Religious booknotes:
Gerhart, Mary
RELIGIOUS BOOKHOTES Spiritualities of the world Mary Gerhart One of the most promising events in religious scholarship is Crossroad's publication of seven volumes, now going on eight, of a...
...implicit comparative context, however, when it is further stated that "the text of the Quran is thus not based on long periods of compilation and interpretation by human agents...
...Because each volume is arranged topically as well as chronologically, some figures and events arc treated in more than one context...
...Completed, the series will include two volumes on the "meeting of spiritualities," the first volume tracing MARY GERHART tcaches hermeneu-tiii...
...She co-authored (with Allen Rumc II) Meiaphoric Process (Texas ers, the Dead Sea community at Qum-ran, the Christian church, and the Pharisaic sect...
...Greek, Roman, edited by A. H. Armstrong, Crossroad...
...In Praise of Nonsense" (an analysis of a long poem from the Mag Hammudi Library...
...6)-as well as those reviewed here make a significant contribution to the contemporary understanding of religion...
...Sal-trey carefully reconstructs what can he known about the spirituality of these people who have been rendered mute by history done according to traditionalist methods...
...in "Topics in the History of the Spirituality of the Psalms" entertains both hypotheses before saying which he thinks is more plausible...
...An implicit justification can be found in a later claim that women have direct access to Allah, there being no priestly caste, clergy, or ecclesiastical system to intervene One might have wished for a more even-handed treatment of women's spirituality across the several volumes...
...religion, and literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York...
...Equally valuable, however, is a historical and theological context for interpreting these individual writings in relation to their respective religious traditions...
...Why, for example, if it is agreed that the Hebrew Psalms have a cultie connection, have there not been found . prescriptions for liturgical proce-dures...
...Doctrines of Creation," and "Primitive Kchoes...
...in Jewish Spirituality I. for example, has a ! chapter to himself (written by David Winston), extensive commentary in Steven Fraade's "'Ascetical Aspects of Ancient Judaism," and several references in Robert Goldenberg's "Law and Spirit in Talmudic Religion.'' For all this frequency of men- . lion...
...James Kugel...
...and three chapters on the influence of women mystics in Chris-nan Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, and an unusual piece...
...Roman In two of these three volumes inclusive language also prevails...
...In other words, unlike the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures, the Quran was written shorly after its reception by one person as revelation...
...RELIGIOUS BOOKHOTES Spiritualities of the world Mary Gerhart One of the most promising events in religious scholarship is Crossroad's publication of seven volumes, now going on eight, of a projected series of twenty-five volumes in World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest, edited by Ewert Cousins of Fordhatn University...
...The texts already published-Christian Spirituality I: Origins to the Twelfth Century (Vol...
...1 found no duplication of cover-| age...
...The reader is occasionally obliged to decide among conflicting hypotheses...
...In Mumic Spirituality I, for example, it is stated that the Quran is the "verbatim revelation of the Word of God, revealed in Arabic through the archangel Gabriel to the Prophet...
...and Hindu Spirituality: Vedas through Vedanta (Vol...
...There are extended discussions of women's spirituality in three of the four volumes reviewed here: for example, "Female Spirituality in Islam" by Saadia Khawar Khan Chishti in lslamic Spirituality...
...Philo...
...And H. D Saffrey breaks new ground in' 'The Piety and Prayers of Ordinary Men and Women in Late Antiquity" because, as he notices, "ordinary men and women, by definition, leave no personal mark on history" and therefore can be grasped only when someone else gives (hem a voice...
...Different hypotheses regarding the sense of the nearness or distance of Yahweh as represented in the Psalms are also entertaincd...
...This series is a timely addition to the burgeoning in the last decade of new books on spirituality...
...Jewish Spirituality II: from the 16th Century Renewal to the Present (Vol...
...Religious Women in the Later Middle Ages" by Caroline Walker Bynum, "Marian Devotion in the Western Church...
...450 pp...
...This is one series of books on religion which is guaranteed to have the tell-tale marks of frequent use...
...The scholarship is fresh and invites further reflection In her article,' 'The Faith of the Pharaonk- Period," in Classic Mediterranean Spirituality, for example, Gwyn Griffith makes room for new thought in subheadings such as "Basic Cults Reconciled," "A Lush Pluralism...
...which is the "sclf-revelalion of a powerful goddess") by Patricia Cox Miller in Classical Mediterranean Spirituality: Egyp-tion, tian, (Greek...
...This monumental project of interpretation has been undertaken in the Crossroad series...
...Female divine imagery for Yahwell, for example, is asseited, without argument, to be non-existent in the Hebrew Bible "Some contemporary authors have attempted to find female divine imagery related to Yahweh in the Bible, but their efforts are not convnc-ing " Another claim -that "the ab-sence of that female imagery accounts lor the widesprcad popular worship of goddesses which is condemned by the biblical authors"- receives no fur-ther comment whereas the relationship of Yahweh to Canaanite gods is generously interpreted in another part of the essay...
...The ongoing Paulist Press series on individual "masters" in Western spirituality, their series on sources of American spirituality, the Amity House series on classical figures in Eastern spirituality, and the recently published Oxford dictionary on spirituality-to mention only a few-have responded to and cultivated a renewed interest in spirituality comparable in importance to the interest in liturgical reform in the early twentieth century...
...49 50.117 PP...
...In the fourth volume, however, opportunities to include women are curiously neglected...
...One has the sense that the structure of the series as a whole leads to new insights quite apart from any deliberate effort at comparison...
...The retrieval of classic texts by individual authors is indispensable...
...In some of the best articles., the essayists act as guides through different interpretations of their material...
...49.50...
...Multiple coverage here yields not Islamic Spirituality: Foundations, edited by Seyved Hossein Nasr...
...Some five hundred scholars have been working on mis project...
...As is typical of the series as a whole, the historical framework and identifications are clear and reiterated whenever necessary...
...Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, edited by Jill Raitt in collaboration with Bernard McGinn and John Meyendorff...
...The observation that some titles of Yahweh are joined to that of a goddess...
...The notion of "verbatim" unexpectedly receives an Classical Mediterranean Spirituality: Egyptian...
...Crossroad, $49.5O, $19.95 paper, 479 pp I found it difficult to tear myself away from reading these volumes...
...perhaps as a consort, begs for futher comment Israelites are referred to throughout the essays by male pronouns (a practice also made into policy in the volume on Islamic Spirituality), thus leaving women largely invisible and unaccounted for The general focus for the series is on the "inner dimension of the person called 'the spirit"' -that spiritual core which is "the deepest center of the person where the person is open to the transcendent dimension, where the person experiences ultimate reality" While the series as a whole "explores the discovery of this core, the dynamics of its development, and its journey to the ultimate goal" (Preface), each volume begins with a statement of that particular tradition's understanding of the term "spirituality...
...Again, in the essay, "Female Spirituality in Islam," it is claimed that "the male and the female arc absolutely equal in their relationship with their Creator" but also that "both the male and the female arc assigned different roles by nature...
...repetition but a welcome multi-faceted understanding...
...Is the non-existence of rubrics best explained by postdating the composition of the Psalms after that of the Priestly Code or by finding a reason in a possibly deliberate omission of ru-brie by Israel's priests, who wished to isolate Israel's cult from the tendency toward magic in their neighbors' spiritual practices...
Vol. 115 • June 1988 • No. 12
