. Harper and Row. $12.95, 342 pp. For many years one had the impression that Thomas Merton's life as a...
...Nevertheless, despite this inevitable limitation, the Whale-Hebblethwaite symposium is the best of the current crop of English-language books about John Paul II and is far superior to any of the biographies of the pope that have been translated into English from the original Polish...
...Gradually, however, word filtered through that his life, to the contrary, was beset with nagging tensions and, more specifically, that he and his Abbot were seriously at odds...
...For this we can be grateful, despite the fact that Furlong's book is less than adequate in its treatment of Merton's extensive and influential writings on social and political matters...
...Nevertheless he is not discouraged...
...Winston Press...
...Amen...
...But that's neither here nor there...
...1186 pp...
...While the majority of the entries reprinted in this extraordinarily well edited collection of letters are not concerned with religion as such, enough of them either directly or indirectly touch upon religious matters to warrant including the volume as a whole in this annual list of current books about religion...
...Ticknor and Fields...
...Their book is an added argument in favor of keeping the London Times alive...
...In any event, Furlong, while avoiding the more obvious pitfalls of psycho-history, has told us more about the real Merton than most of us ever knew before...
...Father McBrien has learned the hard way in recent months that some people, God bless them, are extremely hard to please...
...The fact is that by the impressive example of his own "pulpit performance" over a long period of years and by his perceptive essays (including the opening chapter of the present book) on the theory and practice of homiletics, he has done as much as any other single priest of this generation to raise the level of Roman Catholic preaching in the United States...
...Tell The Next Generation: Homilies and Near Homilies...
...He says that his primary purpose in publishing this, his third book of sermons, was "to help the reform along in a small but perhaps not insubstantial way...
...10.95, 256 pp...
...Whale, Hebblethwaite, et al, are critical of the pope on certain matters, but always respectfully and contructively so...
...Walter J. Burghardt, S.J.Paulist Press...
...Father Burghardt notes very gently and compassionately in his Preface that our "pulpit performance" leaves much to be desired...
...For many years one had the impression that Thomas Merton's life as a Trappist monk at Gethsemane Abbey was settled and filled with contentment...
...They take him very seriously on his own terms and refrain from trying to force him into a provincial Western European-North American mold...
...She concludes that, in the end, his efforts were crowned with victory...
...In addition to sheer hard work ("four hours of preparation for each minute in the pul-pit"), the secret of his success is to be found in his life-time commitment to serious study and serious prayer and, no less importantly, his life-long affair (I almost said his infatuation) with the English language...
...Any book about a living pope, especially one as energetic and peripatetic as John Paul II, is inevitably doomed to be out of date ten minutes after the manuscript is sent to the printer...
...The good news is that the majority of the professionally trained theologians who have thus far reviewed Catholicism (David Tracy, Avery Dulles, and Raymond Brown, among others) have given it very high marks indeed...
...Alas, his more conservative critics will have none of his irenicism...
...He is truly a master craftsman and a joy to read...
...6.95 (paper), 240 pp...
...29.95, (2 vols...
...Dulles put it very well when he wrote that, as a textbook that attempts to incorporate the dramatic developments since Vatican II, it "will not soon be surpassed in scope or quality...
...This is by way of saying that The Man Who Leads The Church, which in large part built around Pope John Paul's frequent journeys a-broad, suffers from the limitation of having been written before his trips to Brazil, France, and Germany and not having been able to anticipate his forthcoming trip to the Philippine Islands, Guam, and Japan...
...Maybe so...
...He is being much too modest and self-effacing in this regard...
...He intended his two-volume, eleven-hundred-page magnum opus to be "a bridge between the church of yesterday and the church of today" and leaned over backwards therein "to do justice to the true values and legitimate concerns of both sides: the conservatives' regard for continuity and stability, and the progressives' regard for development and growth...
...The sheer venom of their attacks not only on his book but on his person suggests, to this reviewer at least, that they will settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender...
...Edited by Mark Amory...
...The Letters of Evelyn Waugh...
...The Man Who Leads the Church: An Assessment of Pope John Paul II John Whale, Peter Hebblethwaite and Staff of the London Sunday Times...
...The English-speaking world can ill afford to lose a paper that is capable of producing this kind of fair-minded, sophisticated, and broad-gauge reporting.e reporting...
...So much for the bad news...
...One turns to Waugh not for theological enlightenment but for the sheer delight of reading, in this case, one of the great letter-writers of recent generations...
...Evelyn Waugh's religious views and/or prejudices are curmudgeonly elitist and aristocratic, often to the point of being aggressively (but hilariously) eccentric in the low-key British sense of the word...
...At least one reviewer, writing from a religiously agnostic point of view, is not persuaded by Furlong's "rhetoric" in this regard...
...The reviewer argues that Furlong has artificially imposed a spiritual design on Merton's life, one that is not supported by the evidence at hand...
...Catholicism...
...So it goes...
...Incidentally, it is hard to think of any other British or American author whose posthumously published letters to relatives, friends, and foes would hold one's attention, as Waugh's held mine, for 673 pages and still leave one thirsting for more of the same...
...25, 673 pp...
...Furlong is refreshingly, but not sensationally, frank in discussing Merton's agonizing struggle to resolve these tensions...
...Richard P. McBrien...
Vol. 108 • February 1981 • No. 4
