Religious booknotes
Sawicki, Marianne
OONCE UPON a rainy day, a friend gave me an old plastic bag to keep my notebooks dry. The bag had traveled across the sea with him from a bookstore in Germany, Contemporary American Theologies: A...
...mechanistic process of technological societies as it integrates or subsumes them...
...Theirs is a cookbook approach, figuratively and sometimes literally speaking, with chapters on simplicity (including diet), nonviolence and violence, sex Parenting for Peace and Justice, by James McGinnis and Kathleen McGinnis, Orbis Books, H.95, 153 pp...
...Lest the philosophers run away with the social world, let us note that Kathleen and James McGinnis share their own and their friends' experiences integrating social ministry with family ministry in Parenting for Peace and Justice...
...whom the social world is built on inter-subjective consciousness...
...The bag had traveled across the sea with him from a bookstore in Germany, Contemporary American Theologies: A Critical Survey, by Deane William Ferm, Seabury Press, $8.95,192 pp...
...For the most part From Chaos to Covenant: Prophecy in the Book of Jeremiah, by Robert P. Carroll, Crossroad, $14.95, 352 pp...
...The survey is equally useful as an introduction or as a review...
...This book is a tangled thicket of experiences, but worth the tramping through...
...Winter suggests that human dwelling, as a living-interpreting of the "text" of societal experience, be taken up as an alternative paradigm to those of mechanism and organicism, and furthermore that dwelling be understood as an artistic creative process...
...Here is a modest and painstaking phenomenological description of moral experience following along lines laid down by Alfred Schutz, for The Human Center...
...for example, that the Bible nowhere identifies Mary Magdalene as having been ahooker...
...splinter theologies" concentrating on a particular group's experience without achieving % grand single vision of the human and the divine...
...To read is to profit from someone else's experiences...
...What the reader may take to be the strong point of these distinctively American theologies, however, seems to Ferm a weakness...
...The range of Howard's familiarity with China, Japan, Thailand, and India is breathtaking, as is the pace at which one encounters historical, cultural, and religious allusions in the text...
...she sticks to the scriptural facts, and indeed exposes some "facts" that never were...
...Harrod proposes that root symbols such as duty or responsibility function to match up experiences in the everyday world with transcendent horizons of value, and thus give them moral texture...
...One merges from that Asian jungle into the symmetry of Howard Harrod's The Human Center as into a rose garden...
...The Book of Jeremiah itself is a metaphor for the redactional community activity which produced it, according to Carroll's substantial but very readable argumentation...
...Yet within it there is at least a concerted effort to retrieve the biblical data on feminine humanity...
...and it bore the slogan "Erfahrung man kaufenkann" - "experience one can . buy...
...The McGinnises' judicious and joyful suggestions may be recommended to parents and to anyone seeking to form a home environment of concern with the world's peace...
...for now, the sharp sparkle of the splinters is surely to be cherished...
...Gibson Winter also follows Schutz's trail, to its intersections with the thought of John Dewey on art and with the theme of human dwelling which threads through Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer...
...Occasional references to extra-biblical sources are generally helpful, although Nunnally-Cox incautiously accepts Dorothy Irvin's questionable claim to have found evidence in artworks that women led Eucharistic celebrations in ancient times...
...We dwell in the world, that is, we create the world, symbolically...
...Life experiences in the Western hemisphere have generated religious literature so diverse that we no longer speak of trends in theology on the American continents, but of theologies plural...
...History and justice (not to mention the curiosity of the theological reading public) are well served by Kung in Conflict, the most complete dossier on the Kung affair in English...
...Artistic process displaces both the organic process of primitive societies and the Liberating Creadon...
...Nunnally-Cox's gentle pastoral touch befits a minister who traces her ancestry through Lydia, Priscilla, and the disciple Tabitha...
...Foundations of Religious Social Ethics, by Gibson Winter, Crossroad, $12.95, I50pp...
...The stories go from Sarah to Syntyche, Pauline teachings, and the Greek and Latin Fathers...
...The effort founders, I believe, when this connoisseur of cultures runs aground on the dark islands of his own culturally engendered assumptions about femininity and his misogyny...
...One male biblical figure's story, or rather that of his book, occupies Robert Carroll in From Chaos to Covenant, a preparatory volume for a commentary on Jeremiah which is yet to come...
...Leonard Swidler has collected in one volume the exchanges between Hans Kung, the German bishops, and the Vatican which led eventually to the removal of the Swiss theologian's missio canonica...
...The- pathway thus traced in Liberating Creation is exciting in several respects...
...Ferm finds that feminist theology, like American theology at large, lacks Religious booknotes A thicket of theologies Marianne Sawicki any organizing theme or focus...
...Deane William Perm's survey Contemporary American Theologies assesses the most significant writers and books that make up evangelical, black, Roman Catholic, feminist, and liberation theologies...
...Janice Nunnal-ly-Cox's Foremothers contributes in that vein a simple retelling of the stories of many of the women whom the Bible mentions...
...namely, that they are Foremothen: Women of the Bible, by Janice Nunnalty-Cox, Seabury Press, $6.95, 182 pp...
...A different sort of fascination attaches to Leslie Howard's The Expansion of God, a treatise which seesaws between strategies for the indigeniza-tion of Christian experience and theology in Asia, and proposals that certain Christian doctrines can be better expressed in Asian philosophical categories...
...Editors continue to play crucial roles in interpreting the experiences and pronouncements of men with prophetic aspirations...
...roles, "multieulturizing" the family, social action, and prayer...
...Moral Agency in the Social World, by Howard L. Harrod, Fortress Press, $14.95, 160 pp...
...Perhaps an American synthesis lies in theology's future...
...for their own school of theology...
...Carroll doubts that a quest for the historical Jeremiah himself can arrive at his ipsissima verba, for in the book as it now stands, the prophet's original material has been recast by a committee of Deuteronomistic editors who have enlisted him as a spokesman Kung in Conflict, by Leonard Swidler, ed., Doubleday: Image, $8.95, 627 pp...
...But the book's implications for theology, liturgical studies, anthropology, hermeneutics, and art criticism may very well overshadow its intended contribution to social ethics...
...The title of the book, inadequate for a work of this scope, alludes to Winter's search for a symbolism that is able to project a liberating future for our time...
Vol. 109 • January 1982 • No. 2
