Religious booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
he New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship carries on the reference book tradition begun with Glazier's The New Dictionary of Theology (1987). A third volume on spirituality, now in...
...How does one handle deviance in such a world...
...1. On the American Catholic bishops' views about the war, I continue to accept the authority of Archbishop Roach, who has said: "Most bishops...have withheld a definitive judgment [on the morality of the war...
...This strikes me as just the right balance...
...Neyrey has a gift for organization and a clean expository style, such that his book, while repetitive in parts, is instructively easy to read...
...Dorothee Soelle is a German theologian whose life is triangulated among three points: her native land, the United States (she teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York), and various parts of the third world...
...Ranging over a vast amount of scholarship on a number of particular topics (e.g., the "dying/rising" god in antiquity...
...President Bush warred for Kuwait, but not for the Kurds and Shiites, who are in greater millions...
...and (c) the psalm read with our own time in mind...
...It is Marty's intent t.o give us the necessary background...
...Piles of rubble on either side of the ledger create only a mirage of moral argument...
...ascending rather than descending...
...Smith reveals the hidden biases of much of this scholarship, not solely to demolish it, but to show how one might embark on different, less ideologically driven roads of research...
...Most of us have limited contacts with fortresses, shepherds, still waters, and panting deer...
...JOHN F. BRANIGAN The author r e p l i e s : John F. Branigan enriches the debate on the justice of "Operation Desert Storm" with several factual claims and moral assessments, which are not, however, beyond reasonable counterclaims and contrary arguments...
...The Catholic Worker, founded in 1933 by Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day as a radical experiment in Christian service, is still alive and the subject of much bookish concentration...
...It helped me immensely to see Paul from his own perspective, a perspective that was filled with dialectical tensions marking off the anomic world of chaos and the ordered world of salvation...
...He reminds us that it was only in 1931 that the Supreme Court stopped using the term "Christian people" to describe this country...
...In Illinois: 312-568-1550 17 May 1991:347 guaranteed right to teach about religion in state schools (indeed, the vast majority of departments of religion in state universities derive their legal legitimacy from that decision...
...The forces Marty chronicles are not part of a dead past...
...which threaten that world get handled...
...Marty's concentration is on those who speak or write or preach or organize...
...We use them in the liturgy because they are the prayers which Jesus used...
...Equally useful is her observation that it is often people who are remote from the church who are so dogmatic about what it should be or do...
...the criterion by which one judges what "Christian" means (fundamentalist versus modernist versus neo-orthodox in Protestantism...
...3. Branigan estimates casualties of the war in the "hundreds of thousands," Such a toll would indeed raise serious questions of proportionality...
...We will not fully appreciate today's discourse without some sense of how these issues developed in our recent past...
...Those Arab members of the coalition which also possess oil reserves supported the American war to protect their own interests...
...I think he does it admirably...
...Such outcomes, likewise not foreseen in August, would set a formidable precedent to be pondered by would-be future aggressors...
...Should one wish to flesh out Quesson's somewhat brief reflections, one could read his book in tandem with the estimable volume of Walter Brueggemann: The Message of the Psalms (Augsburg, 1984...
...Neyrey provides any number of tables setting out tensive points by which Paul contrasted what, theologically, we would call the arenas of grace and sin but which Neyrey 346: Commonweal names "maps" of acceptance/deviance or, in the case of some passages (e.g., Galatians 3:1), the "bewitched" world/the exorcised world...
...the reader must therefore do a lot of thumbing and page-turning to find the relevant entries...
...The Festschrifl is a dual opportunity: to honor a distinguished academic by the presentation of a collection of studies, and, for a contributor, the chance to clean out the desk drawer of a hitherto unpublished paper...
...Kuwait controls oil, the Kurds and Shiites do not...
...the nexus between Christian meaning and the economic polis (socialism versus capitalism...
...In a companion essay the Harvard theologian Gordon Kaufman makes the same case from a somewhat different perspective, while Schubert Ogden (who was involved in the Charles Curran case as an investigator for the American Association of University Professors) untangles the many issues arising from university based theologians who must straddle both the world of their communities of faith and the astringent character of secular learning...
...The long articles are informative and reflect standard positions of contemporary scholarship...
...and the cultural forces attendant upon increased mobility (automobiles...
...As a consumer rather than a producer of biblical scholarship, I must judge this book a success...
...Marty's book, then, nourishes my present life by his re-creation of the past...
...As Secretary of State James Baker said, the issue was jobs, which translated means oil...
...She is Protestant by persuasion, nourished on that tradition by academic training, but, by disposition, irrevocably committed to the theology of liberation as she experiences it through active participation in liberationist struggles, antiwar movements, feminism, and her evident sympathies for the political party of the Greens...
...Such a strategy nicely combines scriptural scholarship with the needs of the life of prayer and worship...
...Those questions are still with us today even though the vocabulary of the discourse has changed and demographics have reshaped the players...
...looming fears of European fascism and the equally feared evolution of the Russian Revolution...
...and (3) eminently readable...
...His history is cultural history with a keen ear for the rhetoric of American religious culture...
...Branigan rightly implies that some consequences of the war (e.g., the flight of the Kurds) were not precisely foreseen...
...Giving context to the story Lawrence S. Cunningham entries that range from theological and historical considerations to issues like eucharistic devotions outside of the liturgy and eucharistic chapels...
...Yes, Griffin argues, if one understands theology not as a defensively orthodox discipline but as a rigorous inquiry into ultimacy done from a critically sophisticated stance...
...Renan's famous mot that Jesus preached the kingdom of God and we ended up with the Catholic church was also an ideological assumption of a good deal of, mainly, Protestant biblical scholarship on Christian origins in general and the New Testament in particular...
...Sanctions may yet turn out to be a new and powerful instrument of justice in a new international order...
...to defend Kuwait by the use of force, I follow the 1948 teaching of Pope Pius XII: "The solidarity of the family of nations forbids others to behave as mere spectators in an attitude of apathetic neutrality [when people are threatened with unjust aggression...
...In the case of the volume in honor of John Cobb's retirement from the Claremont faculty, there are a few recycled pieces (e.g., a lecture by Hans Kiing touched up for the occasion) as well as some very instructive essays on theology and the contemporary university...
...I have one other criticism: unlike the earlier volume, this one lacks running heads with the entries at the top of the page...
...The individual chapters are relatively brief but are ordered into a consistent argument for a way of doing theology that sketches out theological trajectories from the fundamentalist through the modem to the liberationist perspective (some helpful tables are used to set out the differences), with the latter seen as the only legitimate postmodem way of being theological...
...What are the boundaries of that world and how are those boundaries maintained...
...One may only hope that he continues to apply his formidable intelligence to this area of research...
...We use that language but must somehow appropriate it and make it our own...
...their use by Jesus...
...The "other words" of Neyrey's title refers to the author's study of the Pauline corpus from the perspective of cultural anthropology...
...and so on...
...It is with keen anticipation that I await his third volume which will chronicle a past that is even more a part of our common present...
...For all of the intellectual oddities and anarchic impulses that make Worker life so idiosyncratic (Murray documents them well), the Workers have identified with the poor and served them so completely over the decades that they are, in fact, a sign of Christ (thought they would most likely pooh pooh the very idea...
...As early as the reflections of Thomas Jefferson (who with his correspondent, John Adams, becomes the focus of Smith's brilliant opening chapter) on the pure philosophy of Jesus, uncontaminated by paganism and the "mysticism of Plato" in particular, to the later investigations of those who saw Christianity tainted by the mystery cults, the aim was the same: to track down what Robert Wilken once described as the "myth of Christian origins...
...Anyone who has read much cultural anthropology knows that it can be rather murky terrain...
...it was a sign of the presence of Christ among the poor, the seedbed of a new soci17 May 1991:345 ety within the shell of the old...
...b) the psalm read "with J e s u s " - against the background of the New Testament witness...
...new modes of communication (movies and radio...
...the advent of a coming war after only two decades of European peace...
...That focus, of course, means that not every denomination gets its full moment on the stage nor do the voices of Everyman and Everywoman get equal treatment...
...For each of these he provides three glosses: (a) the psalm read from the perspective of Israel, i.e...
...2. On the right of the U.S...
...A third volume on spirituality, now in preparation under the editorship of Michael Downey, is to follow...
...Stylistically, the entries range from scholarly sobriety to somewhat breezy homilies...
...Murray, himself a Worker and a sociologist, examines the concept of hospitality in Christianity in general and its appropriation in three specific Worker houses (New York City, Rochester, and Worcester) in order to understand the complex relationship among three classes of people: the committed Workers, the longterm guests of the houses, and the clientele who come to the door for food and clothes but are not resident in the houses or formally attached to them...
...Dorothy Day insisted that the Catholic Worker Movement was not an exercise in philanthropy or of improved social services...
...Indeed, one of Neyrey's intentions was to demonstrate his methodology in order to invite others to test the method in areas and on topics in Paul which he does not cover...
...Today there are more Muslims in Chicago than Jews, and by the year 2000 half of all Catholics will speak Spanish as a first language...
...Such an enterprise, he contends, should not be merely tolerated but nourished...
...The key words in the title of this current volume are sacramental and worship for the intention of the editor is to provide a comprehensive overview of the mediating gestures/symbols of the Christian faith as well as a broad coverage of the liturgical life of that same faith considered historically, phenomenologically, and theologically...
...Every Christian knows snippets of the psalms since they are, as the clich6 would have it, the "prayerbook of the church...
...Hough's argument is not for a recovery of the mediev.al world view but for a common good which takes account of ecology--a theme central to Cobb's own theology in recent years...
...She writes with passion and with an eye close to human experience...
...The peculiar merit of Neyrey's analysis is that it gives the lie to the vulgar reductionisms of, say, the Bishop Spongs of our world, while, at the same time, protecting Paul from being seen only as the prototype of a sixteenth-century reformer of the Christian church...
...He has chosen fifty psalms (using the Grail rendition) for consideration...
...In sum: a useful reference tool that could have been made more user-friendly but deserves a place on the bookshelf...
...What significance do these 344: Commonweal demographic facts have...
...To the Editors: I was surprised to see the reactionary and ill-informed article by David R. Carlin, Jr...
...the poorer Arab countries that joined the coalition were bribed...
...The calculation must rather weigh spiritual realities: the unleashing of destruction in response to unjust aggression and, on the other side, the suffering of those whose claim to independence has been snatched away...
...I would give the palm to the coeditor of this collection, David Ray Griffin, for his argument that theology has a place even in a state-supported school...
...Illus...
...and for that we are all in debt to their witness...
...the place of the alien (anti-Catholicism...
...The not fully converted (i.e., myself) may be put off by some of the rather shrill sermonizing (liberationists can seem so self-righteously sectarian) and/or the political cant, but such resistance should not blind us to some very important points she urges upon us...
...called "Shakespeare's Embrace: The Values of Eurocentrism" [April 5...
...He writes so well of their daily life, in fact, that we can overlook the book's origin as a dissertation and the inevitable blather and documentation that such works require...
...One goes to this work not to find the meaning of this or that sacramental/liturgical term but to fred an overview of large topics ("Sacraments" or "Liturgies of the Eastern Churches...
...What is the relation of the micro-world of the body to the macroworld of the cosmos...
...If there is evidence for them, it should be published in full and assimilated in the public debate...
...This present volume took its shape from a series of popular lectures she gave in Germany to account for her role as a theologian in a confessing community of faith...
...Smith is interested in comparative research, but what he has to say also has pertinence, it seems to me, for the whole arena of historical-critical research on the New Testament where the desire, for example, to recover the ipsissima verba of Jesus may reflect a response to the siren song of the "pure" religion of Jesus...
...That perspective has been the greatest gift liberation theology has given the contemporary church and we should receive that gift with gratitude, even if it sometimes comes wrapped with a thin ribbon of tendentious political sloganeering...
...2) sensible and learned...
...Her stated aim is not to introduce us to theology but to give us some sense of its passion...
...the Jazz Age...
...Marty gives shape to his story by restricting his focus to "public religion"--the te~ sive discourse between church/synagogue and the idea of America...
...the question of Mithraism and Christianity, etc...
...and so on...
...Soelle's theology, to borrow the jargon of Christology, is low rather than high...
...The one word in the title which is a tad misleading is dictionary...
...Casting his net a bit wider, Joseph Hough stipulates that a university should not only seek to serve the good in the Aristotelian sense of the natural order but in the Thomistic sense of a common good ordered to the cosmos in relationship to God...
...Borrowing heavily from the seminal work of Mary Douglas, Neyrey attempts to enter the symbolic universe of Paul to understand his world view: Who is within the purview of Paul's world...
...First, I very much like her notion of the necessity of doing theology from within a community so that theology does not become a sterile academic exercise...
...the cycle of boom and bust...
...Here perhaps lies the core of the difference between Branigan's moral calculations and my own tentative ones...
...Soelle writes from within the community...
...This fact is a part of the human condition and no excuse for moral paralysis...
...While it is still too soon to know whether the UN and allied preparations for the Kurds' retum to their homes will work over the long term, it is perhaps not wholly utopian to hope that the glare of publicity, the UN initiatives, and Saddam Hussein's weakened condition will combine to provide the Kurds an opportunity to shape their own destiny, and that the continued presence of formidable allied forces, along with the continued effectiveness of sanctions, may bring about the removal of Iraq's stores of weapons of mass destruction...
...Thus, there are generous essays on church music but one could not look up separate entries like "chant" or "motet...
...The Spirit of the Psalms is a pastorally meditative work, not a scholarly one...
...On major topics there is wide coverage...
...the tapering off of immigration...
...For the moral weighing is not, in my view, between the rain of war and the havoc caused by the invasion...
...4. Branigan writes: "...the devastation and displacement of possibly a million Kurds and Shiites give evidence that the ruin following the war was greater by far than the original havoc caused through the invasion of Kuwait...
...CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 306) sibly a million Kurds and Shiites give evidence that the ruin following on war was greater by far than the original havoc caused through the invasion of Kuwait...
...I do not believe, however, that such estimates are yet in the public domain...
...A personal vignette: I finished Marty's book the evening I returned from speaking at the local Catholic Worker house (a movement, fully discussed by Marty, founded in the 1930s and shaped by the Great Depression) here in South Bend and two months after I participated in a faculty seminar on the social thought of Reinhold Niebuhr who is a major player in Marty's account of the prewar period...
...There is a nice blend of historical entries along with suggestions for pastoral praxis as well as theological reflections...
...America and its Western partners went to war because the control of their oil supplies was threatened by Saddam's aggression...
...antiSemitism...
...Sociologists will undoubtedly read his work for information about status, human relationships, and the social dynamics of a caring community (which Murray contrasts with more bureaucratic care-giving agencies), but a less professionally concerned readership might find the work more valuable as an exercise in reality therapy...
...Quesson's book (originally written in French) is an aid here...
...FRANCIS X. WINTERS The power to rank Austin, Tex...
...We may take it as a given that anything Martin Marry writes about American religion is (1) worthy of note...
...Despite internal fissures and external challenges, old-stock Protestants remained the dominant but declining core culture...
...Furthermore, it strikes me as fundamentally true that the classical loci of theology, as she repeatedly insists, ought to be expansive enough to include the common experience of people who pray, struggle, and work to make the church one built of "living stones...
...Despite that warrant, the psalms are strange prayers, if for no other reason than the peculiarity of their imagery...
...This problem could have been solved had their been an exhaustive index to the work but, in fact, apart from a topical index in which the disparate entries are put under general headings, there is no subject index...
...Marty suggests that a criss-crossing of religious and political oppositions holds together America's richly pluralistic society...
...Quesson's meditations help us to understand the essential Jewish character of the psalms...
...The traditional argument goes something like this: A putative "pure" Christianity, derived from the preaching of Jesus, became contaminated with the rites, ceremonies, and myths of the pagan religions with the resulting construction of early Catholicism...
...I'm used to finding myself to the right of many opinions expressed by your columnists, but now I find myself looking over to the right at Carlin, and just 348: Commonweal...
...Thus, the discourse of those decades asked about the imposition of morality on the "Christian populace" (Prohibition...
...This volume, the second of a trilogy about modern American religion, not to put too fine a point on it, is a briskly written, well-conceived, and panoramic account of religion in the United States between the two great wars...
...There are no lexical entries in this work that define specific terms...
...It is rather between the ruin of war and the violation of the Kuwaiti people's right of independence...
...While not as profound and wide-ranging as Wayne Meeks's brilliant The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (Yale, 1983), it is, nonetheless, a very instructive and useful work...
...Christian people meant, in the older parlance, what Marty calls "original stock Protestants...
...That is now a generally accepted fact but Jonathan Smith, in this superbly written and intellectually sophisticated work, shows that the same assumption undergirded a long tradition of comparative study in which scholars attempted to puzzle out the relationship of early Christianity and the mystery religions of antiquity...
...Since the 1963 Supreme Court decision Abington v. Schempp, it has been a constitutionally "The series will become a standard account of the nation's variegated religious culture during the current century.'" mRichard N. Ostling, Time In this second volume of his acclaimed chronicle of "faith in America, Martin E. Marty tolls the riveting story of how religious conflicts between the two world wars decisively shaped the destiny of America...
...Apart from those technical criticisms there is much to praise in this volume...
...and their pertinence for today...
...its historical setting...
...S24.95 The University of Chicago Press At bookstores or for VISA/MC orders call 1-800-621-2736...
...What is revealed in this study is not the Paul of the systematic theologians but the Paul who lived in a specific world (Roman/Hellenistic) with a specific background (Pharisaic Judaism), and a specific faith (in Christ...
...The Eucharist, for example, gets fifteen LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...How do those forces (evil, misfortune, malice, etc...
...cultural alienation and cultural experimentation (the Lost Generation...
...27.50 Modern American Religion Volume 2: THE NOISE OF CONFLICT, 1919-1941 MARTIN E. MARTY Also available Volume 1: THE IRONY OF IT ALL 1893-1919 illus...
...None of this fits within the principles of just-war doctrine...
...but theology...
...This volume is a welcome addition to the literature that ponders the role of theology in the academy when it is no longer easily accorded the title of the "Queen of the Sciences," It is a fitting tribute to John Cobb who has spent nearly all of his professional life as a theologian in the university...
...By using long chunks of his diaries and notes, he effectively deromanticizes the life of the Workers in order to bring us closer to what they see and live every day: the endemic violence, derangement, squalor, and hopelessness of contemporary urban poverty...
...The time period is a messy one for historians, if only because so many disparate things were happening: Prohibition...
...They remain with us...
Vol. 118 • May 1991 • No. 10
