Religious Booknotes: The past in the present:
Gerhart, Mary
Religious booknotes The past in the present Mary Gerhart ONE OF the MOST urgent needs come to light with liberation theology, but inspired not only by liberationists, is for the retrieval and...
...Combining the best in both Anglican and Roman traditions, Robert Hale's Canterbury and Rome: Sister Churches is a thoughtful review of where things stand today...
...it suggests that the issue of understanding our origins is far from being settled...
...Bynum also shows how certain kinds of feminine imagery seem to have inhibited the presence of other kinds...
...A recent book on the 1973 coup in Chile which overthrew the Allende government, Fernando Alegria's novel, Chilean Spring, evokes a more profound grasp of the significance of the event than even the documentaries and films which have appeared in the U.S...
...Or to put it another way, people who have to lie about their history cannot clarify their identity...
...Craig supports The Germans, by Gordon Craig, Putnam's, $15.95, 350 pp...
...those visions of reality which one's self embodies...
...His two chapters on the' 'consanguinity" of the two traditions and on prophecy as a distinguishing characteristic of the Anglican church convey a sense of patient urgency that all members of both churches be committed to reconciliation...
...Peter Brown' s Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity is a collection of essays written since his well-known book on Augustine ten years ago...
...What does it mean to have a historical consciousness...
...If Origen was an ' 'inventive diabologist," Russell is an inventive analogist, restoring legends such as Plato's myth of the cave in terms of a darkened cinema and the doctrine of evil in terms of Einstein's remark on the necessity of logical simplicity...
...murdered during the coup) and his wife (who survives), the book suggests the complex link between the fate of a country and the choices of people who attend it...
...Syria to early modern Russia...
...The title alludes to the distinctions traditionally made between doctrinal certitude, theological unanimity, and disputed questions...
...The best essays are vintage Brown: his construction of new keys to unlock the codes of the past - codes preserved in relics and ikons, legends by and about holy persons, trials by ordeal...
...CAROLINE Walker Bynum's Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages is also a collection of essays which immensely adds to and corrects our understanding of the past...
...In the opening chapter, "The Gospel according to Cretien," Alegria plunges us into the ambiguity which accompanies every historical reality...
...She distinguishes first between canons and monks on the basis of their self-understanding as disclosed in primary texts, i.e., the canonical concern for edification and the monastic emphasis on individual salvation, then between the "individual" and the "self" in twelfth-century texts...
...Jeffrey Burton Russell's Satan: The Early Christian Tradition is a lively historical theology of the problem of evil from the first through the fifth centuries Russell's self-conscious and critical reflection on historical method marks him as a discriminating interpreter and his book as reliable...
...A life-long student of German history, he is professor emeritus at Stanford University and president of the American Historical Association...
...A skillfully narrated account of a Chilean photographer (who is Chilean Spring, by Fernando Alegria, Latin American Literary Review Press, University of Pittsburgh, $15.50, $7.95 paper, 160 pp...
...So accustomed are we to the sociology of suspicion that Brown's appreciative explanation of the artifacts of antiquity startles and delights...
...MARY GERHART...
...In this book, Ruether explicates anew her own work on religious origins - Christol-ogy, anti-Semitism, the Goddess, Mariology, and political theology...
...In an afterCanterbury and Rome: Sister Churches, by Robert Hale, Paulist, $7.95, 188 pp...
...forceful judgments with many kinds of documentation...
...Hale argues that the model of two sisters is appropriate for the relations between the two churches, generously documenting the use of the term in public conversations, statements, and the scriptures...
...Foye as a "stalagmite, formed from the deposit of innumerable little drops of the gosJesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, by Caroline Walker Bynum, University of California Press, $28.50, 280 pp...
...For Rosemary Ruether it means to understand and to rectify when necessary Disputed Questions: On Being a Christian, by Rosemary Ruether, Abingdon, $9.95, 144 pp...
...The more recent past is richly integrated in Gordon Craig's The Germans...
...Throughout the book the roles of religion and of religious leaders give evidence that for a large part of the German population, religion is a vital force in public as well as in private...
...In Disputed Questions: On Being a Christian Ruether explores her intellectual itinerary through her own Christian tradition: ' 'One cannot correctly pose the question of the meaning of Christian identity today until one is willing to tell the story of Christian origins truthfully...
...For example, the supernatural, being partly "the depository of the objectified values of the group'' in the early medieval period, reappears in the miracles of St...
...Religious booknotes The past in the present Mary Gerhart ONE OF the MOST urgent needs come to light with liberation theology, but inspired not only by liberationists, is for the retrieval and in some instances the correction of certain badly noted or overlooked historical data...
...Sensationalist elements are illustrated but not elaborated: Satan represented as women, or blacks...
...Satan draws from major original sources on diabolism and includes a bibliographical essay on minor sources...
...the shift within Christianity from the ideal of martyrdom to the ideal of soldiery...
...When he writes, "Whether or not thi Devil exists objectively, it is certaii that the Devil exists in the sense tha the pheonomenon Devil, the concep Devil, exists and can be defined his torically with a reasonable degree c coherence," his claim is challenging if somewhat epistemologically obscure...
...Some of the essays review Brown's criticism of accepted models (Gibbon's, Hume's, Pirenne's) for thought on the meaning of the holy from fourth-century C.E...
...The devil, you say...
...Her key theses are that "the female (or woman) and the feminine are not the same" and that religious images of the feminine are not to be taken literally...
...sip and value judgments of a region.'' One of the best essays is a contrast of ikons with the Book of Kells, "a talisman from the Third World of the Celtic church remote from the ancient Mediterranean of Rome and Byzantium...
...The chapter "Religion" is a balanced evaluation of the handling of the Kiing case, the papal visit in 1980, and the Kirchenbund agreement with the DDR in 1978, all against the background of German religious history since the Reformation...
...MARY GERHARTeconciliation...
...The first essays become the context for what Bynum calls the "feminization" of images in the high Middle Ages: for example, Jesus and the Abbot referred to as mother, monks as women, blood as milk...
...word, Canon Allchin gives tribute to the "freshness and originality" of the book whose author is an American Catholic monk...
...Russell concludes by stating and responding to seven objections to belief in the Devil...
Vol. 110 • January 1983 • No. 2
