Religious Book Week Critics' Choices:
Kauffman, Virginia Sloyan, Ernan McMullin, Marilyn Chopin Massey, Bernard F. Swain, Margaret Farley,
RELIGIOUS BOOK WEEK CRITICS'CHOICES Virginia Sloyan Just as the classic Dear Theo, edited by Irving Stone, assumes the form of an auto-biography of Vincent Van Gogh (it is, in fact, so...
...is not a universal fact of culture," but occurred at a precise historical moment in Platonic Greek philosophical dis-course when women were named as' 'de-fective, partial men...
...has stayed longer at the top of the non-fiction best-seller list than any other book about science in recent times...
...Collins traces a path through history marked by dates, names, and documents, leading to a point where it is assumed that both the baptized and the ordained share in the gift of the Holy Spirit, but the shares differ in terms of quality...
...Two 1988 books on the construction of gender in antiquity present different but complementary perspectives...
...While we talked, a car drove up and Maria was taken away by her protectors...
...113 pp...
...The final new section discusses the role of the visual arts in this century...
...In this sense it is not all paradoxic to include in this survey a small book, rich in religious culture, by Justus George Lawler: Speak That We May Know: A Spirituality for Uttering the Inner You (Meyer-Stone, $8.95, 96 pp...
...Mary of Egypt as the liturgical icon Of repentance...
...That is, voices from within diverse com-munities and traditions are raised in all of their particularity...
...The eighteen papers that follow provide an on-the-whole cautious assessment of the present situation...
...Published on the twenty-fifth anni-versary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, this dictionary is in-fused with a historical consciousness and is intended as an aid for "teachers and preachers...
...Here, however, he moves beyond his earlier work to present traditions as not so discrete and as capable of asking questions of one another, overlapping and interacting in their search for rational grounds for justice...
...Nevertheless, this is an exciting work, one that will provoke the right sort of discussion...
...Editors' note: A review of this series will appear in a forthcoming issue.] Authorized by the National Council of Catholic Bishops and underwritten by a grant from the Knights of Columbus, the series is uni-fied by an understanding of the roles played by the American ethos in the formation of the Catholic community, by a common periodization, and by a methodology influenced by current trends in historiography and ecclesiolo-gy...
...There is historical information about the social roles and activities of women, brief discussion of the texts a-bout women, and development of themes from a feminist perspective...
...For those who are searching for ways to express the social dimensions of faith and sacrament in biblical language, this book is a real find...
...Page DuBois's Sowing the Body: Psychoanal-ysis and Ancient Representations of Women (University of Chicago Press, $29.95, 227 pp...
...I especially appreciated Diskin Clay's "Reading the Republic" and Griswold's own essay, "Plato's Metaphilosophy: Why Plato Wrote Dialogues," which addresses the political and moral aims of Plato's writ-ing in relation to today's philosophical relativism...
...The second, "intro-spective" strain, concentrates on justice in the internal life of the church...
...A sensitive and insightful ex-amination of women's writing about themselves and other women, Heilbrun ends by discussing her own creation, Kate Fansler, the heroine of Heilbrun's eight pseudonymous mystery novels...
...Instead of Christology "from above" or "from below," the authors propose a Christology "from the side," through social context and constructed meaning...
...One evening she approached me and asked me to help her get away from a life she hated...
...But this book is far more than a revision...
...Indeed, it should be avoided for its theological over-simplifications and its visual mis-readings...
...Jane and John Dil-lenberger have also edited for publication the unpublished and uncollected essays of Paul Tillich, On Art and Architecture ($24.50, 276 pp...
...I dedicate this book to her, asking that the mercy of God may come upon us all...
...Readers, not skimmers, have a treat in store-but it's the kind of visual treat that opens our eyes wider than many of us had bargained for...
...Another set of issues is treated in David Hollenbach's Justice, Peace, and Human Rights: American Catholic Social Ethics in a Pluralistic World (Crossroad, $16.95, 260 pp...
...For those who like historical novels, Pietro Redondi's Galileo Heretic (Princeton, $29.95, 356 pp...
...My own guess is that there are many other factors at the origins of modern atheism-social, political, psychological, technological...
...Whose Rationality...
...Hence, it celebrates the bicentennial of the local church...
...The rarity of the phe-nomenon has implications that extend far beyond the academic world...
...traces the sources of the change back to the theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who met the new challenges to theistic belief not by calling on Christology or religious experience but upon philosophy...
...The amalgam of humanistic cul-ture, descriptive realism, imperatives of state, and Christian sensibility illustrated in the frescoes for Palladio's Villa Barbaro at Maser confronted the Council of Trent's directives to painters and bishops and sparked Veronese's "conversation" with the Inquisition in 1573...
...In a re-printed version of a 1984 text, The Visual Arts and Christianity in America: From the Colonial Period to the Present ($39.50,290 pp., 184 plates), Dillenber-ger expands upon this historical analysis by examining the experience of the United States...
...It shows that intelligent essays can reflect the inner spiritual har-monies of the visual arts...
...Put in the hands of adults or children in the setting of their homes, it will say: "Stand tall...
...Rensberger takes on the social func-tion of John in its own context, according to what we know from recent attempts at reconstruction, and its message of human liberation through the mediation of sym-bols in the life of a community...
...The first is the "magisterial" strain, including both episcopal and pa-pal social documents and commentaries on such documents...
...the ordained's, active...
...it attempts a "much deeper" analysis of the evolution of the concept of ministry and the theological implications of that evolution...
...The text works by way of suggestion, rather than argument...
...How did this change come about...
...produced W.R...
...The book's title is slightly deceiving, though I would guess intentionally so...
...She is also a Sister of the Love of God, an Anglican religious community...
...How can we celebrate the Eucharist worthily, in a manner that harmonizes with the character of Jesus' own Eucha-rist, in a world of injustice and disregard for human rights...
...The wedding of an inherent Neo-Platonism of the theme and Chris-tian transcendentalism is stressed...
...and Johannine Faith and Liberating Community by David Rensberger (West-minster, $14.95, 168 pp...
...and Dance as Religious Studies, a further co-edited volume by Adams and Aposto-los-Cappadona...
...In all of these volumes we have something that ethicists tend to talk about, but women are beginning to do...
...They- have provided us with John Dil-lenberger's A Theology of Artistic Sensi-bilities ($22.50, 280 pp., 123 plates), which describes a broad history of Christian interaction with painting, mosaics, and frescoes...
...Leonardo Boff, in his When Theology Listens to the Poor (Har-per & Row, $18.95, 147pp...
...Soon more will know who Don Giovanni is, priest, founder of the religious congregation, the Poor Servants of Divine Providence...
...The other, in his forties, is gradually dying of a degenerative neurological disorder which has left him incapable of com-municating except by pressing a key con-nected to a computer...
...an excellently edited volume showing us the progenitor of so many interests in religion and the arts, gion and the arts...
...To be sure, we've seen North Amer-ican liberation perspectives aimed at the experience of women, Hispanics, the poor...
...What we do together is important, and lovely...
...But more than that, her skills have the force and effect of a rallying cry to the bap-tized, without any of the over-simplicity or frenzy the term implies...
...This book con-sists of over thirty essays by prominent Catholic writers and thinkers on topics ranging from dissent and judicial proce-dures to office-holding, academic free-dom, working conditions, and wages...
...Masculinity and femininity, these authors agree, are neither biological nor natural but socially produced...
...a title redolent of Avanning and swooning about the dunes of early Christian Egypt...
...The extraordinary presentation (Just completed) commemorating Paolo Veronese's works at the National Gal-lery, Washington D.C...
...The laity's share is passive...
...Worth reading nonethe-less...
...Two final works must be mentioned...
...My act of reaching past Bloom's trans-lation, and in fact, my very presence that day in the midst of the wildly diverse students of New York City was my per-sonal act of defiance of him and all of his sympathizers, who equate recovering a historical canon of great works with de-fending the moral fiber of our culture...
...Neither Stout nor Macln-tyre provides easy resolutions to deeply troubling problems, but their analyses also prevent us from too easily stopping at what we consider an impasse in the debate...
...Favorite maxims aside, you can tell a prayer/blessing book by its binding...
...it is without a doubt the most important and most specific papal statement on the rela-tions of religion and science in recent times...
...By virtue of her protest of apartheid, Gordimer identifies herself as a minority in the white minority...
...on Christianity (Miles, Piediscalzi, Cook, and Hen-dricks...
...But the moral drawn by Buckley warns us of the risks inherent in this...
...Stephen Happel Museums have discov-ered that our televi-sion society likes to attend large exhibi-tions...
...Rearick's catalogue, The Art of Paolo Veronese, 1528-1588, with introductory essay by Terisio Pignotti (Cambridge University Press, $65, 212 pp...
...Collins's narration and use of history to show how the strands of culture, eccle-siology, theology, and liturgical tradi-tion have meshed, and not meshed, over the centuries is highly instructive...
...Buck-ley holds Descartes and Newton mainly responsible for this turn to a God who could be known only by abstract infer-ence...
...the price makes it accessible to anyone con-cerned with contemporary renderings of the horizons of belief...
...Jesuits Peter Henrjot, Eduard De Beni, and Michael Schultheis survey the history of social doctrine from Rerum novarum through Solicitudo rei socialis, including synod documents, U.S...
...Yet diverse experi-ences yield some shared moral ques-tions-questions that do not become abstract just because they may be universal: Are we impelled to condemn commonly recognized injustices and to act for com-monly desired goals...
...Blockbuster shows give public expression to both a thirst for a visual richness, opposed to the drab functionalism present in some mod-ern art and architecture, as well as to a nostalgia for religious traditions dis-carded by postconciliar iconoclasts...
...Indeed, in 1989, we can look forward to Jane Dillenberger's the Image and the Spirit: Essays in Sacred and Secular Art (a collection of her un-published papers and lectures), Doug Adams's Transcendence Within the Hu-man Body in Post-Modern American Art: Seqal, DeStaebler, Johns, and Cristo...
...At the crucial moment in the argument he then asks: but what if imaginary time is the real time...
...These same persons have figured out that eucharistic worship and a more just communion of sisters and brothers are intimately related, but too often their worship experience weakens the connection and sometimes belies it...
...When we view reality from the per-spective of the poor, that reality simply must be transformed...
...On a different but still biblical note, several recent studies on the Gospel of John mark the transition from seeing it as the timeless "spiritual" Gospel, to seeing it as a contemporary social chal-lenge...
...This is a very accessible, experience-based book drawing on the author's previous pub-lications in such fields as literary criti-cism, psychology, politics, theology...
...Most intriguing to me was how these uninvited guests zeroed in critically on Plato's concept of the necessity of the censorship of literature in the education of the just man...
...The final chapter on images of flight as an internal spiritual pilgrimage is fascinat-ing...
...he occupies the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, once held by Isaac Newton...
...works carefully against airinter-pretation of modern moral discourse as simply' 'echoing Babel.'' He wants plur-alism but not total confusion, moral di-versity (without an abstract universal vantage point for judgment) but still some sense of moral truth...
...Its broad scope, with perhaps necessary generalization, has created a superficial look at the topic...
...Accessible to the educated general reader, the book pro-poses that what men and women most need from one another is a mutual recog-nition entailing the acknowledgment of sameness and difference...
...The baptismal liturgy in all its fullness, however, takes us on another road: "God's deed at baptism confers a sacred fitness, makes believers into images of the saving Lord Jesus, and empowers them to proclaim the Gospel...
...To properly grind such a lens, histo-rians should consult the best one-volume work on recent trends in theology, Joseph Komonchak, Mary Collins, and Dermot Lane's The New Dictionary of Theology (Glazier, $59.95, 1112 pp...
...he can take the most abstruse idea and find an analogy that makes it at least moderately intelligible to the average reader...
...All of the essays are in-r teresting and readable...
...In contrast to Bloom's despair about to-day's uncultured freshmen and their in-sensitivity to classics, I felt intellectual excitement about my opportunity to read The Republic with a special group, none of whom would have been invited to the party at which Socrates imagined his ideal city...
...Because only one book deals with the hierarchy, the series is a critical study of the intersection of the Catholic people's experience and the life of the institutional church...
...It is no surprise to find James Hennessey, S.J., the pre-eminent historian/ theologian, as the author of the "His-tory" article...
...There it was in bulk, right next to the translation by Allan Bloom, the now famous author of The Closing of the American Mind, which has set the terms of debate, within and about higher educa-tion today...
...The book itself is the record of an unusual spiritual correspondence be-tween a Roman and an Anglican, con-ducted in Latin between 1947 and 1961...
...And the philosophers turned to Nature: impersonal na-ture was made the primary warrant for" the personal God of Christianity...
...The subtitle promises a rather more modest text: "A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources...
...neither is the premise for the other...
...the first thing I did was remove its paper cover...
...Unlike Hart's work, the sometimes idiosyncrat-ic information does not always seem to service a larger whole...
...may be recommended as a good read...
...126 pp...
...The Galileo story never seems to lose its attraction for the modern mind...
...Baum, since Laborem exercens appeared, has persuasively argued that the pope's encyclicals constitute a major breakthrough in developing a Christian, non-Marxist critique of postindustrial capitalism...
...Each essay applies Michel Foucault's principle of the inex-orable relationship of power and knowl-edge to his insistence on the necessity of unearthing those essential knowledges of human struggle beyond and beneath the limits of official knowledge and disci-plines...
...values in Table 1 of the appendix alone is worth the price of the book for under-standing everything from biblical per-sonalities to contemporary Middle East-ern politics...
...known for such sophisticated, indeed, award-winning children's books as The Book of the Dun Cow and The Book of Sorrows...
...he was beatified a year ago by John Paul II...
...No doubt mis analysis will prove both controversial and seminal...
...What sets off his book, apart from the skill and authority of the author, is the question he keeps raising: if physics can once explain the initial conditions of the universe, as it seems close to doing, "what place, then, for a creator...
...science establishes the general features of that order, and hence sets conditions that a theological account of s the Creator and his activity must satisfy...
...One can still detect a tendency in some of the essays to attribute a greater religious sig-nificance to recent science than the evi-dence seems to warrant...
...The message bears close reading...
...The resulting essays appear in a volume, Physics, Philosophy, and Theology: A Common Quest for Under-standing (Notre Dame, $14.95,419 pp...
...Jewish borrowings already anticipated the ways in which Christians appropriated Orpheus, Apol-lo, and Helios as images for the Christ...
...Gordimer maintains that "acceptance of the con-cept of a culture based on an elite dis-pensation to the masses who cannot cre-ate anything valid for themselves, acceptance of the role of literature in life according to that culture, are firmly based on a particular myth of power...
...paper, $15.95, 183 pp...
...The Pastoral Press, $11.95,295 pp...
...The general reader, howev-er, will be pleased with the noticeable absence of the specialist's rhetoric...
...Beautifully bound in red with a simple, gold cover design, and enhanced with good illustrations and sturdy ribbon markers (the latter are available when the collection is ordered through Liturgy Training Publications), the volume points' to planners and de-signers who know something about the aesthetics of worship...
...This proc-ess is a tentative and continuing one...
...When I opened Catholic Household Blessings & Prayers (Bishops' Commit-tee on the Liturgy, NCCB/USCC, $18.95,433 pp...
...Jessica Benjamin's The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (Pantheon Books, $12.95,304 pp...
...edited by Robert Russell, William Stoe-ger, S.J., and George Coyne, S.J...
...Under the Scribners imprint Macmil-lan published the excellent three-volume Encyclopedia of the American Experi-ence: Studies in Traditions and Move-ments, edited by Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams (Scribners & Sons, $235, 1882 pp...
...and on the street she wears a habit that reminds me that I really must reread Chaucer soon...
...John Polkinghorne discusses the natures of physical science and of theolo-gy, and argues that they have much in common...
...Pref-acing it is a message from Pope John Paul II, who sponsored the conference...
...Much of such writing follows two strains...
...338 pp...
...It was a joyful experiment, and I hope you have the privilege, as I did, of re-visiting The Republic with superb readers who teach you to see what is, and is not, in the work...
...Moreover, the color reproduction of icons is superb...
...It de-scribes the transition toward monumental religious narratives com-bining color and light in Veronese's later years...
...Shall we ever laugh over commonly perceived incongruities or weep over commonly recognized tragedies or yearn for commonly held hopes...
...all these help us understand how the Gospels appear from the oppressed side of North American life...
...contri-butes an important voice from the experi-ence of African-American women's community...
...the' use by contemporary theologians of a scientific insight no more commits the church to that insight than did the use by the medieval church of insights from Aristotelian science to express the nature of the sacraments or the Incarnation...
...Here, there is almost a call for us to learn'' second languages'' so that the rationality of one community or tradition is not completely unintelligi-ble to another...
...To help me brush up on my Plato and to feed my interest in hermeneutics, I read Platonic Writings, Platonic Read-ings, an excellent volume of essays edited by Charles L. Griswold, Jr...
...As general editor, I was privileged to be a part of this publishing effort...
...And his manner of dis-pensing with a beginning in time in-volves a risky logical leap: the "no-boundary condition" which enables him to do without an initial singularity (a "beginning") applies only to imaginary time (which he had earlier described as "merely a mathematical device...
...Religion and science are distinct modes of inquiry...
...Many social and intel-lectual historians, literary critics, theolo-gians, and psychoanalysts are investigat-ing past and present societies using gen-der as a category of analysis...
...In fall, 1987, a group of physicists, theologians, and philosophers met at Castel Gandolfo to discuss the mutual relevance of their disciplines to one another...
...The main source is a collec-tion of Greek texts entitled Lives of the Harlots, the women in question being well known, by name at least, to a fair number who have ambled down the ascetical road: Mary Magdalene as the biblical model of repentance...
...she is happily remembered for The Sayings of the Des-ert Fathers and The Lives of the Desert Fathers...
...The com-parative list of Mediterranean and U.S...
...What different social roles, abilities, and limitations are/ were women and men expected by their society to have...
...The republication in an edited one-volume edition of Erwin R. Good-enough's Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period (Princeton, $35, 288 pp., 91 plates), makes more accessible an im-portant resource for both Jewish and Christian scholars...
...First is Harlots of the Desert (Cister-cian Publications, $25.95...
...Even when biographers have written about women, Heilbrun says, they have chosen and discussed their sub-jects on the basis of criteria for male success...
...on the potential surprises and revela-tion in language, Lawler is second to no author I know...
...I gained new insights into how defensively Plato dealt with fragility and finitude, and how comforting it would be, but how impossible it is, to believe his version of truth and justice as a contemporary New York City woman...
...Carolyn Osiek Those who have become sensitized to the over-whelmingly patriarchal viewpoint of the Old Testa-ment and are looking for an overview from a different perspective now have Alice Laffey 's An Introduction to the Old Testament: A Feminist Pers-pective (Fortress, $12.95, 243 pp...
...It is a reflection about censorship and suppres-sion in society of the words, stories, and bodies of the uncultured...
...Re-dondi brings to life in vivid prose, the Rome of Bellarmine and Galileo, though he also obscures the real issues at stake between the two great protagonists of the old and the new...
...Two catalogues from current exhibitions de-monstrate our contemporary secular and religious concerns...
...Among these are The Humanity of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, by Marianne Meye Thompson (Fortress, $11.95, 176 pp...
...The reader new to any kind of social science lan-guage may find this book tough going at first, but it is worth the effort...
...Only when the church-Boff trans-forms the word into "we" in a way few are able to achieve-sees reality from the eyes of the poor can the crucial connec-tion between celebration and conflict be made...
...Even if the theologians of the Renaissance had not made the fateful choice they did, I won-der whether the situation for belief in God would be all that different today...
...DuBois's thesis is that "the male subject as a figure for wholeness to which the female and her body are compared...
...Art as Religious Studies, edited by Doug Adams and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona ($17.95,247 pp., 27 plates), argues for the primordial role of the visual and the nonverbal in the study of religion...
...examines why biographers have usually written about men rather than women...
...Rousselle traces the far-reaching social effects of this margin-alization of women's sexual pleasure in cultures that primarily prized in women their reproductive capacity...
...How significant, I pri-vately thought, that this ancient concept does not die...
...This is a collection of essays with wide-ranging application to our lives as citizens and as members of believing communities...
...The praying church knows this, says Collins, and has always known it...
...asks that question in as many ways as there are kinds of deprivation in the world and respects his readers by not always com-ing up with answers...
...Watch for it...
...What is being celebrated is the obliteration of the conflict," Boff says...
...of this sort need to be watched, and ought to lead the reader to be wary about the quality of the speculations with which the book con-cludes...
...At the end of this class, I received a thank-you book from a student who read my mind...
...Gregory Baum's Theology and Socie-ty (Paulist, $12.95, 298 pp...
...Christopher J. Kauffman The Second Vatican Council developed a new apologet-ic, a fresh articulation of faith suitable to the diverse peoples of the world...
...Religion thus became alienated from its own true nature, and scientific theism led, by an inexorable dialectic, to atheism...
...His ability to speak with his investigators as an equal is a marvel to later ages...
...Most everyone knows who Lewis was, a professor of medieval and renaiss-ance literature at Oxford and Cambridge...
...None of them argues for a natural theology of the traditional sort, taking its start from specific features of the natural world...
...It will be a long time before the controversy gener-ated by this careful study abates, at least as long as we care about the issues, it addresses...
...takes a different tack, by scratching a lot of sur-faces...
...Essays on the visual arts in Judaism (Neusnerv Milgrom, Reid, and Apostolos- Cappadona...
...Capping the volume is Sharon Welch's essay, "The Truth of Liberation Theology: Particulars of a Relative Sub-lime...
...Michael's Hall, Oxford...
...argues cogently that only by examining "the interaction of culture and [intersubjective] psycho-logical processes" can one understand female subordination and-male domina-tion in its most concentrated forms- masochism and sadism...
...then articulates the way in which twentieth-century art has contributed to religious vision and theological thought, and in the final thir-ty pages, argues for the role of the visual arts in theological education...
...Im-plicit in the Council Fathers' call to dis-cern the "signs of the times" is the need of the historian to provide a lens to im-prove our vision of the signs of past times...
...Though basic themes recur, there is little duplication of thought...
...Lewis/Don Giovanni Calabria-A Study in Friendship edited by Martin Moynihan (Servant Publications, paper, $5.95...
...The publishers are to be commended for their attempts to assist us in understanding the incarnation of our religious traditions...
...Polkinghorne wants the read-er to see through his eyes a quantum world that is no more-and no less- mysterious than the world of sacrament and miracle...
...The author obviously has in mind a moral for today: the Christian ought not rely on science or philosophy as the primary grounds for belief in God...
...It is natural on the part of a scientist who is also a Chris-tian believer to find resonances where others do not detect them...
...It does so, however, with such flair and with such an ingen-ious deployment of slender evidence that the reader tends to be swept along...
...There is another kind of book emerg-ing in feminist theology and ethics that also deals with issues of diversity and universality...
...exemplifies the former...
...The first three sections set up a distinction between Catholic and Protestant attitudes toward the visual, and study nineteenth-century views of art and architecture and the role of such art in private and public life...
...The theory became systematized in the Middle Ages and remains so still...
...Third is Letters: C.S...
...urges attention to the particular historical conditions under which gendered discourses have arisen...
...But perspec-tives focusing on the alienation of domi-nant peoples-the affluent, the suburb-anite, the upwardly mobile-remain rel-atively rare...
...It was on a street that she met Maria, "a very young girl living in Lon-don as a prostitute...
...In recent years, Crossroads publishing has developed a small library of good books on Christianity and the visual arts...
...The stories act as lenses, through which the author views his recent experi-ences as pastor of Grace Lutheran, an inner-city church in Evansville, Indiana, and recalls the rapidly receding scenes of his youth, with his pastor-father and dra-matically intense mother changing resi-dences and residencies in the American and Canadian northwest...
...Pelegia, Thais, and Maria the niece of Abraham as images of salvation...
...Rout-ledge, Chapman, & Hall, $13.95, 321 pp...
...Norton, $14.95, 144 pp...
...Like Gordimer, who feels the tenuous ambiguity of being a white and remaining sensitive to the experiences of blacks in South Africa, Welch argues that acceptance of the relativity of any purportedly universal principle of justice is not equal to moral paralysis...
...is much more an integral treatise on liturgy and the ritual process than a col-lection of prepublished articles...
...Preparing to teach a freshmen phi-losophy course, I had come to check on the availability of my favorite translation (G.M.A...
...Writing a Woman's Life by Carolyn G. Heilbrun (W.W...
...In One World (Princeton, $7.95, 114 pp...
...Holy Image, Holy Space: Icons and Frescoes from Greece edited by Myrtali Acheimastou-Potamianou, translated by David A. Hardy (Athens, $30, 248 pp., 80 plates) has seventy pages of excellent if brief essays on the role of the icon in the ancient world up through the six-teenth century...
...Both stories must be taken with equal seriousness, and where tensions occur, the Christian must have confidence that these can be reconciled...
...Today, belief in God has ebbed...
...Jacob Neusner, the editor, has provided an introduction, updated the reading list, and included an index...
...Partly fiction, partly faction, like vanilla swirled with chocolate, it contains twelve interwoven stories, six of childhood, six of adulthood...
...a set of essays about her experience as a writer from 1963 to the present in South Africa...
...Finally, the work as a whole is a sort of self-portrait of a gentle pastor in middle age, whose extended parish is now the literate world...
...the sixteen articles build tightly on one another...
...Encyclopedia means "wheel of knowledge," that is, a book that embraces the entire spectrum of learning...
...Hawking has a flair for exposition...
...In an erudite essay in the history of ideas, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (Yale, $27.50,445 pp...
...Aline Rousselle, in Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, (Basil Blackwell, $24.95,213 pp...
...Theology explains the source of the rational order which science inves-tigates...
...The freshmen in my college come from the great variety of the city's public and private schools, and4his par-ticular class would be entirely female, ranging in age from eighteen to forty-eight...
...Most impor-tant, it asks the question: Why were things the way they were for women in these contexts...
...In an act of moral responsibility, Gor-dimer has dared to try to enter into the imagination of the people to be freed in South Africa and, consequently, to bear both the censorship of her government and the suspicion of the oppressed...
...As if in support of Gordimer, Welch writes, "A concept of freedom is most effective as it is rooted in the imagination of the people to be freed, if it does indeed speak to Something in their experience and his-tory...
...While Baum offers depth and nuance, Catholic Social Teaching: Our Best Kept Secret (Orbis, $8.95, 134 pp...
...The result is a deeply transformative model of the human Jesus and the human us...
...The author of this work is Benedicta Ward, who teaches medieval studies in-cluding patristics to Americans at St...
...There are lengthy treatments of denominational history as well as "Religions Outside the Jewish-Christian Tradition...
...William Griffin Every intellectual I know complains that too many books are published every year...
...She gave me Nadine Gordi-mer's The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics & Places (Knopf, $16.95, 356 pp...
...Finally, ethicists have continued to produce important normative studies and proposals...
...There is no alphabetical scheme but a 123-page in-dex is very useful...
...The essays all make moderate to heavy demands on the reader...
...bishops' pastorals, and works by bishops' conferences in Latin America, Africa, and Asia...
...Notre Dame, $22.95, 410 pp...
...Critiquing and amending Freudian theory, Benjamin, a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City, analyzes why it is so difficult to give and get this recognition...
...Perhaps no other book in medical ethics has received more atten-tion this past year than Daniel Callahan's Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Ag-ing Society (Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, $8.95, 256 pp...
...Grube) of Plato's Republic...
...Together, these books demonstrate a subtlety and sophistication that signal the maturity of a relatively new conversation about gender and its social effects...
...Thompson rejects the classic characterization of John by Ernst Kasemann as "naive docetism" (denial of Jesus' humanity), and sets out to show how John's Gospel gives us a profoundly human portrait of Jesus...
...The second, "introspective" strain was the clear aim of Leonard Swidler and Herbert O'Brien (a pseudonym) in edit-ing A Catholic Bill of Rights (Sheed & Ward, $8.95, 187 pp...
...It propounds the rather outrageous thesis that the real source of the church's opposition to Galileo was not his defense of Copernican views but* the threat posed by his atomism to the eucharistic doctrine...
...This dictionary should reside alongside Webster as a very useful and informative work...
...study guides adaptable to classroom or parish use...
...The book is in three parts: twenty pages of historical over-view...
...His incarnation of Christian experience in flesh, the tex-tures of cloth, and the power of color and design are not to be missed...
...In a far more pointed and probing study, Edward Schillebeeckx has once again addressed the crisis surrounding ministry in The Church with a Human Face: A New and Expanded Theology of Ministry (Crossroad, $12.95, 308 pp...
...reconstructs ancient ideas of male and female bodies from Greek and Ro-man science, medicine, gynecology, and law, mapping changes in perceptions of the role and value of desire into the Christian era...
...It is a book that confirms Sebastian Moore's comment in the Foreword...
...The desert, it seems, is always with us, especially in the big city...
...Ernan McMullin Two recent books by Cam-bridge dons present an in-teresting contrast...
...We are being instructed that blessings are events, often a good deal more than the table prayers we are used to...
...Incarnation here has traveled far from heaven...
...The 106 essays in this encyclopedia are not intended just for the specialist...
...He ranges over the entire field of cosmology, and gives us asides along the way as he details how his own contributions to the fieijd came a-bout...
...The exhibit has traveled to Baltimore and Miami and will be in Fort Worth, San Francisco, Cleveland, and Detroit...
...detailed, text-referenced outlines of eighteen major documents...
...which applies the insights of recent textual theory...
...Christian liturgy is discussed here by someone who knows about ritual and its attendant disciplines, who is well versed in theology's formative influence on our Christian faith, and whose grasp of church is sound...
...This is a superb work, a must for both academic and public li-braries...
...My only cavil with this dense and valuable work is with the au-thor's Hegelian belief in the efficacy and autonomy of ideas...
...Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (Bantam, $18.95, 198 pp...
...Bernard F. Swain As a white, male, first-world Catholic whose theological training largely pre-dated the arrival of liberation theology, I have waited pa-tiently for a complementary theological movement, speaking in some fund-amental way to the social and political experience of people like me...
...In this act, she stands as a counter-figure to Bloom and as a paradigm for those scholar-teachers who have the ethical courage and brilliance to continue to tread beyond the boundaries of disci-plines and canons to discover essential gestures and knowledge yet unheeded, and thereby, help us understand that American culture and our canons are things still, indeed always, to be made...
...The entire book is gripping, but the last section, "Living in the Interreg-num,' ' is especially telling for our debate about canons in higher education...
...I would venture that Sunday assem-blies across the land include countless worshipers whose concern for social jus-tice is intense, matched only by frustra-tion at their own powerlessness to take effective action...
...Something similar though more corporate is offered in the volume edited by Virginia Fabella and Mercy Amba Oduyoye, With Passion and Compassion: Third World Women Doing Theology (Orbis Books, $11.95, 192 pp...
...Katie Geneva Cannon's Black Womanist Ethics (Scholars Press, $23.95...
...In God, these levels find their source, their connection...
...among other things, he was a devout Anglican and a Christian apologist of international reputation...
...He seems to suppose that the Christian no-tion of creation is necessarily tied to a beginning in time, an assumption that Aquinas rather convincingly refuted a long while ago...
...Although I did not agree with all of Griswold's piece, it stimulated me to set the terms of my own reading ex-periment...
...In acknowledgment of the bicenten-nial of the appointment of John Carroll as the first bishop of the United States, Macmillan has recently published a six-volume work: Makers of the Catholic Community: Historical Studies of the Catholic People in America, 1789-1989 (Macmillan, $160 per set...
...Thus labels of witchcraft (con-nivance with demons), deviance, and prominence as applied to Jesus in Mat-thew are examined to show how people of Matthew's day confronted the chal-lenge of Jesus in their lives...
...Emphasiz-ing poetry and the visual arts of the late-Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Hart describes their artistic and spiritual sig-nificance...
...As one of the twenty-five central concepts in the work, "Theolo-gy" fills twenty-seven pages, is divided into eleven sub-headings, and reveals the pervasive synthesis of haute culture and theological reflection...
...Appendices provide useful contextual texts from the 1971 synod, canon law, and the UN Universal Declaration of Hu-man Rights...
...It is regrettable that Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang's Heaven: A His-tory (Yale, $29.95, 410 pp., 62 plates), cannot be recommended...
...Only by resisting the real and oppressive effects of that myth on the black major-ity, can one understand that "culture in South Africa is something still to be made," culture, that is, defined "as the vital force generated by the skills, crafts, legends, songs, languages, sub-literature as well as literature-the living express-ion of self-realization-in the life of the people as a whole...
...Her proposed starting point is not our definition of humanity, but rather to let the Gospel speak for itself about what it is to be human...
...Both were saintly men, which means that one can not only read their book but also, saving their respective theologies regard-ing the communion of the saints, pray to the one and with the other...
...Not being an intellec-tual myself, I can afford to say that just the right number are pub-lished and that almost everyone who reads can find a hundred books that will appeal to his or her taste...
...And so we are treated to invocations, blessings, a Scripture reading, silence, and a song text in the "Blessing upon Returning from a Journey...
...RELIGIOUS BOOK WEEK CRITICS'CHOICES Virginia Sloyan Just as the classic Dear Theo, edited by Irving Stone, assumes the form of an auto-biography of Vincent Van Gogh (it is, in fact, so desig-nated) and not a series of letters from the troubled artist to his brother, so Worship: Renewal to Practice by Mary Collins, O.S.B...
...Hart relates the ways in which abstinence from sexual desire and bodily existence permitted Joseph of Cupertino to levitate...
...Both au-thors are physicists...
...new properties emerge as com-plexes appear...
...and on the role of the visual in teaching (Empereur, Smith, Adams, Gpehale) lead toward wtee extensive bibliographies for teachers and research-ers in the field...
...The other topics include ex-plorations of "Approaches to Religion in America," "North America: Contrasts and Background," "Religious Thought," "Religion and the Political and Social Orders," "Liturgy, Worship, and Arts," "the Dissemination of American Religion," and "the Mis-sionary Heritage...
...While that summarizes much of the book's intent, it doesn't do justice to Boff s connections and the distinctions...
...Or what if questions about "reality" are meaningless in the context of scientific theory, and the only thing that matters is which "time" allows us to predict best...
...Gordimer's work resonates with the essays in Feminism & Foucault: Reflec-tions on Resistance, edited by Irene Di-amond and Lee Quincy (Northeastern, $14.95, 246 pp...
...Clive Hart has surveyed the ways in which images of ascension have been used by artists in secular and religious themes: Images of Flight (California, $32.50, 300pp., 103 plates...
...for conceptions of jus-tice only within particular moral tradi-tions...
...Michael Buckley, S.J...
...Yet there has to be a larger framework of understanding to which both contribute, and where each assimi-lates the insights of the other...
...The diversity of life in Judaism is shown by the mixture of images present at the Dura Europos syna-gogue and elsewhere...
...Harper & Row, $14.95,192 pp...
...What ifs...
...Five centuries ago, the peoples of the West almost universally believed in a Creator God...
...For their dignity, form, simplicity, and occasional unpredictability, the prayers and blessings that appear without attribution are rich supplements to the cited selections: from Judaism, the Christian Scriptures, the saints, hymns, bishops' pastorals...
...In-tended as a companion to conventional Old Testament introductions, it also makes good reading by itself, with Bible in hand...
...A fascinating chapter, ' 'The Bodies of Women,'' describes Ar-istotle's discovery that "women could conceive even if they did not reach orgasm," replacing the earlier view of the Hippocratic Collection that the female orgasm was necessary for con-ception to occur...
...Isham's excel-lent essay on the implications of quantum cosmology for the doctrine of creation gives a more balanced account of the topic than does Hawking's book...
...Among my hundred are three outstanding titles that deserve, I think, a larger audience than they have already found...
...Re-entering this same debate, Alasdair Maclntyre continues to argue in Whose Justice...
...Second favorite is Miz Lil & The Chronicles of Grace by Walter Wanger-in, Jr...
...paper, $11.95...
...Schillebeeckx is responding to difficul-ties arising from his book Ministry, which aimed to present ministry as shar-ing in a priesthood rooted in the humanity of Jesus, and in the process rejected cler-icalism as a historical aberration...
...Margaret R. Miles The books that most engaged me during 1988 were those that provided analyses of the social construction of gender, both in the present and in historical societies...
...Marilyn Chopin Massey My adventures in read-ing began at the Barnes & Noble on Eighteenth Street in New York City, where I was jostled by students from all the city's colleges looking for bargain texts...
...Although this collection of recent essays applies (and defends) lib-eration theology within the North Amer-ican (and especially Canadian) context, Baum's distinct contribution is his analy-sis of Pope John Paul II's social teaching...
...One, in his sixties, has recently been ordained an Anglican priest, and now serves in campus ministry in the university where he formerly held a prestigious chair of physics...
...Lastly, for those who want a new look at Christology, there is Calling Jesus Names: The Social Value of Labels'in Matthew by Bruce J. Malina and Jerome H. Neyrey (Polebridge, $15.95, 174 pp...
...Reality comes in layers...
...For example, Letty Rus-sell, Kwok Pui-Lan, Ada Maria Isasi-Dfaz, and Katie Geneva Cannon have brought together women's self-interpreted stories in Inheriting Our Mothers' Gardens: Feminist Theology in Third World Perspective (Westminster, $12.95, 181 pp...
...Philosophy (not natural science) can dis-close the need for a transcendent source of being, but the fundamental witness to the Christian God must testify to his Father in heaven...
...For all the teachable moments, big and little, in our house-holds, the book is a mine of gold...
Vol. 116 • March 1989 • No. 5
