Religious booknotes:

...Who was Archbishop Goodier...

...I think only the more assiduous readers of the Wanderer would find this work palatable The more interesting question is why a respectable house like Doubleday would issue a work this odd Is there really an audience out there that needs to read a translation of Adolph Tanquerey's dogmatic theology...

...how one balances the demands of various constituencies...

...class seems to be a significant indicator of a liberal or conservative sect Hunter's book is not merely a vademe-cum of statistics It is a closely argued, and clearly written, account of contemporary evangelical attitudes especially as they are refracted through the changing experience of younger Evangelicals He studies evangelicalism as a cultural system, and in that study, to cite the judgment on the jacket, many stereotypes are exploded and the force of modernity on Evangelical orthodoxy is set out This is a stimulating work that deserves an attentive reading by both religionists and those interested in American culture generally Until very recently, American presidents observed a sort of gentlemanly distance from intense religious expression as a method of preserving the common national consensus That spirit of detachment gave way with Jimmy Carter's election in 1976 Carter was not only the most theologically literate president of the century (Wilson would be his only competitor for the title) but he was unabashedly religious in open and public ways That his natural constituency-the Evangelicals-should be snatched away by Ronald Reagan is part of the story Hutche-son tells in this readable book It is a cautionary tale that tries to assess how much religion the American public will tolerate...

...and so on Hutcheson rounds up the usual suspects-Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, etc -but his book, on the whole, is fair and judicious It ends before the Bush presidency so we do not have the opportunity to read the author's reflections on a president who is a committed church person (like Ford and Carter...

...how much religion can enter into public policy...

...Or are the editors so genially ignorant of Catholicism that they fail to recognize a bad book when they see one...

...RELIGIOUS BOOK NOTES John Hardon's roadmap for a lifetime of Catholic reading begins with a core: the Bible, the Roman Catechism, the documents of Vatican II, and a subscription to L'Osservatore Romanol There then follow 104 potted biographies (cum homilies) of persons from the apostolic fathers to the writers of the late 1950s To say that the list (and the editorial comments) are eccentrically reactionary would be to put it mildly Thus, his modern theologian of choice is the late, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange But no entries are to be found on the luminaries Garrigou-Lagrange not so genially persecuted over the years: Chenu, Congar, de Lubac, etc For Scripture scholars, Har-don suggests writers such as Ferdinand Prat, Giuseppe Ricciotti, and M J La-grange, whose works are not even in print Apart from Catholic trivia buffs (Can you name one book by Katherine Burton...

...his very chapter title gives a hint of what he sees happening: "Family: Towards Androgyny " Likewise, the vaunted conservatism of the Evangelicals is not absolute While only 25 percent of Evangelical students favor the ERA (as against 66 Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation, by James Davison Hunter, Chicago, $11 95,302 pp percent of students in public universities), 76 percent favor gun registration Only 27 percent demand prayer in public schools but 83 percent favor equal time for creationist theories while nearly 60 percent of public university students favor the same equal time Liberal Evangelicals tend to come from either the Rocky Mountain or Pacific areas and have blue-collar backgrounds while the conservatives are more middle class and from the South and Midwest...

...and unlike Reagan), but who seems a bit more resistant to the agenda of the religious God in the White House: How Religion Has Changed the Modern Presidency, by Richard G Hutcheson, Jr , Macmil-lan, $18 95,267pp ideologues who got at least lip service from Ronald Reagan One can only speculate at this stage whether Bush will back away from the Reaganesque realpolitik, for example, on human rights to an attitude of studied resistance to human rights abuses that was one of the shining moments of the Carter years Virgil Elizondo is a priest in San Antonio, Texas who has been at the forefront of efforts to make the Hispanic church better known and more appreciated in North America Given the demographics of Catholic America this is a commendable work not solely derived from ethnic pride but from the sheer numbers of Hispanic Catholics in this country This book, first published in France (1987) where Elizondo studied, is part autobiography and part theological reflection He recounts the tension of growThe Future Is Mestizo, by Virgil Elizondo, Meyer-Stone, $7 95,128 pp ing up as a Mexican-American in an Anglo-dominated culture and the cultural difficulties in his path to the priesthood when Irish/German clergy looked down on the Mexican seminarians as unreliable and/or unteachable This is a story that is a teaching moment for anyone who is not of Hispanic background I found it very chastening to read The second half of the book explores a vision of theology deriving from the Mestizo (Spanish/Indian) culture rooted in the dynamics of Our Lady of Guada-lupe as an organizing symbol of that culture and a very moving portrait of Jesus as mestizo It is a theology that has passion without sentimentality and solidity without ponderousness What Elizondo does is employ Paul Tillich's method of correlation (the juxtaposition of experience and revelatory claims) to construct a religious vision that is consonant with both experience and the claims of faith It is very much an American theology if one is willing to concede that Americans can live and think at a border which is more than geographical It is a theology thought out "from below" and, as such, bears a family resemblance to liberation theology with its sense of the popular Catholic tradition, its evangelical passion, and its matrix of a lived cultural experience x of a lived cultural experience...

...I suspect even Ignatius Press (which is reprinting some very good older classics) would quail at this reading plan Like Moliere's character who discovered that he spoke prose all his life, I discovered, on reading Michael Novak, that I always believed in the common Experience & the claims oi iailh Lawrence S Cunningham good (the commonweal) but didn't know it More to the point, Novak has shown me that the concept of the common good is a very complex one (his appendix on terminology is excellent) that engages political philosophy on the spectrum from libertarian to Marxist He makes the very sane point that in the name of a putative common good the right of an individual can be crushed while the unbridled atomism of extreme libertarianism in rejecting the common good can erode the civility of the polis Novak's goal is to speak corrective words both to the statist and the individualist by mounting a cogent argument for the concept of the common good In this enterprise he brings to bear synthetically both the resources of classical Catholic social theory and the thought of the liberal tradition identified with The Federalist Papers and its progeny What is basic to Novak's work is the thesis that the common good emerges, not Free Persons and the Common Good, by Michael Novak, Madison Books, $17 95,223 pp from prior intentions of large social bodies (i e , the government) but as a result of free-market forces (he has a very expansive notion of market as a cultural reality beyond the purely economic function of markets), which produce the common good This is a conclusion that should not surprise those who have read Novak's earlier work That not everyone will agree to this notion is patent from a perusal of a recent essay by David Hollenbach on the common good in Theological Studies (vol 50, pp 70-94) where Novak's arguments are, en passant, taken up I had the opportunity to read that essay just as I finished Novak, and before beginning Hollenbach's recent book Hollenbach's collected essays makes a nice companion piece to Novak's Hollenbach is more the theologian and better read in the theological tradition than Novak who is more a philosopher of religion These essays range over specific topics on a wide array of social problems (jobs, the nature of work, human rights) to more Justice, Peace, and Human Rights: American Catholic Social Ethics in a Pluralistic Context, by David Hollenbach, SJ , Crossroad, $16 95,260 pp theoretical issues like the nature of justice They are models of clarity and sophisticated in their theological depth What I most like about these studies are their irenic balance and their fairness Hollenbach tells us what he is going to say, says it, and indicate the significance of what has been said In essays on Just War theory, he makes a genuine effort to see the pacifist alternative, not as a sectarian response for the Christian, but as an integral part of our inherited tradition His carefully nuanced historical approach to papal documents is always able In an excellent essay on the nature of work, he offers some enlargement (and critique) of Pope John Paul's Laborem exercens Hollenbach has been closely associated with the formulation of the American bishops' recent letter on the economy What he has to say sheds light and provides background to both this document and the pastoral on peace The bishops, judging from these essays, have been well served I found this book to be profoundly satisfying and was much instructed by it By evangelicalism, James Hunter means the North American expression of theologically conservative Protestantism It is an umbrella term that subsumes the classic evangelical tradition as well as charismatics and fundamentalists Such folk have been very much in the news since at least the Jimmy Carter years but their potency in America culture can be traced back to at least the Second Great Awakening in this country, during the 1790s and early 1800s Hunter's work, based on a good deal of field research, wishes to assess their position in the world today while Evangelicals are conservative ethically and theologically, they are not rigid yahoos as the journalistic caricatures would have it In his chapter on family values, for instance, he notes that the Evangelical defense of the "model" family (based on a late bourgeois concept of the family) is in a state of fluidity...