Religious booknotes
Toolan, David
Religious booknotes Of Judaism, Jesus, money, & metaphor David Toolan YOU read some books, like Franz Mussner's Tractate on the Jews because they are monuments of quiet erudition and bold...
...it puts faith and inwardness together with the outward-bound quest for social justice...
...Though his last book (he died in 1984), The Potent Self, never once mentions God, it deserves to be on the reading list of anyone interested in a holistic approach to spirituality...
...But it's not just a matter of unearthing roots...
...This same earthy spirituality filled the work of die late Moshe Petdenkrais, an Israeli and one of the great physical therapists of our time...
...Metaphoric Process, by Commonweal columnist Mary Gerhart and physicist Allan Melvin Russell, breaks new ground in the old querulous division between the "two cultures.' ' The link is provided by a fresh apprehension of the function of metaphor, not as decoration or analogy, but as the vehicle of knowing-in-process at the moment that new insight or understanding breaks in...
...Sociologist of religion Prentiss L. Pemberton and economist Daniel Rush Finn set the problem in terms of a common sense of powerlessness to do much about the persistence of massive poverty that condemns some forty-six million Americans (as of 1982) to a "dead end...
...Suddenly Newton's rigid bodies turned plastic, space warped, time dilated or contracted, and very peculiar things happened to mass...
...authors, the method in both the exact sciences and the humanities is the same...
...it became convertible with energy...
...This Tractate onfhe Jews: The Significance of Judaism far Christian Faith, by Franz Massner...
...273 pp...
...It is a set of beautiful meditative reflections in which the borders between theology and God's Fool: The life and Times of Francis ofAssid, by Julien Green...
...More soul food: The subject has been covered by other writers but rarely so well...
...Then I must mention Julien Green's biography of St...
...Jewisft-Christian relations...
...Similarly, to say what the object of religion is like (e.g., Jesus) stretches boundaries, opens up new possibilities of being in (he world...
...Translated by Judith L. Greenberg...
...cism, it was alive and thriving in the Jewish folk underground...
...I recommend the first English translation of Hans Urs von Balthasar's Heart of the World...
...In a similar historical vein but with its own twist is Jaroslav Pelikan's brand new Jesus through the Centuries...
...Toward a Christian Economic Ethic provides a helpful introduction to the dismal science of economics from the perspective of Christian social ethics...
...Fel-denkrais's "functional integration" Experiencing God: Theology as Spirituality, by Kenneth Leech...
...nonetheless, his variations on a theme will resound in your inner ear...
...What does it tell us about an epoch when Jesus is imagined as rabbi, turning point of history, king of kings, Christ crucified, monk, bridegroom of soul, universal man, common-sense teacher, liberator...
...Harper & Row, $20.95, 500 pp...
...Harper & Row, $15.95, 240 pp...
...Winston Seabury, $11.95, 256 pp...
...From this Jewish base, I turn to two wonderfully accessible books on Christian themes whose form represents something of an innovation in usual theological genres (1 told you, they are accessibleX), The first is Kenneth Leech's ribs ticking Experiencing God, which reflects on the "transforming knowledge of God" from Sinai to Desert Fathers to Julian of Norwich and Dorothy Day...
...The topic of religion and culture naturally raises practical questions for the herc-and-now...
...Fortress, $29.95, 339 pp...
...Translated by Peter Heinegg...
...The specific image unlocks the dynamic of the time...
...It is at once a history of the many-limbed Western spiritual quest and theological reflection of the highest quality — superb, I would think, for college classroom, catechesis, and the pleasure of learning how rich is the tradition, how polynomial is God...
...George BaaaHer, $10.95, 113 pp...
...But then, in this quarter, from the Jewish side, seme books ate simply dynamite, Olivier Revault D'AUonnes reminds you lhat before the Bible was written...
...We're told, aren't we, that there were only "the twelve" to start with...
...than usually crucial...
...Finally, we are offered a blueprint for small, disciplined communities of faith which, starting locally, can make a difference...
...8.95, 147 pp...
...work, a major reconstructive step forward from die Christian side, deserves a second mention in these pages — for afl Ihose who see that the recovery of Christianity's Jewish roots is on,e of the most important developments of the time...
...New metaphors opened up new meanings, new worlds...
...Finally, the soul needs good company...
...Well yes, definitely one of this rare quality, combining as it does an elegant style, vivid portrait of the age, and Green's remarkable poetic ability to open Francis's whole world to you...
...Heart of the World, by Hans Urs von Balthasar...
...I recommend Rosemary Haughton's new book, The Re-Creation of Eve — a fine, un-polemical synthesis of the best current biblical scholarship on the significance and role of women in the New Testament, written in her succinct, graceful way (I just wish the print were larger, but the compensation is that the book is not long-winded...
...humous publication of Abraham Hes-chel's The Circle of the Baal Shem Toy reminds you, is a living tradition ^MkVJB t(X»JMJ» am assistant editor cf ^Cotoakawwaii...
...well, if just ten produce Commonweal, anything is possible...
...and when the word of God was being fossilized in eighteenth-century Protestant and Catholic ScholastiThe Patent Self: A Guide to Spontaneity, by Moshe Feldenkrais...
...Pelikan takes us on another journey into time, here using transformations in the image of Jesus as a key to the "genius of an age," its often unspoken cultural heartland...
...Edited by Samuel H. Dresner...
...At the time, Hasidic teaching stories may have been the closest thing around to the parables of Jesus — and Heschel's special feeling for this material brings them to life...
...Metaphoric Process: The Creation of Scientific and Religious Understanding, by Mary Gerhart and Allan Russelt...
...The publisher might have been more generous with the illustrations, which in this kind of book are more Toward a Christian Economic Ethic: Stewardship & Social Power, by Pren-tiss L. Pemberton and Daniel Rush Finn...
...Musical Variations on Jewish Thought, by Olivier Revaalt D'AlIonnes...
...But again, we have here, besides feast for any reader, believer or not, a splendid educational tool, a welcome epilogue to H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture on a broader canvas...
...Templegate...
...The soul also requires beauty...
...Francis of Assisi...
...Yale, $22.50...
...Translated by Erasmo S. Lciva...
...it was first the creation of an oral culture, a message of the distinctive Israelite Muse...
...Texas Christian University Press, $16.95, $10.95 paper, 217 pp._______________ Shift gears a bit...
...The authors go on to give a history of the breakdown of the Christian economic ethic before Lockean liberalism and various forms of state and corporate capitalism, which is then followed by a critical exposition of current economic theory (in terms, that, gratefully, even I can comprehend...
...In this sense, science and theology, at their fans et origo, refer, not to different worlds, but to the same world...
...In this intense' 'musical reverie" he captures the nomadic, restless heart of Judaism, its power of negation, its unstoppable imaginative passion rooted in the vertical dimension of God's unconditional will and promise of a just world...
...Ignatius Press, $4.50, 219 pp...
...270 pp...
...Einstein imagined what it might be like to ride around on a photon at the speed of light — and had an "on-tological flash" analogous to what happens in religious awakenings...
...Translated by Leonard S widier...
...Judaism, as the postThe Orefe oftheBoolShem Tov: Studies in Hasidism, by Abraham J. Heschel...
...Not the least of this book's merits is that it recaptures the Jewish balancing act D'Allonnes speaks of...
...Harold Bloom's introduction corrects D'AJ-lonnes's score on several points...
...4 October 1985: 537...
...demonstrated a way to spit and spirit through the body — or a way to give spirit body...
...Harper & Row, $16.95...
...prayer dissolve — a demonstration of the author's theological aesthetic in action...
...Can you stand another...
...Chicago, $24.95, 213 pp...
...At their "nascent" moment, argue the The Re-Creation of Eve, by Rosemary Haughton...
...The following book, not a light read, is for those with an interest in science and religion...
...Religious booknotes Of Judaism, Jesus, money, & metaphor David Toolan YOU read some books, like Franz Mussner's Tractate on the Jews because they are monuments of quiet erudition and bold thinking in the sensitive area of...
...Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture, by Jaroslav Pelikan...
Vol. 112 • October 1985 • No. 17
