Books Religious Book Week: Critics' Choices:
Kelsey, Lawrence S Cunningham, Albert C Outler, Lisa Sowle Cahill, John Shea, Mary Jo Weaver, Robert
Religious Book Week: CRITICS' CHOICES Lawrence S, Cunningham TEACHING RELIGION and culture (as our departmental flyer rather grandiosely puts it) encourages me to read in a rather undisciplined...
...In an age of cultural backlash, Spretnak calls on women to enter the second decade of feminism with their eyes open and their "politics of women's spirituality" straight...
...Raymond Brown...
...Each kind of literature teaches us and only in the unity of Torah, Prophets, Writings do we get a rounded education...
...is a very impressive reconstruction of Marxist theory of religion...
...his invocation of 'the tradition' (viz...
...One of the crying needs in contemporary Christianity is a properly updated version of the grand old tradition of ars moriendi...
...Biblical Ethics and Social Change...
...GABRIEL MORAN is director of the graduate program of religious education at New York University...
...Most of her points can be made from a religious viewpoint as well...
...CRITICS LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM'.V new book, The Tradition of Catholicism, will appear this year from Crossroad/Continuum...
...The programmatic part of the book explores appropriate ways to include the Bible in everyone's education...
...She emphasizes the role of the imagination and tries to chart a course for religious/ theological discourse between irrelevance and idolatry...
...In the last two decades Lawrence Kohlberg's scheme of moral development has found its way into religious education books, a fact that always mystified me...
...Fortress, 1981...
...The result is a lattice work of reflections and extracts from the case-histories...
...The women weave spells, create rituals, minister to one another and find a new religious voice with which to celebrate their identities...
...A cry from all people involved in marriage and family ministries is: "Where are the critical resources...
...A final choice would be Marrying Well: Possibilities in Christian Marriage Today (Doubleday, $17.95, 481 pp...
...is essential reading...
...John Elias, a professor of religious education at Fordham, shows some of the reasons why...
...This book is a splendid blend of critical theology and spiritual power...
...Nurtured by dogma and sentiment, anti-Semitism had become a self-contained mythology, which touched reality only in spots...
...Human Rights and Basic Needs in the Americas ($8.95, 343 pp...
...The moral domain will be enlarged to include responsibility and care...
...for they portend a possible convergence of religion and imagination, inspired, as Newman foresaw, by laymen and women, schooled in the diverse languages of church and society, and thus especially competent ministers of a hard-won and al ways-to-be-refashioned reconciliation...
...you can reflect on how modern sainthood can be attained by risking one's life in responding to the cries of the poor and by acting on the understanding of justice learned from this attendveness...
...Weil was an emotional mess after the same fashion as Kierkegaard and Pascal but should be numbered in their high company not because of her quirks but because of the quality of her moral and spiritual witness...
...Robert E. Krieger, $14.95, 301 pp...
...Eugene Bianchi's Aging as a Spiritual Journey (Crossroad, $17.50, 285 pp...
...Jewett's timely study applies that message to contemporary problems of religious intolerance...
...Any person interested in the life of the mind should find Arendt an exemplar in her passion for study, her willingness to swim against the tides of intellectual fashion, her search for values, and her admirable faith that ideas count...
...Ethicists such as Curran respond via a religious interpretation of the law of nature itself...
...Or by reading or rereading Placido Erdozain's Archbishop Romero, Martyr of Salvador (Orbis, $4.95, 98 pp...
...A sample of books from 1982 reveals both the ecumenical nature of the religious part and the broad range of the educational concerns...
...You can read this tiny book in the subway and check the biblical references when you get home...
...his rhetoric is unreined to the verge of obscurantism...
...Plenty of that still goes on but the realities of the twentieth century are reflected in the religious education literature of today...
...The women, a disparate array of dreamers and activists, draw together to survive as celebrating women in the land of the fathers...
...Religious education, if true to its name, must include a dialogue between Eastern and Western religions...
...This last book will be published in March by Crossroad...
...It may well be that there is another book to be written on Day as Catholic activist, thinker, and writer but Miller's account of her early life and connections with the New York literary scene is very fine stuff indeed...
...Thoma's essay is a careful study, written in the form of an outline...
...What impressed me most is Rahner's interest in ecclesial Christianity, as bedrock for his (or any) speculative theology...
...Recent years have seen a better turn, exemplified by the American Bishops' pastoral letter on war and peace...
...edited by Margaret E. Crahan, includes essays on political, military, and economic factors affecting rights in Latin America, and on U.S...
...The author pursues his inquiry on a high plane of abstraction and with an impressive mastery of the relevant literature...
...Chalcedon gets short shrift...
...is a learned but well-written comparative study of the church and politics in Chile under a liberal anti-clerical government, a Christian Democratic regime, the socialist alliance of Allende, and authoritarian repressive government...
...The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity...
...My favorite biography of the year (in a year that saw some exemplary biographies published) was Elizabeth Young-Breuhl's Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (Yale, $25.00, 563 pp...
...His latest book is Christo-Psychology (Crossroad...
...A Christian Theology of Judaism by Clemens Thoma, translated and edited by Helga Croner, published by Paulist Press, 1980, $7.95, 212 pp...
...This year Georgetown University Press announced a new series of Studies in Ethics, inaugurated with the publication of two volumes produced by scholars at the Woodstock Theological Center in Washington, D.C...
...Daniel Bell's comment on the book jacket says it all: "A pebble dropped in the moral cross-currents of American life...
...In American Catholic Social Ethics: Twentieth Century Approaches (University of Notre Dame Press, $21.95, 336 pp...
...Our earlier focus on the psychic is just beginning to shift to the social in this endeavor...
...Maduro's book is well followed by Gregory Baum's The Priority of Labor (Paulist Press, $5.95, paper, 152 pp...
...The book might have been entitled "Notes on Religion and Imagination," for it is tightly, at times epigrammatically written, in a style that demands careful consideration, yet yields tangible rewards...
...For women and men who have invested themselves in the application of theories of moral development, Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (Harvard University Press, $15...
...The author would not classify this book as religious education but no book this year is more important for religious educators...
...Feminists will be particularly interested in the fact that "monks refer more frequently to the virgin Mary, while women concentrate especially on the infant or adolescent Christ...
...Greeley states ninety-nine hypotheses about the propensity to hope and experiences of grace which renew human hopefulness...
...Gerd Theissen...
...He does not emphasize the importance of Jung for developing a post-modern world view as I have in various recent books...
...The first is a careful analysis of Jung's thought and its relevance to Christian thought and practice: Wallace Clift, Jung and Christianity (Crossroad, $12.95, 186 pp...
...continues the meditation begun in The Crucified Jesus Is No Stranger and The Fire and the Rose Are One...
...This book is noteworthy for two reasons: 1) The presumption here is that the literature of the Hebrew Bible deserves study by Christians...
...She is an editor of Religious Studies Review, the Journal of Religious Ethics, and Horizons...
...MARY JO weaver, associate professor of religious studies at Indiana University, is working on a book about the women's movement and the Catholic church...
...Broner (Bantam $3.50, 296 pp...
...and if Newman's is the grammar of the poetry, Eliot's is the poetry of the grammar...
...It is an argumentative book, but richly worth arguing with, given the stakes at issue: Eugene C. Bianchi's Aging as a Spiritual Journey (Crossroad, $17.50, 285 pp...
...Clift quotes from Jung's highly significant letters as well as from nearly all the...
...highlights the importance of eschatology and shows that moral exhortations in the New Testament do not represent individualistic perfectionism, so much as a concern that Christians exemplify the new being to which the community is called...
...John Elias...
...John Coleman MY PRINCIPLE of selectivity for choosing the following five books is focused on outstanding recent social science studies on religion and society...
...These scholars, such as Daniel Levine, Alex Wilde, Thomas Bruneau and Michael Dodson, are doing the best work today in continuing Max Weber's basic questions about religion as a force for social change...
...Dolores Leckey's The Ordinary Way: a Family Spirituality (Crossroad, $7.95, 156 pp...
...Benedict, and imaginatively extends it to embrace the needs of a much-changed present...
...combines feminist concerns with the question of theological method...
...These three books will give us wisdom, understanding, and guidance as we come to know God in all the divine mysterious fullness.ee books will give us wisdom, understanding, and guidance as we come to know God in all the divine mysterious fullness...
...Gerd Thiessen sees the Pauline mission as an important departure from the pattern of wandering, charismatic preachers derived from the ministry of Jesus and his disciples...
...Throughout, in deceptively available language, Greeley weaves a highly sophisticated theory, based on empirical generalizations, dealing with story, tradition, limit-experiences, religious heritage, and communities of religious interpretation...
...Eliot's poetics of faith, showing that "Eliot's poetry exemplifies what Newman's theology explains...
...One of the most prolific of American Catholic ethicists, Charles E. Curran, has made two additions to his corpus...
...The Foundations and Practice of Adult Religious Education...
...MARIE AUGUSTA NEAL...
...For my money, this is both theoretically and empirically the most important single social science study on religion and society to appear in the past five years...
...The subtitle better describes Tipton's brilliant ethnographic study of a counter-cultural Jesus group, Zen in America, and EST: "Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change...
...The dialogue between Pinchas Lapide and Jiirgen Moltmann is an excellent contribution to the ecumenical movement...
...In the last year I have read a number of uncommonly good books, three of which merit special mention since they give us greater insight into some very significant women who lived close to the great issues of our age while, with wildly different religious sensibilities, attempting to make sense of them...
...Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Caroline Walker Bynum (University of California Press, $28.50, 279 pp...
...Auschwitz-Krise der Christlichen Theologie, Vortragsreihe, heraus-gegeben von Rendtorff u. Stegemann-Miinchen, editors, published by Kaiser, 1980, $15., 198 pp...
...He utilizes the insights of the great thinkers from different religious traditions and he returns invariably to the positions hallowed in Judaism...
...Carol Gilligan...
...Her finest moment is the clarity she brings to the relationship between image, model, and concept...
...Drawing upon the poetic imagination of Dante and Charles Williams, Haughton offers a ' comprehensive catholic cosmology of divine Wisdom incarnate in Jesus, celebrated in the body of Christ which is church, working the wondrous transformation of the whole material universe...
...The mutual impoverishment ensuing from this dissociation of religion and imagination, dogma and metaphor, idea and experience, forms a major motif of John Coulson's Religion and Imagination (Clarendon' Press, $35, 193 pp...
...Christianity originates in small, local house churches linked by traveling missionaries...
...Translated by J. Schutz Fortress, $19.95, 210 pp...
...he shows us the indigenous plants which Catholic social thought produced in American soil: John A. Ryan, German-American Catholics, Paul Hanley Furfey and the Catholic Worker, John Courtney Murray, and the Catholic Peace movement of the 1960's and 70's...
...father JOHN SHEA's latest book is Stories of Faith (Thomas More Press...
...it is a personal account of how we can use our aloneness (indeed must use it) to become whole and real human beings able to truly love one another...
...A lovely book...
...The parallels are astounding...
...The underlying epistemology will shift from the Greek ideal of knowledge as correspondence between mind and form to the biblical conception of knowing as a process of human relations...
...George Abbott White's collection of essays Simone Weil: Interpretations of a Life (The University of Massachusetts Press, $18., 207 pp...
...In form, the book is a genuine collaboration, a dialogue between two friends who have taken different routes...
...PHEME PERKINS is the author of several books on the New Testament, including Ministering in the Pauline Churches and Love Commands in the New Testament (Paulist...
...Reflection can then focus on how these ethics merge in a developmental process that goes beyond the present limited form of analysis...
...and her book effects what it signifies (as sacraments are wont to do) as she guides her reader, Beatrice-like, into enlarged perception and transformed practice...
...FATHER JOHN A. COLEMAN, S.J., associate professor of religion and society at the Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley, is the author of An American Strategic Theology (Paulist) and the editor, with Gregory Baum, of The New Religions (Seabury...
...Above all, readers will be impressed with what Alfred Kazin has called her"intellectual love of God" and her profoundly religious sense of gratitude for the gift of being...
...Both excursions can benefit us as long as we proceed with a healthy caution...
...three are specialized empirical studies which have important theoretical implications...
...He examines adulthood from historical, philosophic, religious, cultural, and psychological perspectives...
...The best way to enjoy it is: read and ruminate, read and ruminate...
...Two of the books are primarily theoretical...
...The Woodstock Center, sponsored by the Society of Jesus, is a nexus of innovative yet "conservative" (in the best sense) Catholic thought on the concrete meaning of rights, duties, and justice in our global but inequitable society...
...Gabriel Moran RELIGIOUS EDUCATION is a field that throughout the twentieth century has been struggling to come into its own...
...Religious traditions lend form and feel of reality to the protean religious feelings of their followers, but they also generate blind spots, which need to be identified and illuminated...
...These men who weep for the lost God of their childhood seem rather to be mourning childhood...
...Fortress, $12.95, 204 pp...
...Indeed, I used this book in courses to contrast with the putatively secular (but basically Lutheran) theories of Peter Berger and the implicitly Calvinist sociology of Robert Bellah...
...will be a welcome textbook in courses in sociology of religion...
...It is likely to stimulate theological creativity in non-Catholic denominations and in Judaism...
...Mott's study addresses another con-• temporary problem: what is the social obligation of Christians...
...Will someone get his books back into print...
...Morton Kelsey THERE IS a growing interest in the relationship between the findings of depth psychology and spirituality and theology...
...He knows that we can bear all of what we are only as we find the Love which is available to us in the aloneness where the divine may be encountered...
...If that is so, can we still argue that women need female images of the deity...
...the essays connect the Goddess to new avenues of personal and political power...
...Nasr's critique of Western rationalism is trenchant...
...To-towa, N.J...
...For me a religious/theological book is worth the time if it introduces me into a perspective I hadn't considered or develops an idea I know in a way I'd never dreamed or, just simply, strikes me as talking truly and compassionately about the mystery Of existence...
...Their emphasis on Weil as a social thinker was a deliberate corrective to those studies which focus solely on her mysticism, her tortured relationship to Catholicism, or her personal eccentricities...
...In their different ways, all four studies are signs that Christianity can be alive and well without surrender to intolerance or sectarianism...
...Here, then, we find a strong sense of "tradition" linked within a lively ecumenical consciousness...
...They are quite different from one another: an astonishing novel, a scholarly monograph, a useful handbook and a political treatise...
...In view of the growing unemployment in both areas, this reflection will help the North and the South to pray together...
...He argues for the Maimoni-dean concept of God, for all that it seems cold and lifeless to the unsophisticated...
...At least one Catholic biblical scholar, Pheme Perkins, makes available New Testament ethical resources...
...My one demurrer would be to the sub-title,"A secular theory...
...its resources - worship services, rituals, prayers, poems, rewritten canticles - are excellent, and the articles and bibliography which serve as the theoretical underpinnings are quite good...
...When you complete this work and come to the photographs of Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Jean Donovan and Dorothy Kazel ask yourself: "To what end...
...represents one fine realization of such an integral spirituality...
...Rahner's interpretations of Vatican II are illuminating even for those of us who were there...
...184 pp...
...4.50, 93 pp...
...Coleman's essays should be " must" reading for anyone who wants to enter the debate...
...Human rights are not mere duties created by human desires or needs...
...Every traveler on the inner journey could well use this careful and helpful guidebook to the inner way...
...Spirituality, according to Spretnak, is a political force...
...Sallie McFague's Metaphorical Theology (Fortress, $11.95, 225 pp...
...His focus is much more structural and institutional than the basically social-psychological approach of Greeley...
...Pheme Perkins The Epistles of John...
...furthers Curran's critique of classical natural law methodology...
...will further your reflection so you can better make that fine distinction between atheistic Communism and Christian socialism...
...Bianchi has combined his own reflections on "the human life-cycle" with reports from twenty-two extensive case-histories of American religious leaders (Christian and Jewish) - all elderly and representative...
...It combines personal interviews which gives the "feel" for aging with social and psychological analysis which gives his perspective its needed breadth...
...a thoughtful analysis of Pope John Paul H's encyclical On Human Work...
...Don't get turned off by the jargon-like title...
...John Eusden is a Christian writer who has gone far in opening his life to the spirit and forms of Zen...
...Forget Evelyn Wood when you pick this book up...
...I also appreciate his willingness to give us a Dorothy Day warts and all...
...For those frustrated in their present situation and looking for creative alternatives within the tradition, I recommend this book...
...Baron von Hiigel believed that one could study religious experience only by studying a person whose life was rich in this aspect of religion...
...by Evelyn and James Whitehead...
...07512...
...What Elias suggests is that religious education must be an integral part of attempts to create lifelong educational patterns...
...John Shea ANY SUGGESTED reading list should be upfront about the biases of the one suggesting...
...It is closely reasoned, moderate in tone and in accord with the latest developments in Catholic teaching...
...In a time, to borrow from David Tracy, when religion is the one subject about which intellectuals feel free to be ignorant, Arendt's life is a testimony to the fecundity of the Western intellectual tradition in all its depth...
...His close-knit collection of essays, An American Strategic Theology (Paulist, $9.95, 296 pp...
...Bianchi's book looks in that direction...
...Collected sermons of popular preachers and the Christian press employed the vocabulary of anti-Semitism, as if it were a standardized litany...
...Consequently, the New Testament shows a genuine religious pluralism in its expressions of belief...
...The Politics of Women's Spirituality is a well-designed apologia for feminist spirituality edited by a partisan of the Goddess movement...
...The spirituality described here goes beyond the Goddess to a holistic conception of the universe...
...Identity will expand to include the experience of interrelation...
...It signifies more than the splendid rounding off of a monumental series of essays and a preeminent career...
...Living Alone speaks of far more than how to manage aloneness and loneliness...
...Brown thinks that the tradition defended in the epistles was only preserved by Johannine Christians who joined communities with structured patterns of church office based on Petrine traditions...
...rest of his collected works...
...2) Brueggemann shows that the process by which the Bible came to be is itself educational...
...The myths of anti-Semitism were politically useful to post-Weimar militarists and the demons of Nazism came alive...
...Teresa in equal depth...
...Moral Theology: A Continuing Journey (University of Notre Dame Press, $14.95, $6.95 paper, 252 pp...
...Bynum gives medieval texts a new reading, presents some important women's religious history and, most importantly, gives us a way to compare practices and values of monastic females and males...
...Only a Catholic with a sacramental and analogical imagination and a certain view of nature and grace could have produced this sort of sociology of religion...
...high religion's claims to revealed truth) is unembarrassed...
...Lisa Sowle Cahill CHRISTIAN (notably Catholic) ethics has acquired the not entirely undeserved reputation of preoccupation with personal ethics (especially sex) to the detriment of social justice...
...Israel believes as Jung did - although Jung is never mentioned - that we cannot love any other person until we can have love for the whole of our own being...
...a movement in which individuals discovered a new world of freedom in Christ...
...Robert P. Imbelli TWENTY YEARS after Vatican II, theology and church are embroiled in a long-postponed linguistic revolution...
...It is not a rhetorical question...
...surveys liberal, Marxist, Protestant, and Catholic theories of rights, and suggests that the exaltation of civil liberties to which North Americans are prone is vacuous unless accompanied by the fulfillment of basic social and economic needs...
...Since 1971 when the bishops, gathered in synod, proclaimed that "action in behalf of justice fully appears to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel," we have been trying to integrate more effectively the social justice agenda into our prayer and ministry...
...Volume Two is forthcoming in 1984) and Stanley Hauerwas (his latest is A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethics, University of Notre Dame Press, $7.95, 298 pp...
...But his erudition, nobility of vision, and irenic spirit are impressive...
...The most substantial contribution in the quartet is Karl Rahner's Concern for the Churches: Theological Investigation XX (Crossroad, $12.95, 191 pp...
...The language which dominated the dogmatic theology of pre-Vatican II vintage was notoriously rationalist and rigid, rendered all the more so by its virtual divorce from the nourishing and validating context of contemporary culture...
...Otto Maduro's Religion and Social Conflicts (Orbis, $8.95, 161 pp...
...Teresa of Avila as revealed in her most mature work, The Interior Castle...
...Although a specialist's book, Maduro presents an entree to the kind of sociology of religion which informs liberation theology...
...Such tolerance is based on the understanding that God wills the salvation of all people in their diversity...
...Otto Maduro's Religion and Social Conflict (Orbis, $8.95, 169 pp...
...Publishers Allanheld, Osmun & Co...
...Religious Book Week: CRITICS' CHOICES Lawrence S, Cunningham TEACHING RELIGION and culture (as our departmental flyer rather grandiosely puts it) encourages me to read in a rather undisciplined manner while justifying such excess under the rubric of research...
...Perhaps a more thoroughgoing revision is called for, however, if Catholic ethics is to be fully Christian, that is, to begin from the New Testament construals of the significance of Jesus...
...Protestant ethicists such as James Gus-tafson (Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, Volume One: Theology and Ethics, University of Chicago Press, $20., 345 pp...
...This is a fine work, as much for "declut-tering" the area of faith and its expressions as for constructing a creative approach...
...The Bible in American Education: From Source Book to Textbook...
...has one quality that eludes most books that try to put together research on the life stages with a faith perspective...
...Andrew Greeley's Religion: A Secular Theory (The Free Press, $15.95, $7.95 paper, 192 pp...
...For many people religious education still calls up images of catechism, Sunday school, and reluctant children...
...Brian Smith's The Church and Politics in Chile (Princeton University Press, $30, $9.75 paper, 383 pp...
...Finally, in my opinion, the best book on the new religious movements is Steven Tipton's Getting Saved From the Sixties (University of California Press, $19.95,364 pp...
...Marie Augusta Neal FOR YEARS we have reached into the field of the behavioral sciences for some guidance in our spiritual reflections...
...Paul's mission established a pattern of community-founding...
...This book is in the series "The Bible in American Culture...
...This book marks a giant step forward in our still inchoate inter-religious dialogues...
...This book enables us to grasp in fuller perspective the global reach of our mission since the Second Vatican Council...
...John Westerhoff has been involved in several similar books wherein the authors educate each other while inviting the reader to listen in on the conversation...
...From the beginning, it has sought to create communities of genuine love, justice, and respect...
...in which she searches out how central to the entire biblical message is the theme of liberation of the poor from the oppressions of society...
...The individual who is interested in learning exactly what Jung has to say about religion and the religious life can do no better than read Professor Cliffs study...
...For those interested in church and society in totalitarian regimes, Hansjakob Stehle's Eastern Politics of the Vatican 1917-1979 (Ohio University Press, $28.95, $14.95 paper, 456 pp...
...As an aside: Romano Guardini made a deep impression on Arendt in her youth...
...Jewish Monotheism and Christian Trinitarian Doctrine, Pinchas Lapide and Jiirgen Moltmann...
...that ecumenical reader sponsored by the World Council of Churches...
...He argues that the Pauline vision of community obligates Christians to mutual tolerance...
...Read and see how she comes to the conclusion that the male ethic of justice, resting on a premise of equality, concludes that everyone should be treated alike, whereas women's experience generates an ethic of caring, resting on a premise of nonviolence, and concludes that no one should be hurt...
...He argues that the Bible constantly shows that without a genuine struggle for justice, the people of God cannot be said to respond to the grace by which God has called them...
...Image-Breaking-Image-Building: A Handbook for Creative Worship with Women of Christian Tradition, Linda Clark, Marian Ronan and Eleanor Walker (Pilgrim $7.95, 144 pp...
...Bar none, it is the best work on the Vatican's Ostpolitik...
...He is a professor of religion at Florida State University...
...Their author defends his vision of the tradition against a radical group which had separated itself from other Johannine Christians...
...The second half of the book provides organizational steps to move in that direction...
...In brief the book argues Newman's case that poetic faith and religious belief conspire to form personality, while their divorce deforms persons and inhibits their full realization...
...The Spiritual Life: Learning East and West...
...Jacob B. Agus Monotheism, Lenn Evan Goodman...
...Thus, love must be the basis of any quest for justice and of any understanding of the dignity of human persons...
...For Leckey takes her bearings from a genial linguistic achievement of the past, the Rule of St...
...Adult education remains to this day the stepchild of educational literature...
...The two editors have been trying for many years to make people aware of the relation of religion and the public school...
...MORTON KELSEY, Professor Emeritus, University of Notre Dame, and Adjunct Professor at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, is a well-known writer and lecturer on religious subjects...
...John Welch's purpose is to study the way of religious development by considering how Jung's understanding of that way is related to that of St...
...The Politics of Women's Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power within the Feminist Movement, Char-lene Spretnak, editor, (Doubleday, $12.95, 590 pp...
...Jesus as Mother is painstakingly researched and beautifully written...
...Robert Jewett...
...Two striking sets of findings are that religious images are better predictors of social behavior and world view than doctrinal or philosophical propositions and that the family is more important than the church both as a community of religious heritage and a community of current religious interpretation...
...It is a demonstration of the way noble minds can reach out in love and understanding to one another, piercing through the curtains raised by their respective faiths...
...Seen with Haughton's eyes the cosmos reveals its sacramental density...
...He postulates that "the sociology of religions is the study of religious phenomena that are socially produced, socially situated and limited, socially oriented and structured and have an influence upon the society in which they find themselves...
...Nowhere else up to now has Greeley given us his general theory in sociology of religion...
...does just this...
...Raymond Brown's commentary describes the struggles in the Johannine community at the end of the first century...
...Westminster, $9.95 paper, 168 pp...
...These "progressives" apparently had some success preaching a perfectionist ethic along with an understanding of Jesus that denied his humanity...
...The institutional church's stance on abortion and nuclear war are hot items which will continue to get hotter...
...Monotheism is a thin volume, compacted with old-fashioned and ever valid reflections on the biblical philosophy of life...
...With that in mind: Sebastian Moore's The Inner Loneliness (Crossroad, $9.95, 120 pp...
...A concrete and striking example of this wedding of religious and imagination, of theological structure and affective depth, appears in Rosemary Haughton's The Passionate God (Paulist, $11.95, 344 pp...
...Spretnak, committed to finding a post-patriarchal spirituality, invites us to a broad-based understanding of women's religion...
...FATHER ROBERT P. IMBELLI is professor of systematic theology at the Maryknoll School of Theology...
...Gilligan here makes a devastating indictment of that scheme from a feminist perspective...
...Father Welch knows his Jung as well as Professor Clift does, and he knows his St...
...The second book is by a Carmelite who is teaching at the theological consortium in Washington, D.C.: John Welch, O.Carm., Spiritual Pilgrims: Carl Jung and Teresa of Avila (Paulist Press, $7.95,240pp...
...Elsa Tamez fosters this effort with her Bible of the Oppressed (Orbis, $5.95, 88 pp...
...In thirty years of reading Jung and about him I have found no more careful analysis of his total corpus on the subject of religion and Christianity in particular...
...Essays on Corinth...
...They are substantive and critical appreciations of Christian social responsibility...
...These works, and others like them, generate both excitement and hope twenty years after Vatican II...
...Christian Tolerance: Paul's Message to the Modern Church...
...David Barr and Nicholas Piediscalzi, eds...
...Anchor Bible 30, Doubleday, $18., 812 pp...
...Feminist spirituality, like feminist anything else, is a creative response to frustrating and recalcitrant realities...
...his courage for the Christian future is heart-lifting...
...Human Rights in the Americas: The Struggle for Consensus ($8.95,291 pp...
...A more flexible method addresses practical questions: aging, in vitro fertilization, family planning, socialism, and abortion legislation...
...LISA sowle CAHILL, associate professor of theology at Boston College, teaches and writes in theological, medical, and sexual ethics...
...The contributors examine the various aspects of German Christendom, which made the horrors of Auschwitz possible...
...As with Moore, halfway through this book you leave off looking at it from the outside and start wondering what you can find here that is going to help you...
...Martin Israel has written of the same inner journey from a very different perspective, but his insights correspond and carry out the implications of the inner journey which Professor Clift and John Welch have outlined...
...Fortress, $8.95, 167 pp...
...In a recent article in this journal John Garvey commented: "We need a spirituality in which the daily conditions of marriage, family, friendship, work, and social struggle become a school of spirituality" ("Loving God for Nothing," June 4, 1982...
...Oxford, $6.95 paper, 254 pp...
...In many ways her book also presents a model for advance in the midst of linguistic revolution...
...If you wonder that the focus here is on social justice, then you should review Santa Ana's Toward a Church of the Poor, (Orbis, $8.95, 210 pp...
...What sometimes goes unremarked is the substantial but underutilized Catholic tradition of reflection on the common good and reciprocal rights and duties (e.g., the social encyclicals...
...The collection of essays on Auschwitz by members of the theological faculty of Heidelberg is interesting and valuable...
...John Westerhoff and John Eusden...
...Indispensable to any specialist on Latin America, the book is rich in comparative material on the church and politics in other Latin American and European Catholic settings...
...Walter Brueggemann...
...In a sense it represents the best of a genre of books by Norm American political scientists specializing in studies of church and society in Latin America...
...The third book is from Great Britain and is written by a man who is both Senior Lecturer in Pathology at the Royal College of Surgeons and also serves as a priest assisting in a parish in London where it was first published: (Martin Israel, Living Alone: The Inward Journey to Fellowship...
...A Weave of Women is an extraordinary novel about a group of women in Israel, spellbinding in more than one sense of that word...
...The Pauline ethic of mutual respect and love provided the central ideology for this new pattern of community...
...They flow from God's claim on humanity...
...policies...
...is significant chiefly for its theme...
...He presents a clear and coherent picutre of Jung's latest and most mature religious thinking...
...Seabury, $10.95, 134 pp...
...It also reflects the inevitable tensions in a movement which sprang from powerful manifestations of the Spirit...
...This historian-journalist's account of religion and society in the Soviet bloc will be a fascinating read...
...Its significance (besides being the first series of Gifford Lectures ever delivered by a Muslim) lies in its exciting re-presentation of the central tradition of Islamic mysticism...
...Coulson elucidates Newman's grammar of religious belief and complements it with an analysis of T.S...
...9.95, 144 pp...
...Ogden's Christology is avowedly "revisio-nary," heavily dependent upon what "history" can tell us about Jesus and Christian origins...
...We get a good sense of the combination of anger and yearning that went into this workshop and we can reap the results of the collective energy of the participants...
...We can see, perhaps in a glass darkly, how caring and justice might meld as we reflect on the mission of God in our times...
...These communities are grounded in a vision of God which has no place for division, injustice, or intolerant self-assertion...
...At times, like most work based on Marx, Maduro represents too much a hermeneutics of suspicion without any real hermeneutics of retrieval of religion but, just so, complements Greeley's splendid retrieval of the social meaning of religion which lacks any great suspicion of the devious uses of religion by psyche or society...
...The research was impressive, her story line straightforward, and her analysis of Arendt's thought and intellectual milieu lucid...
...What is often misunderstood is the theological understanding of church and society which informs these positions...
...will be an essential book in their library...
...and what remains of"tradition" is the Reformation stress on soteriology as an existential concern...
...These groups possess both autonomy and regional diversity...
...Her thesis is that the study of women's developmental experience, in women's own terms, will transform interpretation of the sequence of what constitutes growth...
...Teresa springs to new life and significance as we are shown the profound psychological insights contained in her classic analysis of the human soul...
...Maduro's book is particularly useful because we read it as outsiders looking in on a struggle taking place in Latin America in which a social scientist is helping to guide the thinking and action of contemporaries as the northern philosophers once guided the development of our theological reflection...
...not the imposition of a religious or political ideology...
...Albert G. Outler THE FOUR books that survived the winnowing for this comment seemed as important for what they signify as for what they say...
...Stephen Mott...
...Her Love Commands in the New Testament (Paulist Press, $5.95, 130 pp...
...This book is a comprehensive look at marriage which combines spirituality, social and psychological analysis, and common sense...
...In the process the old language is transformed and a new language is minted from the old yet precious metal...
...rabbi JACOB B. AGUS is professor of modern Jewish thought at Dropsie College, Philadelphia and Rabbi Emeritus of Beth El Congregation of Baltimore...
...The works of Jewett and Theissen focus on the Pauline communities...
...Here we are once again in the sort of atmosphere that Lonergan and others have taught us to label the "historical consciousness" (sharply contrasted with the "classical consciousness" so evident in Nasr and still residual in Rahner...
...Their tales and lives are woven together in a marvelous combination of the mythical and the ordinary...
...Mary Jo Weaver A Weave of Women, E.M...
...Christians sought to create integrative communities which transcended the socio-economic divisions of their society...
...Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, American edition, 1981, $22.50, 119 pp...
...Hagiography would have ill served the memory of a very tough-minded saint for our times...
...With the historical essays in this book they show that the exclusion of biblical study cannot be assumed as a norm for public education...
...The Creative Word: Canon as a Model for Biblical Education...
...albert c. outler is professor of theology emeritus at Southern Methodist University in Dallas...
...His book is a genuine amalgam of psychological understanding and practical guide to the spiritual life...
...There is, for example, Seyyed Hossein Nasr's Knowledge and the Sacred (Crossroad, $19.50, 341 pp...
...s.N.D,, is currently president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion...
...White's own essay (and the one by Staughton Lynd) makes a convincing case for understanding Weil as a social critic in the prophetic tradition of George Orwell and Ignazio Silone...
...Three books have been published during the past year which speak to this subject in a significant way...
...In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development...
...Here is one which is readable and uses realistic examples...
...It resists summation but fundamentally it is about confronting and healing the deepest of human alienations...
...ALL FOUR of these books are related to some aspect of feminist spirituality, to women's attempt to find a distinctive spiritual voice...
...THE FOUR BOOKS selected represent a growing tide in biblical studies: analyzing the social setting and community structure of early Christianity as a key to understanding the message of the New Testament writings...
...Image-Breaking/Image Building grew out of a workshop at Grailville (Ohio) in 1978 intended to "generate alternative images of God and forms of worship...
...This premise is far removed from schemes of salvation history in which "Old Testament" is merely preamble to the New Testament...
...Yet, taken together, they give us a rich taste of a new brew...
...Harvard, $15.00, 184 pp...
...A Greek legend held that ghosts come to life temporarily when they drink human blood...
...A more provocative book is Schubert M. Ogden's The Point to Christology (Harper & Row, $14.50, 191 pp...
...It is a useful word about a profound moral and psychological perplexity in "greying America": how to grow old with grace, faith, and dignity in an uncaring society, in which faith in "the life of the world to come" is withered...
...It can be used as a textbook...
...is an effective antidote to the more egregious nonsense written about Weil by both her critics and her admirers...
...Chapter V (Women Mystics) examines the writing of thirteenth-century nuns at Helfta and their non-use of negative female stereotyping...
...It is persuasive...
...This book is diverse, sensitive, reverent, and extraordinarily useful: it contains exercises to enhance visual and verbal expression, spatial awareness and meditation...
...Reviewers have not been uniformly kind to William D. Miller's Dorothy Day: A Biography (Harper and Row, $18.95, 527 pp...
...urge that no an-thropocentric and universalistic morality does full justice to the biblical picture of Jesus and his radical gospel of repentance and conversion...
...Chapter IV (Jesus as Mother) looks at twelfth-century Cistercian monks and their need for a nurturing role model...
...John Coleman is expert at putting together social analysis, theological reflection, and practical policy...
Vol. 110 • February 1983 • No. 4
