Religious Book Week Critics' Choices
Dolan, Jay P.
Religious Book Week: CRITICS' CHOICES Jay P. Dolan ONE OF THE spiritual giants of our generation was Thomas Merton. Not surprisingly his life and work still remain in the foreground and it is not...
...This study certainly breaks new ground and reveals, among other things, how influential the Vatican was in persuading American religious to become missionaries in China...
...Hardly the last word on the topic, Breslin's book is, I suspect, the first of several in the next decade which will unveil the hidden story of the China mission...
...Not surprisingly many of the issues discussed by Tracy still have relevance for today's pastors...
...Yet we know very little about this chapter in American Catholic history...
...My final recommendation is a book just recently published, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925, by George M. Marsden (Oxford University Press, $16.95, 306 pp...
...To penetrate the mind and soul of Merton, I can think of no better guide than The Solitary Explorer by Elena Malits, C.S.C...
...Not surprisingly his life and work still remain in the foreground and it is not unusual to go into a bookstore today, twelve years after his death, and see a newly published book of Merton's poetry or photography...
...Marsden examines the beginnings of this impulse in Protestantism and the cultural forces in American society which shape this school of thought...
...The intensity which this struggle reached - the author calls it a "war" - strikingly reveals how much conflict existed in the church half a century ago...
...The 1970s witnessed the resurgence of evangelical Protestantism and the more we know about its roots, the better we will understand the evangelicals of today...
...This is not a biography of Merton...
...This is not the type of book you would read on the subway, but it is rewarding reading...
...rather it is a study of his spiritual writings organized around several themes , metaphorically expressed, such as the guilty bystander and the solitary explorer...
...Another chapter in American Catholic history which has remained unknown to most of us is the story of the Polish...
...Its strength is to illustrate the important interaction between culture and religion...
...Edwards was not only the intellectual giant of eighteenth century Puritanism, he was also pastor of a congregation for twenty-two years...
...This story is much more complicated and more significant than the Scopes monkey trial or Elmer Gantry would have you believe...
...It is a well written, carefully researched study of a specific Polish community...
...its focus is the campaign of the Polish clergy and laity to have Polish bishops appointed in the United States...
...Though only about four and five million of an estimated forty million evangelicals in 1980 "would refer to themselves as 'fundamentalists,' a broader fundamentalist impulse is still strong in much of the rest of evangelicalism...
...To Marsden's credit, this book makes intelligible a complex chapter in American religious history.s history...
...A fine example of the new social history in the area of religion is the book by Patricia J. Tracy, Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth Century Northampton (Hill & Wang, $5.95,270pp...
...Fortunately, this situation is changing as a new breed of Catholic historians begin to publish their research...
...To dispel our ignorance, Thomas Breslin has written a book on the China experience, China, American Catholicism, and The Missionary (Pennsylvania State University Press, $15.95, 144 pp...
...In comparison, today's disputes sound like Sunday school debates...
...It is a penetrating study written in a readable, engaging style...
...is an excellent example of the work being done by the new generation of American Catholic historians...
...Anthony J. Kuzniewski, S.J., belongs to this group and his study, Faith and Fatherland: The Polish Church War in Wisconsin 1896-1918 (University of Notre Dame Press, $12.95,171 pp...
...Harper & Row, $6.95, 175 pp...
...This study examines the pastoral side of Edwards's life and seeks to explain why after such long years of service to the people of Northampton!, Edwards was fired from his job...
...Long before Merton traveled to Asia, American priests and nuns worked mere as missionaries...
...to be sensitive to and understand this relationship is as Vital today as it was in Edwards's time...
...He was a prolific and talented monk who worked at writing as hard as he did at praying...
Vol. 108 • February 1981 • No. 4
