Religious booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
' ~ " ' - ~ avis's well-written and _9 comprehensive history of D black Catholics is a work ~ w " A - - that I found hard to finish because I kept lending it to my black students to encourage...
...see my remarks in this column, 3/9/90...
...The most helpfui sections of Batstone's book are to be found in his fair-minded analyses of the various Christologies from these theologians...
...The other contributors, in one fashion or another, circle back to that issue albeit in different modes...
...The story that Davis tells is also one of heroics...
...It is a major contribution to American church history...
...We offer the finest paper, printing, binding and distribution in Ireland...
...That recommendation notwithstanding, this is a major contribution to Luther biography with the third volume eagerly awaited...
...This is a gold mine of information on the African-American presence in the American Catholic church...
...Is the time ripe for a sea change in biblical criticism from a hermeneutics of suspicion to a hermeneutics of trust...
...I cannot recommend this book too highly...
...all share this in common: they accept contemporary biblical scholarship...
...They do this by advancing a critique of the ideology embedded in the theology they utilize from across the ocean and in their attempt to reshape that theology so as to speak directly to their lives and their common culture...
...Aided by grants from both the Lilly and Ford Foundations, they have been able to do sociological soundings and data gathering to assess everything from the educational status of pastors and the role of women in the church to the state of church architecture and the bifurcation of the black church experience as a chasm widens between the middle-class and the innercity experience as well as the tensions inherent in a once rural style of ecclesiology giving way to an increasingly secularized urbanization...
...Witherington's book is not for the biblical beginner...
...It is a sorely needed work and would find, I am convinced, an appreciative audience...
...analyses which are sympathetic but critical...
...COMMONWEAL, 15 Dutch St., NYC 10038...
...the manner of decision making in the church...
...I have mixed feelings about Fowler's book...
...It assumes both an acquaintance with the contemporary debates in New Testament scholarship and presupposes a thorough knowledge of the text (I had to read this book with a Bible open on my desk...
...Fowler does not wish to turn the church into a pious social service agency (proclamation, worship, education, etc., are very much a part of his thinking), but he very much wants the church to connect itself to the world and its needs...
...Get 1,000 copies of your book shipped direct to you...
...Brecht follows this frenetic period with tenacity and almost numbing detail...
...It makes books like this both timely and needed...
...WILLIAM H. SLAVICK CLASSIFIED RATES: 80r a word, one time...
...First, Shannon wants to communicate with people...
...His latest book concerns itself with these "stages of faith" (Fowler's paradigm sees seven of them) in terms of the church...
...Michael Downey has assembled a broad range of essayists to consider those problems both historically and existentially...
...Lincotn/Mamiya move forward and backward (from history to actual praxis) as they tell their story (there is a readable narrative here) while detailing the enormous amount of data they have uncovered free from the jargon which tends to afflict such works...
...Publishing Opportunity Publish your poetry book in Ireland...
...a prophetic judgment on the church in this country...
...Leaders & liberation Lawrence S. Cunningham its defense of slavery before the Civil War and, afterwards, to take a serious interest in the evangelization of the black community...
...Selfpublish and avoid the vanity taint...
...the relationship of charism to community...
...Someone (Davis himself...
...CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 674) since titles must conform to our typographic style, the space available, and our (fallible) judgment of readers' interests and writers' intentions...
...Most of these figures, and their twentiethcentury counterparts, made their mark on the life of the church despite racial prejudice and overt hostility from within that church...
...The best known of these theologians (Gutierrez, Sobrino, Boff, Croatto, etc...
...they work in an ecumenical theological context...
...Furthermore, they do not hesitate to look forward to describe, both problems (e.g., a need for a clergy that is more professionalized) and challenges (Islam as an alternative belief system that is especially attractive to males...
...Thus, for one striking example, a Maryknoll missionary has discovered that Indians of the Altoplano make no sense at all of the notion of Jesus as liberator...
...Batstone (an Evangelical Protestant with wide experience in the Americas) has rendered us all a service with this book enhanced, as it is, with full notes, a long bibliography, and a very full index...
...A number of things allow me to recommend tlais book to the widest possible audience...
...Contact: M. Ebner, Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service, 426 East 119th Street, New York, NY 10035.212-289-6484...
...It was a period of intense activity in Luther's life: he worked on his translation of the Bible...
...I very much liked Shannon's earlier Seeking the Face of God (1988) but I like this book, which is more especially the Synoptics and the shadowy source known as "Q...
...Next, he writes, not for the cloistered few, but for those who would really like to get a perspective on prayer which shapes and energizes a person's life...
...Drawing primarily from the writings of Thomas Merton (on which he is an acknowledged authority), he proposes, correctly, it seems to me, that prayer is being and listening long before it is saying and acting even though it is also acting as Shannon's linkage of prayer with a Christian witness in the world shows...
...Classified payable with order...
...The few white figures who saw the racism of the American church and spoke against it get their moment in this story but, ironically enough, it is the Vatican which chided, admonished, and encouraged the American hierarchy to abandon LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM is" chair of the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...avis's well-written and _9 comprehensive history of D black Catholics is a work ~ w " A - - that I found hard to finish because I kept lending it to my black students to encourage them to find research topics on their own heritage for term papers in one of my courses...
...He writes at a profound level but there is none of that treacly language that clots so much prose in this area...
...For free infor702: Commonweal...
...words like subsidiarity, delegation, coresponsibility, consultation, and collegiality...
...Monsignor Shannon is an acknowledged spiritual director, retreat master, and scholar...
...Pace the observation of Robert McAfee Brown in his preface to Batstone's book, a good deal of liberation theology is not written from below...
...and a resource for the recuperation of a neglected part of our common story...
...If Witherington's book urges more reflection on those issues that would be an added contribution to the one he has already made in this valuable addition to the literature on the one whom, in the words of the late Albert Schweitzer, each age creates in its own image and likeness...
...One final thought occurs: The book begins with a fine chapter on the historical role of blacks in the early history of the church...
...Those final chapters, it seems to me, provide, in outline, a book that Fowler should write...
...in the last century and layman Daniel Rudd who not only was a distinguished apologist for the faith but edited a national Catholic newspaper and Mary Elizabeth Lange, a Cuban-born Haitian, who founded the first successful religious community of black women in the early nineteenth century...
...Witherington is too sophisticated to think that one can read back into the New Testament Christologies which derive from the process of doctrinal development (e.g., that he saw himself as the second person of the Trinity) but he is very much convinced that Jesus did see himself in messianic terms...
...He would recognize the redemptive power of suffering--in bearing the burdensome child or, for the sinner, in bearing the burden of an abortion...
...Space forbids even a gloss of the many areas touched on in this book (there are thirteen essays) but I would single out Bishop Robert Morneau's ten theses as worthy of extended discussion...
...He stated otherwise, explicitly...
...Hence the question: Who is Jesus Christ for Latin America today...
...that he did consciously see himself as linked to God in an intimate manner...
...His biographical eye, understandably enough, is always on Luther but that unremitting gaze makes the other players in the decade recede into stage props against which the reformer operates...
...There is so much common sense in what he has to say and so little that smacks of churchiness, that one detects the ring of authentic experience in his invitation to a deep life of prayer...
...Jesus cannot be pigeonholed as a Hellenistic magician or a wandering cynic philosopher or a pious itinerant hasid or any of the other several rubrics under which he has been categorized...
...What is new about their theology, as Batstone makes clear in this well-written survey of Christology, is that they wrestle mightily with the issue of how to combine critical theological reflection with the actual situation in which they find themselves...
...By rereading traditional popular formulations about Jesus some of these theologians are gaining new insights into the inexhaustible mysteries of Christ...
...One of those theses lists, but does not discuss at length, a catena of other terms in contemporary ecclesiological discourse which need to be correctly understood if"empowerment" is to have coherent meaning...
...and so on...
...Professional exegetes will have to judge the reliability of Witherington's results but for this reader, at least, it was a breath of fresh air to see some of the more reductive conclusions of biblical criticism given a stringent appraisal...
...He also hopes for an ecclesial theology which would be holistic enough to confront the broad challenges of ecology but, alas, is a bit too smitten by the rococo effusions of Matthew Fox...
...His book, then, is valuable for the world of biblical criticism but is equally important for the systematic theologian...
...Lincoln and Mamiya make only glancing references to Roman Catholicism in their study of the black church in America...
...Man Between God and the Devil (Yale, 1989...
...that he may have seen himself as the incarnation of the Wisdom of God...
...it is the product of theologians who have drunk deeply of European (read: German) academic theology...
...in other words, ajustojuez--thejustjudge who demands dignity for self and for others...
...Among those needs is the generation of theological metaphors which make God a vibrant reality for contemporary discourse...
...Along the way, Davis points to areas where research is yet to be done so his book has the added value of being a spur to further work in this area...
...I very much admire the detail in this book as Brecht moves from Luther's familial intimacy to the large socio-political events of the time, and his obvious sympathy for his subject moves me to want to read more...
...James Fowler has done interesting research over the past two decades on analyzing the stages of the life of faith from the perspective of developmental psychology...
...The books noted above are, in the words of one of Walker Percy's fictional characters, "big books on big topics...
...Anyone who thinks that the American hierarchy is a compliant instrument in the hands of Rome will soon be disabused of that notion when they read Davis's account of their genteel neglect and persistent temporizing in the face of Roman demands...
...72r six times...
...In that enterprise he has added, among Announcing a new s e r i e s The Fundamentalism Project Edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby The Inaugural Volume FUNDAMENTALISMS OBSERVED Edited by Martin E. Marty and R. S c o t t Appleby An encyclopedic introduction to the emergence and growth of fundamentalism in the twentieth centur}: Contributors consider the resurgence of religion in all its manifestations: Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, and Confucian 896 pp...
...that of Augustus Tolton who labored as the first black priest in the U.S...
...What they have done is to focus on seven of the largest black Protestant denominations in this country to do an exhaustive inventory of the state of the black church...
...monthly in advance for more than three times...
...the problems of family life...
...they see him as humilde not in a Uriah Heepish way of humble but as a signal virtue of the strongest of their people: sure of himself and, covertly, unmovably resistant towards the injustice of others...
...I knew much, for example, about St...
...Spanish helpful...
...he entered into energetic polemics with the reformers to his left and the Catholic critics 22 November 1991:699 accessible to the ordinary reader, even more...
...Empowerment is one of those postVatican II theological buzzwords which could use a rest even though the concept itself carries with it many neuralgic problems for the church: the problem of the "clericalization" of lay ministries...
...Those terms are used a great deal by those who try to sort out the relationship between Rome and the local episcopate, just as they are used to discuss the local parish and its relationship to the ordinary...
...He believes that we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift in ecclesiology and he intends to anticipate that shift by imagining new ways of conceiving the Christian community...
...Augustine, Florida's great pride in having the oldest parish in the continental United States but I did not know how substantial the black presence was in that city in the prerevolutionary period just as I did not know that the majority of the founding families of Los Angeles were persons of color...
...he married and began his family...
...It makes a nice supplement to Arthur McGovern's Liberation Theology and Its Critics (1989) which is still the most panoramic view of Latin American liberation theology but sparing in its Christological reflections...
...He likes the metaphorical theology of Sally McFague and offers some trenchant remarks about both its promise and shortcomings...
...The tonal register elides from theological analysis to biographical narratives to platform exhortation until we get to the final two chapters of the book on the public church which is at the heart of his argument...
...Father Davis not only recovers those facts but he traces, in embarrassing detail, the relationship of the church to the blacks both of the pre-Civil War and Reconstruction periods...
...and, in the midst of all of this, there were the unremitting labors of reshaping a vision of the church and its polity as he attempted to create an evangelical community which, despite his own best efforts, was increasingly being called "Lutheran...
...This book does not address those questions ex professo but they are made urgent by the kind of conclusions Witherington arrives at...
...Nurses Wanted You know the problems--become part of the solution...
...he was involved in the Peasant's Revolt...
...Registered nurses needed, work with inner-city families as part of team with other professionals...
...Have the criteria for the authenticity of the sayings and deeds of Jesus a solid philosophical undergirding or do they mask an often inarticulated ideology...
...The Black Church in the AfricanAmerican Experience can be read with profit as a straightforward report of the African-American Protestant experience but its more permanent value will be as a jumping off place for further studies and as a very fine reference tool since the authors have been generous enough to provide us with over fifty pages of notes to the text and a very useful bibliography of studies...
...Full- or part-time...
...This current book returns to one of his central concerns: bow a person becomes aware of God in ordinary life without bifurcating one's existence into the "spiritual" and "secular" realm...
...76r three times...
...40.00 Also available: A Fundamentalism Project Report ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISMS AND THE GULF CRISIS Foreword by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby Edited by James Piscatori $9.95 paperback The University of Chicago Press At bookstores, or for MC/VISA orders call: 1-800-621-2736 In Illinois: 312-568-1550 22 November 1991:701 other things, to how we think about the relationship of narrative and belief...
...The most intriguing part of the book (but, alas, the shortest) surveys some Christological formulations which, indeed, do come "from below...
...Scattered throughout its pages are some very sensible reflections on the needs of the church but the work, as a whole, does not seem verb, coherently sustained (it was stitched together from disparate lectures, course offerings, etc...
...that he did make claims that went beyond the standard claims of the prophet...
...David N. Power's historical analysis of the rise of episcopal authority in the early church at the expense of charismatic authority (e.g., of the martyrs and confessors) sets out the tension that circles around the issue of power to this day: how to provide a centering authority for the coherence of a tradition without caving into the tendency to accumulate power for the pleasure of its exercise...
...they utilize hermeneutical strategies derived from postEnlightenment philosophy...
...It is a rather technical study that attempts to get to the self-consciousness of Jesus through an examination of the earliest strata of New Testament texts, on his right...
...If one were to encapsulate the author's thesis it would be his strong conviction, pace the more radical wing of New Testament criticism, that one can reconstruct a good deal of what Jesus thought about himself and, further, in that reconstruction one can critique the more extreme forms of the hermeneutics of suspicion that are so regnant in contemporary criticism...
...The second volume (the first appeared in English in 1985) of Martin Brecht's massive biography of Martin Luther follows the reformer's life from the period immediately after his break from Rome down to the complex events which led to the Augsburg Confession of 1530 and its reshaping in 1531 after the criticisms of the Catholic parties involved...
...as an argument...
...the present work strikes me as a prolegomenon to such a systematic study...
...700: Commonweal . . . . . ' i Implicit m W~thenngton s analys s is a whole catena of questions that require (and, de facto, are receiving) a vigorous critical debate: Has the distinction between the self-consciousness of Christ and the later christological faith of the early church been overblown...
...That these relationships are not always harmonious simply underscores how much distance there is between theological assertion (empowerment deriving from baptismal dignity) and the regnant realities of church life...
...His Christian humanism rested upon that dignity, so one could not fairly conclude, as Frank McConnell suggests in his September 27 article, that O'Malley would be uncertain about the unborn or neutral about abortion...
...would do the church a great service by doing a book-length study of that topic following it down into modem times...
...Liberation theology in general, and its Christology and ecclesiology in particular, is much critiqued today but its enduring value for the world theological community is that it has made all of us aware of ideological traces in our thinking and, more importantly, has taught us how different our faith-reflection is depending on where we reflect and how full our stomachs are...
...There is much to learn from Brecht's mastery of the sources and his earnest handling of them, but I still must confess that were I to recommend one book that most captures the vigor and panache of Luther it would have to be Heiko Oberman's Luther...
...O'MaUey on abortion Portland, Maine To the Editors: At the recent "Tribute to Frank O'Malley" at Notre Dame, I was pointedly reminded that in 1950 O'Malley had warned, in an uncharacteristic Wranglers banquet address (his context was usually literary) of coming challenges to the dignity of man--abortion, euthanasia, etc...
...While Fowler would not deny that older forms of church will persist, he makes a plea for a more "public church" (the term is from Martin Marty) which will engage the community in terms of the exigent realities of this world...
...Monsignor Shannon's most recent book is a little book on the biggest topic of all: the relationship of the human to God...
Vol. 118 • November 1991 • No. 20
