Religious Book Week Critics' Choices
Massey, Marilyn Chapin
Religious Book Week: CRITICS' CHOICES Marilyn Chapin Massey AS AN HISTORIAN of Christianity by trade, I am always grateful for books that provide new perspectives on the past. Since a great deal...
...He has taken for his topic Christianity's attitude toward homosexuality and he has traced it with meticulous scholarship up to the late middle ages...
...and Letters of Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald (Vintage Books, New York, paperback, $6.95, 640 pp...
...As the editor, Mary Edwardsen, wrote, this volume contains women's words - "the words of those who have been silenced in the history of man...
...Hardback $27.50, 424 pp...
...Two books appearing this year brought extraordinarily bright lights to illumine Christian history: Religious Practices and Collective Perceptions: Hidden Hontologies in the Renaissance and Reformation by Lionel Rothkrug (Historical Reflections, Vol...
...Boswell's study is less startling than Rothkrug's but the light it provides is strong and steady...
...Published by the History Department, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Paperback $16, 264 pp...
...7, No...
...The book reveals that our present Christian attitudes to homosexuality are directly rooted in medieval Christianity's treatment of it and that Christianity was not always as "medieval" as we are...
...In the tradition of Union Seminary's stance of radically challenging comfortable Christian perspectives, Mary Edwardsen has put together essays, pictures, and book reviews into one of the most excellent volumes of a religious journal to appear in recent years...
...He even connects Kant and Hegel with the bones of the holy dead...
...XXV, Nos...
...The light that this book provides, as the Harvard historian George Williams said, seems to come from strobe lights...
...years...
...and Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality by John Boswell (University of Chicago, Chicago...
...My final choice is Feminist Interpretation, a special issue of The Union Seminary Quarterly Review, Broadway & W. 120th St., New York, N.Y., 10027 (Vol...
...They are Graham Greene's Ways of Escape: An Autobiography (Simon and Schuster: New York, Hardback, $12.95, 256 pp...
...Rothkrug tries to show that those areas that remained Catholic had numerous shrines which played a major part in the devotion of the people and that the presence or absence of shrine piety can explain Germany's political and moral behavior...
...1, Spring, 1980...
...In this sense all of the eras of Christianity deserve the name "Dark Ages...
...Not since Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain has there appeared such literate witness to faith in the midst of contemporary culture...
...1 and 2, Fall and Winter, 1979-80, paperback, $5, 161 pp...
...Speaking and hearing these words is essential, in my opinion, if we are to see into the darkness of the Christian past and to find our way now...
...Since a great deal of the history of Christianity has been written from the evidence of official records and the products of the dominant intellectual traditions, an immense darkness covers much of what must have been the vibrant, complex, and diverse belief and practice of innumerable Christians...
...Rothkrug's is the more adventurous of the two books, relating early medieval burial practices and the shrines of saints and Mary to the division of German territory after the Reformation between Protestant and Catholic...
...The second set of books on my list contains evidence for how creative humans lived as Christians in our century...
Vol. 108 • February 1981 • No. 4
