Books Religious Book Week: Critics'Choices:
Higgins, George G.
by the house to another yellow-green patch, and from there to a dark-blue expanse of ocean and lighter-blue expanse of sky. The house, the dog, the boat, and two islands break up what would...
...It is not only that I like to know the new thoughts of old friends, but it is also that both books address issues that are never out of date: Comnlon weal" s ' 8 4 Trial Subscription Offer - - 11 Issues for $9 ~ [ i i e l i [ ~ g e l I i l i i , l i ~ elm ~ [ j l U I I i I i J i I [ I I COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...It speaks well for the bishops that they allowed Castelli ongoing access to their files while the Pastoral was being drafted and debated and gave him complete freedom t~publish his findings without prior censorship of any kind and with no guarantee as to how the book would turn out...
...S.A.S.E...
...I will choose several books from my own discipline, religious history...
...It is a story of growing consciousness and authentic personal liberation- in one woman's search for justice and love in a situation of misery and injustice...
...F l u t e s Bamboo flutes, recordings...
...I DON'T go out of my way to read new religious books...
...Yet his locating the constant stream of protest, of the ingenuity of survival schooled by black religion, cannot but help give one hope...
...This disconcerting advice has stirred things up on several fronts within the theological establishment...
...But the characterizations are magnificent and the wisdom paradoxical and profound...
...63r six times...
...go here for quick glimpses and ready reference...
...Provides information and enthusiasm for this growing ministry, and will be welcomed both by those who minister, and by those in need of healing...
...T HE QUESTION about my favorite religious books of 1983 took me by surprise...
...Vatican II and the ensuing years saw an outpouring of intraChristian dialogue and the beginnings of Jewish-Christian dialogue...
...Philip S. Foner's volume, Black Socialist Preacher (Synthesis, $8.95, 363 pp...
...The trick is to take them all in: to see with a "first timeness" of vision...
...Dorr, an Irish missionary priest who has combined a distinguished teaching career at Maynooth College, Ireland, teaching, avoiding "sycophantic fundamentalism" on the one hand and corrosive cynicism on the other...
...whtch takes marriage as its point of departure -- not Baptism or Eucharist, as is customary...
...The church's prayer for healing is manifested in many ways, particularly through the language of the rites in the sacraments of Reconciliation, Anointing, and the Eucharist...
...Nicholas Lash, through a critical assessment of Marx, teaches us that hope cannot be less than material for being hope in God...
...Never elsewhere have I learned so much so quickly about the early Christians...
...In reading his article l Dec...
...Kathleen Hughes (Liturgy), Philip King" (OT), Claire Lowery" (Pastoral Ministry), George MacRae (New Test), Sally Mcl:ague (Systematic's), Gabrld Moran (Religous Ed...
...The gradual accommodation of the early communities to the patriarchal patterns of Greco-Roman society meant a loss of The Bishops and the Bomb: Waging Peace in a Nuclear Age...
...While God gives me my being," he writes, "I express outwardly what I have become through others...
...Gain Confidence...
...The point where nature and society interact with each other in the most seemingly pedestrian of ways fascinated him, and in his best paintings he continually returns to this point, developing it rather than pursuing more overtly dramatic subjects...
...Those who prefer an episcopate of dogs that don't bark, or paper tigers, or simple patriots in the style of the American Legion's spokesmen, have been rattled, and | . . . . . A Question of Conscience: The Challenge of Peace An Exploration of The Catholic Bishops' Pastoral Letter from a Variety of Perspectives Guest speakers will include: Rev...
...is a superb theological contribution toward the making of a Christian Praxisweltanschauung...
...HI I I I I I I 1 Religious Book Week: CRITICS' CHOICES with extensive educational and pastoral G. 11"1...
...What has illuminated meaning for me in the ordinary blessed routines of daily love and work, of children and friendship, of sickness, death, and loss...
...14905...
...Williams's conviction that theology cannot be separated from spirituality is here powerfully exhibited as his book is at once exegetically and existentially compelling...
...This is Volume 4 in Pelikan's The Christian Tradition, a series for which they must have coined words like "magisterial...
...Classified payable with order...
...And his program of political theological hermeneutics -- a contemporary praxis enlightenment project -- is a breath of fresh air in ~ese days of pervasive resignation and cynicism for the epochal transition which we are now undergoing...
...COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., NYC 10016...
...is a welcome and valuable collection of the writings and speeches of Rev...
...Commonweal: 124 I l l l l I Dolores Leckey DOLORES LECKEY is director of the Committee on the Laity, National Conference of Catholic Bishops, a featured columnist fcr NC News and the author of The Ordinary Way (Crossroad...
...m . . . . DID NOTTRY to'determine a principle of selection as I collected the books I have liked over the last few years...
...Bryan Hehir, Rabbi David Saperstein, Dr...
...The last book I mention is not strictly a religious book, but I think it deserves wide readership by all concerned with matters moral...
...Walk confidently with him...
...Citing the need to balance reason with reality, Messer urges the church to focus on important human issues, become a forum for debate, and encourage qualified persons to become active in politics...
...His most recent book is On the Idea of a University (U...
...Ruether draws upon liberal, romantic, and Marxist feminist interpretations, the dominant Hebrew and Christian traditions, and the minority voices of Canaanite religion, and countercultural forms of Christian thought to propose a systematic feminist theology...
...of Toronto Press...
...Tillard, O.P...
...the statement of the American bishops on the prospect of nuclear war...
...Write or call for free catalog...
...Aukerman does not try to "solve" the problem of nuclear war, but rather by drawing on Scripture tries to help us understand why we seem so determined by our own creation...
...Founded to ransom slaves, our small community of men have grounded our lives and our work of liberation in fraternity, prayer, and the Bible for over 800 years...
...Let's call it basic, enduring...
...With the text of the Bishops' 1983 Pastoral Letter...
...Monika K. Hellwig MONIKA K. HELLWIG i8 professor of theology at Georgetown University...
...1-800-633-2252, Father Nigro, Gonzaga University, Spokane 99258...
...In his A Matter of Hope: A Theologian's Reflections on the Thought of Karl Marx (University of Notre Dame Press, $19.95,312 pp...
...The Power of the Poor in History, Gustavo Gutierrez...
...by Pinchas Lapide (Mainz: Matthias Griinewald Verlag, 12DM, 144 pp...
...Of these an outstanding book published in 1980 but I read it only in the past year, so I hope it may be included in my list...
...INTO THE NEEDLE'S EYE William E. Reiser, S.J...
...There's a radical challenge to the conventional craft of Christian theology in Edward Farley's Ecclesial Reflection (Fortress, $29.95, 399 pp...
...lished decades ago, it is a bit difficult to remember noteworthy texts published this past year...
...They were Bernard Cooke's Sacraments and Sacramentality (Twenty-Third Publications, $12.95, 251 pp...
...L 24 February 1984:121 some of the more guileless victims of the paranoid fantasies of the Right are genuinely puzzled...
...O NE HUNDRED YEARS ago Christians attacked each other with regularity and gleeful abandon...
...I I I II III Martin E. Marty MARTIN E. MARTY is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Modern Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School, associate editor of the Christian Century, and author of the forthcoming Pilgrims in Their Own Land (Little Brown...
...explores the question of whether or not there is an essential difference between the Christian experience of God and the way in which the other great religious traditions experience the transcendent...
...which a friend pressed upon me unsolicited...
...There are good bibliographies...
...REV...
...At its heart, however, it tells pieces of the secret story of all of us...
...NICOLAUS MILLS (Nicoltms Mills teaches at Sarah Lawrence and writes fiequently on art for Commonweal...
...Rightly seen a car need not be an intruder on the landscape any more than a water tank or a stray dog...
...Who joined the movement...
...His most recent book is The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics ( U. of Notre Dame Press...
...R.C...
...617-552-8440 world of a poor black woman as she comes to awareness of herself, those she loves, and the meaning of God in her own experience...
...In the meantime, they are doing the best they can for their author...
...One Hispanic staff member in Los Angeles' archdiocesan religious education office (where the prevailing theological winds can at times be somewhat clerical, Anglo, and male) found in Warren's book an eye-opening revelation: CCD was founded in this archdiocese in 1922 expressly to work among Mexican immigrants -- and it was founded through the efforts of a lay woman...
...to other Soviet satellite nations as well...
...Jim Castelli...
...There is of course a systematic attempt to suggest that in all this they are not really the pope's men (John Paul II is not unjustly accused, as were John XXIII and Paul VI, of being a tool of the Communists...
...it manifests ideas, choices, a collective will...
...This is the stuff of meditation...
...Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite's Metaphors for the Contemporary Church (Pilgrim, $8.95, 177 pp...
...It was at Canterbury...
...This compilation of eight lengthy essays by the dean of Latin American liberation theologians complements and enfiches the principles outlined in his earlier classic, A Theology of Liberation...
...is perhaps even more chilling...
...L OOK ELSEWHERE than here for excitements of the moment...
...If religious sensibility and theology are embedded in Alice Walker's fiction, r Art, S.J., illustrates his theology with the insights of other disciplines, including poetry and the social sciences...
...This book not only unearths the socialist tradition in the black church, thereby broadening our knowledge of the complexity and diversity of ideological perspectives among AfroAmerican Christians...
...bishops' historic 1983 Pastoral on War and Peace as told by one of the best-informed and most perceptive Cath24 February ! 984- 119 Christianity's original and radical egalitarianism as it stemmed from the ministry and message of Jesus...
...In Williams's account the tragedy of the crucifixion is not denied by the resurrection, but rather he shows how the hope sponsored by the resurrection must embrace that tragic event...
...The militants of Solidarity, they conclude, "do not simply overturn obstacles...
...With Your Whole Soul is itself a work of interdependence...
...CAMERON was for some years the British correspondent of Commonweal...
...The Body of Christ, the Poor, and the Spirit of Justice are central in this clear, readable essay which is directed primarily toward North American Protestant churches but offers valuable insight on Catholic issues of hierarchy and authority as well...
...Ransom...
...twenty years ago Roman Catholics joined the intra-Christian dialogue and proclaimed themselves in favor of dialogue with all believers and non-believers...
...This blows the dust off some old Rutherford College in the University of Kern topics and makes us think again...
...But then Achtemeier, Philip J. King, Elizabeth Achtemeier...
...30 to 50...
...Noel Brown and members of the Marymount Manhattan College faculty...
...It is full of perplexities and rough passages that make us sigh and go back to the beginning...
...They uncompromisingly depict the injustice and terror that grips our lives, yet from such honesty I draw hope as it makes me think that theology may not be as silly an enterprise as it often seems...
...What the Museum of Fine Arts retrospective, which in 1984 will complete its five-city tour with stops in Pittsburgh and New York, m~es clear is that the subtlety and rigor of Island Farmhouse is no accident...
...makes chilling reading as one wonders just how much injustice one people can stand...
...He is co-founder and editor of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies...
...Vincent Harding's, There Is a River (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $19.95, 416 pp...
...A Latin American Journal (Harper & Row, $12.95, 188 pp...
...Maps, charts, snippets, pictures, short articles make up the book...
...i . . . , , . . S INCE most of my reading of religious books consists of those pub...
...Michael Glazier, $17.95, $12.95, paper, 242 pp...
...All through the book the author engages in constant dialogue with Judaism, Islam, and perhaps most of all with modern critical thinking...
...Completed B.A...
...no modern mind can unequivocally say they are more...
...Those interested in the topic of abortion may remember Finnis's brilliant reply to a paper by Judith Jarvis Thomson, in Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1973...
...I do not really think that either of these authors wrote with people like me in mind, people who are already gagging on a surfeit of theology and piety...
...George W. Slater, Jr., Rt...
...carries the feminist theological perspective into the present and future by relating the experience of women to questions of imagery of the divine, the theology of creation, theological anthropology, Christology, Mariology, evil, ministry, and eschatology...
...Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L'Engle (Bantam, $2.95, 198 pp...
...is a useful account of the rich tradition of conversation and alliance between Christians and Marxists C in German-sw, aking parts of Europe...
...Don't miss it...
...Something which theologians habitually overlook is brought to the fore in Michael Warren's Sourcebook for Modern Catechetics (Saint Mary's Press, $15.95, 493 pp...
...The book begins with a sophisticated discussion of feminist theory and method and coneludes with a theological perspective on feminist biblical spirituality...
...Over 25...
...The same kind of theological integrity is present in Rowan Williams's Resurrection (Darton, Longman, and Todd, $4.75, 129 pp...
...RICHARD KOFFLER Executive Director, The Association of o University Presses, Inc...
...Permanent Institute Faculty...
...Thistlethwaite combines historical and contemporary experience as she searches for inclusive, participatory metaphors that might name the church today...
...Write: Sr...
...3.95 An Enriching Portrayal of the Passion THE LAST DAY OF JESUS Gerhard Lohfink Portrays the motivations, actions and characters of the people involved in the drama of the Passion so that we can identify with them--see ourselves'in the roles played by the Council, Pilate, etc...
...Write Fr...
...Impotence and despair, cruelty, forgiveness and reconciliation, and most of all empowering, freeing love are all there...
...but despite all the pressures to which they were subjected by the administration and by conservative Catholics seems to me Jonathan Bishop's The Cov- they didn't swerve from their apostolic chant: A Reading (Templegate, $9.95 responsibility as pastors and teachers...
...His Commonweal: 120 unrelenting depiction of how our sinfulness sustains our intention to murder in the name of a good cause makes hard reading...
...Elisabeth Schiissler-Fiorenza's In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, (Crossroad, $19.50, 351 pp...
...Sometimes they come to me in the way of duty -- I am asked to review them or to comment on them...
...has also gone through several printings and is into a second edition...
...Oh, let me sneak in along with that two volumes edited by Edwin S. Gaustad, A Documentary History of Religion in America (Eerdmans, $18.95 each...
...The editors found far more religion in "Middletown" decades after earlier samples...
...Orbis Books...
...Cambridge University Press...
...Earliest to appear is last February's The First Urban Christians by Wayne A. Meeks (Yale University Press, $19.95, 299 pp...
...letting go of self for the love of God, and as a religious pilgrim, laying aside all attachments...
...Creative Unlimited...
...Alice Walker's superb novel The Color Purple (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $11.95,245 pp...
...paperUniversity of Leeds and then Master of back...
...T his is the best post-Vatican II book in the English language on Vatican social teaching, which, for Father Dorr's purposes, includes not only papal statements but the documents of Vatican II and the Synod of Bishops in Rome and the documents issued by the Latin American bishops at Medellin and Puebla...
...subtitled "An Anatomy of Theological Method...
...olic journalists in the United States...
...Like a detective, the author combs the New Testament texts to chart the experience of women in the movement surrounding Jesus, a reform movement within Judaism that embodied an inclusive vision of the kingdom, female imagery and mythology, and the equal discipleship of women and men...
...is a book for the bedside or the long plane fide...
...I I I I I I I I I Correspondence Classified RATES: 70r a word, one time...
...the main point is the presence of the Gospel in our people...
...Their findings raise problems for those who use simple secularization theories...
...Finally, I have to include in my list The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response (National Conference of Catholic Bishops, $1.50, 116 pp...
...Shirley Letwin's The Gentleman in Trollope: Individuality and Moral Conduct (Harvard University Press, $20,303 pp...
...I look forward to more voices like these, voices that respectfully dispel my illusions...
...resort to arms...
...It is the pure distillation of a lifetime of penetrating scholarship, unburdened by heavy scholarly apparatus...
...Stop citing them, Farley tells theologians, and start investigating the very real evidence offered by ecclesial intersubjectivity, that is, by the distinctive redemptive mode of human beingtogether that is dynamically inaugurated day by day by the Gospel' s healing of our meanings for one another...
...Mark A. Noll and what looks like a cast of thousands edited Eerdmans' Handbook to Christianity in America (Eerdmans, $24.95,507 pp...
...again I have always only encountered it . . . . . . . . . . . . . Publication in some dark corner of labyrinthine Catholic moral meandering about laws and mores in the service of putting a human face on anti-human thoughts, words, actions...
...R Chestnut Hill, MA 02167...
...One author reveals results on a 3 day Fast...
...Miriam Ward...
...Father Tillard, a distinguished French Canadian theologian who has long been involved in significant ecumenical work at the international level, is courageously but respectfully honest in analyzing the question of authority in the church which, in his judgment, is the great obstacle to Christian unity...
...20012...
...My choices, while different in form, share a common substantive grounding, namely that art has the capacity to break open the great themes of Christian faith in such a way that they concretely live in our time, in our place, in our relationships...
...10.95, 240 pp...
...619) 578-1948...
...Watch for Pelikan finding surprising diversity in late medieval thought...
...She integrates central themes of Latin American liberation theology with North American feminist thought to offer provocative ways of thinking about the church as a public, political, and ecumenical force in society...
...Yet the book gives one hope i exactly because Aukerman refuses to be comforted by any false solutions that derive from our denial of God's peace...
...In Memory of Her is a thoroughly compelling piece of scholarship...
...my favorite reading in 1983 did not consist of the e.xlifying religious publications of that year...
...Three of the following books show that Christian feminist reflection on women's experience has moved beyond protest against the theological tradition's denigration and exclusion of women to anew stage of historical revisioning and systematic synthesis...
...I may as well admit it...
...This is the legislative history of the U.S...
...Aukerman and Williams read together would make an excellent exercise for Lent...
...Kirkridge Gathering (Continued from page 100) Perhaps Ahem finds Eco too good for the likes of the novel's quarter million readers, on whom the church Latin is largely wasted...
...I have been reading it at the dentist and in the cashier's line at the grocery store and have found it a good bedside book, because each entry has some gem of insight, compassion, wisdom...
...In The Harbor - Great Spruce Head he gives as much care to a water tank as the dock leading to the ocean...
...The following is merely a sampling of some of my most recent favorites...
...seventy-five years ago dialogue among Protestants was initiated...
...and Jeffrey Stout's The Flight From Authority: Religion, Morality and the Que~ for Autonomy (Notre Dame, $25,307 pp...
...Buddhism had always seemed life-denying to me before, but here from the scholarly hand of a Sri Lankan Buddhist-Catholic the teachings of Gautama come alive...
...Bentley's historical treatments of a number of key figures -- the first Christian socialist party member Christoph Blumhardt, the Marxist historian of Christianity Karl Kautsky, the Czech theologians Josef Hromadka and Jan Milic Lochman, the persistently ~geous Dorothea Sblle and the perennially provocative Jurgen Moltmann -- provide a source of information and inspiration for those of us who think some version of the conversation and alliance is worth pursuing...
...is a richly detailed and carefully argued work of feminist biblical scholarship...
...Examining my conscience about the books that really trapped me, the books I read guiltily through the night and into the early morning hours, I find that these are from other years and for the most part from other centuries and not so explicitly religious -- books of Chesterton, Conan Doyle, Dickens, Shakespeare, folk tales and mythology...
...She is the author of Jesus the Compassion of God (Michael Glazier...
...I wonder if those who make these suggestions have noted the recent advice of the pope to scientists engaged in research on weapons: to get out of this field and do something else...
...Also examines world hunger and poverty, and what religion has to offer as a solution...
...With Your Whole Soul, subtitled On the Christian Experience of God, by Herwig Arts, S.J., (translated by Sr...
...An older book I came across and read on Alasdair MacIntyre's recommendation is Natural Law and Natural Rights by John Finnis (Clarendon/Oxford, England he was professor of philosophy at the $49.95, $14.95 paper, 4,12 pp...
...Yet they've spread their stakes far, and Catholic traditions receive fair treatment...
...James Theodore Holly, and Rev...
...I can assure Ahem, and the readers of Commonweal, that the three presses that have published Eco's other books would be grateful to pick up a small portion of that readership for his scholarly studies...
...17.95,203 pp...
...535, 610 pp...
...Alice Walker is doing the theology of story...
...Bill Axe, The Trinitarian Friars, P.O...
...The Jewish author draws upon his deep Jewish scholarly knowledge and his penetrating New Testament scholarship to present convincingly the "pacifist" teachings of Jesus in a way that makes practical sense in today's nuclear-power world...
...He left England for Canada in 1971 and is now an emeritus professor of St...
...they affirm principles and values, their will and their consciousness make them actors in their own history...
...George Washington Woodbey, his prot~g6 Rev...
...Of course I was disappointed -- it was not there...
...Helen Rolfson, O.S.F., Paulist Press, $7.95,203 pp...
...Far from idolizing the forward principally through the efforts of church, Farley bows to the divine crea- ordinary folks engaged in catechizing the tive influence that begets the miracle of next generation...
...l I I II I I II I | Stanley Hauerwas STANLEY HAUERWAS teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...There are two books that I read in the daytime, most soberly, because the publisher asked me to -- in itself an inauspicious circumstance, yet these two I truly enjoyed...
...Even better, of course, than reading Letwin is reading Trollope who saw clearly our failings but who remained hopeful believing that forgiveness can make a difference in human affairs...
...Religiou s Community Considering Religious Life...
...or call Collect (301) 484-2250...
...Her work is distinguished by its practical, social, and ethical orientation as it suggests ways in which feminist experience impinges on the whole of theological understanding...
...Say~ iour monastery Elmira, N.Y...
...And not a religious clich~ in sight...
...Here you get a feel for sources from the American past...
...Rev...
...paper, 458 pp...
...Highly recommended...
...Sidney Callahan will speak on Self-Awareness, Empowerment For Political Action...
...It is not a book to read straight through...
...His sympathetic though incisive critique of disclosive models of truth and his own transformative conception of truth presents new possibilities for Christian thinkers...
...Jesus in Focus by Gerard S. Sloyan (Twenty-third Publications, 212 pp., $7.95) is a presentation of Jesus as he is depicted by each'of the Gospel writers and by Paul...
...Priesthood Desire Priesthood...
...In the end, please God, their historic movement, whose light "shines on us all," will come back to life again, phoenix-like, and bring freedom to Poland and (who knows...
...Buddhism and Christianity - Their lnner Affinity by Antony Fernando (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Ecumenical Institute, 490 Havelock Rd., $5, 133 pp...
...The house, the dog, the boat, and two islands break up what would otherwise be an abstract painting, but now their presence is anything but incidental...
...In The Privet Hedge he allows a passing retriever to interrupt a Monet-like plane of color...
...Moreover, it's a joy to read -- like sipping from a clear, cool drink -- but be careful, it's really spiritual and intellectual nitro...
...Arts locates the uniqueness of the Christian experience of God in relationships...
...It isa strong work and an original one, though it isn't original in the pejorative sense (it isn't obvious that originality is to be welcomed in a work of theology...
...II I I l i II I _ ~ H_ Cornel West CORNEL WEST teaches philosophy at Union Theological Seminary and is the author of Prophesy Delivexance[ An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Westrm'nister...
...A SYMPOSIUM - MARCH 2 & 3, 1984- at 221 East 71st Street, New York 10021 For information call (212)472-3800, ext...
...More specifically, he would give greater authority to national and regional bishops' conferences and to the Synod of Bishops...
...concentrates on ways in which women's experience can help to forge vital images of Christ, the Spirit, and the church...
...I II III J.M...
...Interdependence is at the core of Arts's work, as it is in Walker's...
...It also gives the lie to those who persist in saying, whether innocently or with malice aforethought, that Gutierrez is a Marxist wolf in Christian sheep's clothing...
...The first sacramental grace one experiences is that of marriage, embodied in one's parents' loving care even before Baptism...
...The most recent to appear, in fact it is not yet published as I write, is Jaroslav Pelikan, Reformation of Church and Dogma (University of Chicago Press, $27.50, 488 pp...
...The fourth is a novel by a black woman which, at the heart of its revelatory story, probes the experiential roots of feminist theology...
...For free catalogue, call or write: Institute of Religious Education & Pastoral Ministry, Boston College, Dept...
...Why so many women...
...Solidarity: Poland 1980-1981, Alain Touraine, Fran~:ois Dubet, Michel Wieviorka, and Jan Strzelecki...
...The essays and historihuman love as divinity's most reliable witness...
...Michael's College in the University of Toronto...
...For information write Anthony Ciccarietlo, 520 W. Gray St., Elmira, N.Y...
...L' Engle ruminates about her dearest treasures: her family, the Christian faith, music, her work, and the natural world.Gently, this small journal invites us to pause and notice our relationship to everything, and to create our own metaphors...
...Moral meandering Keyport, N.J...
...eorge t a l g g l n s oxp o io is constructively critical of Vatican social MSGR...
...Rosemary Radford Ruether's Toward a Feminist Theology (Beacon, $16.95, 285 pp...
...The Just/Unjust War ethic died long before the Age of Trinity but the stench of its congenital failure continues to pollute our moral imagination and courage...
...4 / l~ CHOOSING three religious books to recommend to Commonweal readers, I asked several questions...
...Maybe liberation theology is helpful for that...
...This book, the second of two philosophically agile though dense volumes, discredits the custom of supporting a dogma by appealing to Scripture or to institutional authorities within the church...
...Maria Harris (Religious Ed...
...The Reformation has been his home turf for a third of a century and more...
...I I I I I I Leonard Swidler LEONARD SWIDLER is Professor of Catholic Thought and lnterreligious Dialogue at Temple University...
...4.50 THE HEALING POWER OF THE SACRAMENTS Jim McManus, C.SS.R...
...Set in the South between the two World Wars, The Color Purple is a story about black women, mostly, but black men, too...
...What is going on in Porter's work is political as well and, in the most concrete ways, egalitarian in its implications...
...Box 5719, Baltimore, MD 21208...
...In the profusion of color and light that radiates from the canvases Porter did during these years, we are not, however, simply seeing an artist who has at last come into his own...
...The authors, a collaborative team of French and Polish sociologists who engaged in a fruitful dialogue in several Polish cities with articulate Solidarity militants, emphasize repeatedly that Solidarity is not "a mechanical reaction to oppression which has become unbearable...
...2.95 From your local bookstore, or: I IAVE MARIA PRESS Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 24 February 1984:123 sions while admitting the importance of teaching tradition of the church goes his questions...
...Is it cricket on this one, since I contributed all of two pages to it...
...As he patiently explained in a recent interview in Cincinnati, his overriding concern is not to "preach liberation theology but to be Christian...
...Using what is the stuff of everyday life for most Christians, Cooke has opened up new vistas of theological understanding and religious appreciation...
...66r three times...
...Dorothee S611e, Dr...
...A competent theologian and a man of profound faith in the workings of the Holy Spirit, he deserves a serious and respectful hearing even or especially at the highest levels of the Roman Curia...
...RONALD CIOFFI Restore Faith...
...Hackles were raised at last summer's meeting of the Catholic Biblical Association, which in plenary session collectively scowled at Farley's concluBEGINNING 1984...
...His insistence on painting "things as they are" led him to transform whatever was around him -- whether it was the view from a screen porch, a clump of Persian rose bushes, or the breakfast dishes on an uncleared table...
...Orbis Books...
...In painting upon painting we see that from the 1960s on Porter has become a master in his use of light and color...
...Hardbound, $16.95 At your Christian bookstore or write: P.O...
...it is a murder mystery whose plot moves slowly through five hundred pages...
...If one wonders how the experience of women, or the poor, is significant for theological reflection, The Color Purple is a good place to begin...
...The Abbd Huvelin told von Hiigel that he ought not to read the religious press on the ground that it would do him a great deal of harm...
...Niemi, General Delivery, Mountainview, HI 96771...
...However, I found in both books a degree of honesty that engaged me in refreshing mental conversation...
...B i b l i c a l I n s t i t u t e To the Editors: I share Bryan Hehir's 19th Biblical Institute, Trinity College, Burconcern for building a barrier against fu- . lington, VT 05401, June 17-22...
...Matthew Lamb's Solidarity With Victims: Toward A Theology of Social Transformation (Crossroad, $12.95,158 pp...
...So did everyone else...
...Like the stories of Flannery O'Connor, the art of Alice Walker does not simply have theological implications: its breathtaking symbolism is that primary theology out of which reflection is born...
...Cameron J.M...
...though three years old, still resound loudly in my mind...
...I myself thought their second draft was a stronger document...
...James Bentley's Between Marx and Christ" The Dialogue in GermanSpeaking Europe 1870-1970 (Verso, $7.50, 191 pp...
...In come after the predigested stuff so common in religious literature...
...24 February 1984: 125...
...What class were they...
...Commonweal: 126...
...Certainly it has the attraction of intellectual snobbery, but so do Karl Rahner and Schillebeeckx and Paul Ricoeur, but I have never stayed awake all night to read any of them...
...Box 851, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania 19482-0851 cal documents assembled by Warren show the influence of the catechetical movement upon the Second Vatican Council, for example, and they give invaluable background for understanding phenomena such as the Baltimore Catechism and the CCD...
...And I must admit that Alasdair Maclntyre' s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, $15.95,252 pp...
...Michael O'Ndl] (Leadership), Fayctte Breaux Veverka (Religious Ed,), Sydney & Robert McA~ Brown (Social Ethics), John & Dcnls~ Carmody (Systematic's), Kathy & Jim McGlnnls (Church...
...What recent works have spoken of God in a fresh language...
...Similarly helpful in its radical honesty I found Henri Nouwen's Gracias...
...Go elsewhere for sustained theses...
...11.95, 328 pp...
...A spiritually enlightening account of how affluent Christians can find hope of entering the kingdom of heaven...
...but this is well i American Catholics have reason to be proud of their bishops and the whole Christian world owes them a debt...
...His respect for and use of the intuitive, imaginative path create for me a credible theology...
...I was, therefore, surprised to discover as I gathered them to write this review that they had a common characteristic -- they were books that made me hopeful because of their religious and theological integrity...
...monthly in advance for more than three times...
...Image Doubleday.S7.95, 283 pp...
...They are part of a color scheme of immense subtlety, one that operates in terms of its own spatial construction and at the same time risks being overlooked by virtue of its unassertiveness...
...535-C Brummel Ct., N.W., Wash., D.C...
...The result, as Porter once said of Vuillard, is that "what he's doing seems to be ordinary, but the extraordinary is everywhere...
...The Company at Kirkridge, a supportive network for contemporary Christians, will meet March 23,24,25,1984 at Mt...
...The Sermon on the Mount is not idealistic eschatology, but a practical, doable program of peace-making for today...
...10016 For the enclosed $9 send the next 11 issues (6 months of Commonweal) to: Name . . . . Address City, State, Zip i l'-ll prefer a full-year subscription at $24 2n4/~, i k . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _1 Commonweal: 122 the true meaning of Jesus in the real context of his life (the Jewish context in this case), and the true meaning of our sacramental worship in the real context of our lives...
...Scripture and other loci of authority are, to the discerning eye, vehicles that promote the ecclesial community's social endurance through history...
...In Landscape with Two Parked Cars he treats two automobiles as a natural part of the country...
...16] I was hoping to see some application for the jus ad bellum criteria to this -- unhappy to say -- not most recent U.S...
...The editors come from the camp called Neo-evangelical...
...But to point this out is only to describe the aesthetic consequences of Porter's achievement...
...Finally, (and lest you think I am on the take with Eerdmans, who published 50 percent of my choices,) let me point to Theodore Caplow, Howard M. Bahr, and Bruce A. Chadwick, All Faithful People: Change and Continuity in Middletown's Religion (University of Minnesota, $19.50,378 pp...
...Marianne Sawicki MARIANNE SAWICKI is director of the M.A...
...She shows that women exercised equal leadership with men as prophets, apostles, and teachers in the early Christian missionary movement...
...Join us and become part of an ongoing group which is ecumenical in every dimension...
...Dale Aukerman's Darkening Valley: A Biblical Perspective on Nuclear War (Seabury, $8.95, 228 pp...
...i think it is such in a style that suits our times...
...His new book is required reading not only for his critics but for anyone who wants to know what liberation theology is all about...
...Die Bergpredigt - Utopie oder Programm...
...Throughout his major work Porter takes every opportunity available to show that the light and color he is most dazzled by abound...
...Free details...
...Lash's book is important not only because it is such a fine study of Marx, but because Lash's theological judgments are so sure...
...C ALL it perverse, but this year I took particular delight in books that upset the theological applecart, in one way or another...
...Faculty: Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, Paul ture interventions in the style of the Grenada invasion...
...LuraMedia, 10227 Autumnview Ln., Suite 2, San Diego, CA 92126...
...How does one begin to describe the medieval charm, wit, passion, and intrigue of this book in its excellent translation by William Weaver...
...We cannot, if we care about beauty, act like so many twentieth-century Thoreaus searching for Walden, Porter implicitly argues throughout his painting...
...Alice Walker's The Color Purple (Washington Square Press, publication of Pocketbooks Division, Simon and Schuster, $5.95, 253 pp...
...has already gone through several printings and two editions, and will be published later this year in English by Orbis Books...
...Today, however, the "turn toward the other" dialogue is beginning to bear its full fruit in a harvest of books focusing on interreligious dialogue...
...and Gerard Sloyan's Jesus in Focus (same publisher, $12.95, 212 pp...
...Lamb's detailed knowledge of critical theory and impressive grounding in Lonergan's prophetic Catholic theology greatly enhance the philosophical quality of discourse among liberation theologians...
...T Option for the Poor: A Hundred Years of Vatican Social Teaching, Donal Dorr...
...For Cooke, the Eucharist itself is rooted in the two primary gestures of family love: the giving of food and the giving of the body...
...He is ",dso very good at putting official church documents in proper historical focus and perspective...
...Also delightful is Bernard Cooke's Sacraments & Sacramentality (Twenty-Third Publications, $7.95,254 pp...
...creates the BOSTON COLLEGE Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry Already A Tradition in preparing and renewing Christians for Ministry offers Summer Courses June 25 - August 3 Two week c o u r s e s f o r c r e d i t or a u d i t , f o r c o n t i n u i n g e d u c a t i o n or a degree (M.A., M.Ed., Ph.D) Summer 1984 F a c u l t y Gregory Baum (Sociology), Margaret Brennan (Spirituality), Walter Brueg~mann (OT), Franclr~ Cardman (Church History) Mlchad Cavanagh (Psychology), Bernard Cooke (Sacraments), Regis Duff5, (Liturgy), Thomas Groome* (Religious Ed...
...We must learn to be nourished by what lies before us, by what characterizes our society's compromised relationship with nature...
...And is it really a religious book...
...It's only a means...
...Anne Carr I ! _9 ANNE CARR i$ a member of the faculty of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, presently spending a year in the Women Studies in Religion Program at the Harvard Divinity School...
...I find that many works bearing on Christian theology and morals get my bile flowing to excess.and I therefore tend to keep away from them...
...The most carefully researched and, in Commonweal: 118 many respects, the most impressive of the fifteen or twenty books in English on the Polish labor movement, Solidarity...
...It turned out very well indeed...
...The Sermon on the Mount -Utopia or Program...
...They are systematically comp&ed with the teachings of Jesus (and also the Rabbis in the forthcoming edition), and the same message is found: liberation for authentic life...
...The Bishop of Rome, J.M.R...
...program in religious education at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles...
...F EMINIST theology is characterized by its explicit focus on the experience of women as an important and long neglected source for reflection...
...it also deepens our understanding of the scope of the religious prophetic mdition in the U.S.A...
...Only then will we grasp what the Passion is all about...
...it likewise will be brought out in an expanded edition by Orbis Books in 1984...
...the path of the wider dialogue was trod only by a few...
...GEORGE G. HICK;INS is adjunct lecturer in theology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C...
...is not only a marvelotis study of Trollope, but a wise book about integrity in a world where integrity is not only no longer honored but a hindrance to advancement...
...But there was one exception: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $15.95, 502 pp...
...We are also seeing what is lost when Porter is characterized as the painter of the upper middle class, namely, his passionate belief in the accessibility of beauty...
...Journal Journal-ers: The Bible workbook-journal "Astonish Me, YahwehT" will guide and stir you to talk with and know God...
...Meeks slights theology, but he says he does, so that's fair...
...i.e., that the great Donald E. Messer Challenges the church to help revitalize the elective process with an infusion of Christian values...
...Of willingness and hope...
...while not catalogued as a religious book -- it received last year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction -- is rich with spiritual images...
...He argues "without prevarication" that "the Roman primacy which belongs to the mystery of the church in her pilgrimage on earth and cannot be dispensed without doing violence to God's plan," can and should be exercised in a more collegial manner...
Vol. 111 • February 1984 • No. 4
