Religious booknotes

...his observation that since God made us "male and female" indicates male/female primal potentialities in God albeit not in any reductionist sexual sense...

...Ravier's biography makes me wish to read a fuller study of the saint which would be less hagiographically breathless (the fault may be with the translator here, at least in part) and more fully documented (the few notes provided are more a puzzle than a help...

...it is a cautionary tale...

...Peter Hodgson Dr...

...and the future of Christianity...

...This volume is an assemblage of those short essays which were finished just before he died...

...The fact that the status of women in the church does get discussed in various places in the text does not absolve the authors from presenting a more balanced, less exclusively masculine, focus for their entire story...

...Based on extensive interviews conducted by himself and his sons in a number of countries, Coles, who is psychoanalytically trained himself, eschews the old Freudian dogma that religious belief is simply a projection of need and/or a coping mechanism for fear...

...What comes across most powerfully in these stories is that while children operate on what Paul Ricoeur would call the "first level of naivetr" (e.g., God is "up there" and "sits on a throne," etc...

...BETTY A. DEBERG $8.95 paper MUST GOD REMAIN GREEK...

...Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies P.O...

...Those acquainted with von Balthasar will recognize his style in these short (and, in places, almost gnomic) reflections: an unremittingly "high" view of theology which reflects his long engagement with the Greek Fathers...

...She begins with a survey of contemporary Christian ethics in order to indicate the fragmentation of the field whose major shards would include the return to nature as a source for ethical reflection (Gustafson...

...The larger value of this book rests in its ability to retrieve a classic in such a manner that it sheds light on the contemporary moment...

...A judicious selection of the most important and characteristic PIETY, PURITY, PLENTY Images of Protestantism in America Robert L. Ferm A unique thematic presentation of the history and identity of American Protestantism--and a proposal for change...

...In the last year of his long and enormously productive life, he contributed a series of meditations on the articles of the creed for some German pastoral magazines...

...The 9real household of faith Lawrence S. Cunningham The most conspicuous imbalance, however, devolves around the role of women in the story...

...Coles has spoken with, taped, and collected the drawings of children whose background cuts across both class and religion...

...His friendship with Madame de Chantal (co-founder, with de Sales, of the Visitandine nuns) is one of the great stories of spiritual friendship in the church...

...The Syriac and Armenian churches are mentioned, for example, only with reference to their relationship to Christological heresies...

...Nor should we forget the two women, a mother and daughter, who died...

...In fact, it is one of the small 170: Commonweal ironies of our age that Thomas should be seen as an ecumenical bridge in Christian ethical discourse...

...His deft and original organization helps readers understand their religious culture in new ways...

...Lewis V. Baldwin In this path-breaking volume Baldwin traces King's vision and activism not to his formal philosophical and theological training but directly to his roots in Southern black culture...

...the Christian conscience...

...Frederick Pike on Latin America) are married to profuse illustrations that include both examples of"fine art" and the crafts like calligraphy, textiles, and ivory carving in such a way that one can read or browse with equal pleasure...

...90-'91 titles include Women in Wotsh~o, lnculturation of the Lilurgy, Cbadren Celebrate...

...that is a tradition not lightly to be discarded...

...Like the good householder of the gospel, Porter brings forth both old things and new...

...Jane de Chantal, for example, never comes to life in this work and the untutored reader would not know that the volume Francis de Sales~Jane de Chantal: Letters o f Spiritual Direction (Paulist, 1988) would make a companion piece to this biography...

...laments over the entropy afflicting church reform and ecumenical outreach...

...This book is not hagiography...

...Who might read this little book...

...My suspicion is that this book will provoke much discussion in religious ethics but its reading should not be limited to those discussants alone...

...Histories of universities are most often read by dutiful alumni, professional historians, and incurable insomniacs...

...My mind's image of the E1 Salvador martyrs is of anonymous bodies, face down on a lawn with their heads blown apart...

...He traces out the entwined history of CUA and the building of that massive monument of bad taste, the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception...

...their understanding of that level of imagination carries with it a level of questioning, skepticism, and a capacity for reflection that becomes "THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN THE MAKING OF PUBLIC POLICY" A SYMPOSIUM April 22-23, 1991 hosted by the CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL STUDIES J.M...

...They were all connected to the Jesuit university in El Salvador (Ignacio Ellacuria was its rector) but they were hardly ivory tower intellectuals...

...It is obviously too brief to be a fair introduction to his thought (The yon Balthasar Reader, Crossroad, might serve here), but for the seeker of solid spiritual fare or as a gift for someone who has "received the creed" as part of the conversion process of RCIA, this would prove to be a challenging little book to encounter...

...I have done both and with much instruction...

...That will not do and even the Dons of Oxbridge should know that by now...

...Full historical essays of the unfolding story of Christianity by some of the more eminent names in English ecclesiastical history (there are two Americans among the contributors: Martin Marry writing on North America...

...As always, there are stunning insights in his writing, often expressed paradoxically: his notion that the Second Person of the Trinity has greater claim to femininity than the Holy Spirit...

...Hans Kting, not conspicuous for shyness or modesty, decided to mark the tenth anniversary of the Vatican's removal of his mandate as a Catholic professor of theology by publishing this florilegium of collected essays, addresses, and broadsides on church renewal...

...When Nuesse writes that the sponsors (i.e., the bishops) did not support the institution in 1899 with full enthusiasm he might have just as well been writing about 1990...

...Write for an Introductory issue...

...Afro Culture and God-Talk Robert E. Hood A fascinating look at African-rooted religious traditions and their potential for reshaping Christian theology...

...She has some fine pages on how one can read Aquinas without accepting his worldview...

...Brecht's scholarship is impeccable and his book is indeed original...

...De Sales, in fact, played a large part in the papal settlement of that struggle...

...The priests ranged in age from a cancer-stricken elderly worker in peasant education to a Chicago-trained psychologist who was in his late forties...

...I note that not to plea for equal opportunity but to explain why--to cite a few elementary examples---one does not find figures like Catherine of Siena or Julian of Norwich or Hildegard of Bingen or Clare of Assisi in the general index of the volume while basic nonentities like Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell merit two refere.nces each...

...I judge it to be a handsome book but there are some limitations...

...The first English translation of Troeltsch's Glaubenslchre...

...Her opening and closing chapters set the parameters of her task...

...The reasons for that failure are gently 8 March 1991:169 laid out by the author who is himself a graduate, a veteran faculty member, and administrator of the university itself...

...Box 97308 Waco, Texas 76798-7308 (817)755-1510 This symposium is made possible by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts...

...Francis de Sales (1567-1622) was one of the most attractive of the major figures OXFORD SUMMER SCHOOL IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES Tuesday 6 August - Monday 19 August, 1991 LINCOLN COLLEGE, OXFORD THE LECTURERS Professor John Macquarrie Bishop KaUistos T. Ware Professor Rowan Williams Dr...

...Notre Dame Center for Pastoral Liturgy, P.O...

...Hood's study should be read precisely because it lies outside the range of Euro-American cognizance...

...His pastoral life (he was bishop in exile of the then Calvinist city of Geneva) intersected with some of the most famous figures of the time...

...We have recounted here the reflections of Native Americans, every stripe of Christians, Jews, and Muslims...

...Quite correctly, he notes that the development of the two editions of the Catholic Encyclopedia, the sponsorship of some distinguished learned journals, the patristic editions published under the editorship of the late Johannes Quasten, and other monuments of schol arship point to what CUA might have been...

...and a resistance to any attempt to lessen the data of the tradition...

...Sue Gillingham Dr...

...the agapaic ethics of Outka...

...House of Representatives "The Advocacy Role of Religion In American Polities" DEREK DAVIS Baylor University "The Churches, Public Policy, and the Courts" EDWARD M. GAFFNEY Valparaiso School of Law "A.RaIL v. U.S...

...Some of the pieces in this work go back twenty years...

...Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) is a titanic, if somewhat unclassifiable, figure in contemporary Catholic theology...

...the believing community as thee locus for Christian ethics (Hauerwas...

...What is most attractive about de Sales was his expansive spirituality aimed, not at a spiritual elite, but at everyone who wished to love God...

...a steady focus on the Scriptures conceived as a revelation...

...That Sobrino was able to write this essay is due to his absence from E1 Salvador when the murders took place...

...otherwise it would have been left to someone else to eulogize 172: Commonweal him along with his six companions...

...Nuesse's story of The Catholic University, however, can lay claim to a larger audience if for no other reason than the important role that CUA has played in the modem history of Catholicism in this country...

...They fit the bill: peasants who fled the violence of the countryside for the safe haven of the .city...

...y shelves groan with histories of Christianity, including some that include a good deal of visual art and illustrations (e.g., Geoffrey Barraclough's The Worm of Christianity, Bamber Gascoigne's The Christians;just to name two British publications...

...They had the bad luck to have moved to the priests' residence that night because their house on the edge of the campus seemed too close to the fighting between the guerrillas and the military...

...Catholic Conference: A Case Study" ALLEN D. HERTZKE University of Oklahoma "The Advocacy of America's Mainline Denominations In National and International Affairs" DEAN M. KELLEY National Council of Churches in Christ, US.A...

...5 issues/year...

...Robert Coles is one of my favorite writers both because he loves and writes about some of my favorite people (Flannery O'Connor, Simone Weil, George Orwell, William Carlos Williams, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, etc...

...The Rationale for the Involvement of Religion In the Body Pontlc" CUSHING STROUT Comell University "The Role of Religion in American Politics Prior to World War II" MARK TUSHNET Georgetown University Law Center "The Rationale for the Limits of Involvement of Religion In the Body Politic" ROBERT WUTHNOW Princeton University "The Rise of the New Religious Right In American Polities" For further details contact: J.M...

...Reading Ravier's biography of the saint reminded me of how sensible de Sales, given his age and culture, was with his conviction that religious differences are best solved by loving dialogue...

...and, most importantly, it reminds us that martyrs are not long dead hieratic figures devoured by lions and enshrined in stained glass windows...

...None of the essays anthologized here amounts to much in the way of sustained theological analysis...

...Brian Wren A unique opportunity to join a small ecumenical group and study with these distinguished scholars in the intimate setting of historic Lincoln College, Oxford...

...The historical perspective of the essays is very traditional in its general orientation...

...DAVID W. LOTZ $39.95 cloth M harried from their posts, reputations besmirched, and elementary norms of justice ignored with insouciant arrogance...

...It can make a fair case as having been a shaping force in the American church (a generation ago, it could number nearly a third of the episcopate among its alumni, as well as a large percentage of diocesan curial staffs) but it never realized its dream of being the flagship of American Catholic higher education despite its honor roll of distinguished professors...

...Format: Eight pages (brief and to the poin0 readable in one sitting...

...Porter's final chapter advances the conviction that Thomas Aquinas might well provide a paradigm for the recovery of a foundational ethics since, as she rightly notes, there has been a keen interest in Thomas in Protestant circles and, further, because there is a rationality in his thinking that might give us clues as to how to tackle some of the more resistant conundrums of contemporary ethical debate...

...8 March 1991:173...

...and his own synthesis of humanism and mystical spirituality...

...Content: 3 short, provocative articles focusing on a theme central to liturgy and life...

...it tells us something of the story behind their killing...

...Companions of Jesus serves three useful functions: it personalizes people who, for most of us, were simply more sad numbers in the slaughter in Central America...

...Let them stand for the seventy thousand who have been killed in that unhappy country...

...They embodied, it seems at least from this safe haven of Notre Dame, to perfection the Jesuit charism to be contemplatives in action...

...Nuesse plainly loves his alma mater but his story, in fact, is a bittersweet tale whose underlying moral is that the failure of CUA to attain a greatness proportionate to the vigor of the North American church is a continuing reproach to the hierarchy of the most powerful church in modem times...

...19.95 paper MARTIN LUTHER Shaping and Defining the Reformation, 1521-1532 Martin Brecht Translated by James L. Schaaf The second volume of Brecht's definitive biography...

...My general praise for this volume, however, must be tempered a bit...

...The historical essays are briskly written, authoritative in tone, and eminently readable...

...On the other hand, there is in von Balthasar a kind of abstractionism that keeps him at some distance from the historical grittiness of Christianity along with a mystical lyricism in his writing that cloys after a bit...

...A final section of the book gives us some summing up with an especially cogent article by Maurice Wiles on "What Christians Believe" and three final articles on changing forms of Christian community (by the sociologist of religion, Bryan Wilson...

...There are no female church historians/theologians among the contributors...

...Their short biographies indicate that all of them spent their weekends as pastoral workers among the rural and urban poor celebrating the liturgy, managing clinics, and building small chapels...

...and his possibilities for contemporary discourse...

...Francis de Sales knew the Franciscan tradition, was a devotee of the Spiritual Exercises, and through his links to the Acade circle in Pads, was conversant with the apophatic spirituality of the Rhineland mystics...

...19.95 paper TRADITION AND THE CRITICAL SPIRIT Catholic Modernist Writings George Tyrrell Edited and introduced by James C. Livingston...

...and because of the largesse and sympathy of his research...

...A few chapters of this sort, admittedly, have a certain rhetorical punch but the book as a whole is, to use the pungent Yiddish word, a long kvetch...

...They are contemporary men and women shot down with M16 assault rifles supplied by our own government...

...a spirituality encapsulated in his two classic works An Introduction to the Devout Life and his Treatise on the Love of God...

...Contact: Norma Christensen 820 Park Avenue Worland, Wyoming 82401 Phone: (307) 347-3836 Fax: (307) 347-2133 or Fernand Beck Fordham Preparatory School The Bronx, New York 10458 Phone/Fax: 212-884-6261 8 March 1991:171 IF You ARE SOMEONE WHo HAS YET To ENCOUNTER READ ON...

...Nothing is said of their rich liturgical and literary tradition...

...GAYRAUD WILMORE $14.95 paper GOOD AND EVIL Interpreting a Human Condition Edward Farley Addressing the haunting question of evil, Farley anchors his discussion firmly in "l-thou" dynamics as a key to unfolding the personal and social spheres of human existence...

...all of them tread well-worn paths: Kfing's criticism of papal pretensions...

...Enough already...

...much of it is done in the long familiar style of Kting-asscourge-gadfly-prophet, i.e., lots of short sentences studded with exclamation points...

...He held "ecumenical" discussions with Theodore of B eza, Calvin's heir in Geneva, and knew everyone from Robert Bellarmine, Baronius, and Charles Borromeo in Italy to Saint Vincent de Paul, Pierre de Berulle, and Mother Angelique (of Port Royal fame) in France...

...F. W. Dillistone Canon John Fenton Dr...

...The recent Affaire Curran has analogues that run back to the beginning of the century with clerics IN GILEAD The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King, Jr...

...What von Balthasar excels at is his capacity to keep alive the old tradition of monastic theology in which the theologian is thought to be one who speaks of God out of deep contemplative experience...

...Box 81, Notre Dante, IN 46556 GUELPH CENTRE OF SPIRITUALITY A Symposium on: IGNATIAN SPIRITUALITY September 27 - 29, 1991 Loyola House Guelph, Ontario For further information, contact: Virginia Varley, CSJ Loyola House, Box 245, Guelph, ON Canada N1H 6J9 Telephone (519) 824-1250 of the post-Tridentine Catholic Reform...

...The first flaw must be laid at the feet of the American hierarchy who never quite understood what higher education was all about but did not feel that such ignorance should stop them from energetic meddling in, as well as active resistance toward, the attempts of the university's most visionary faculty to create an American equivalent, say, to Louvain...

...Part of the generosity of his spiritual vision is due to the fact that de Sales struggled both as a scholar and as a spiritual seeker to overcome his own incipient despair over the inhuman logic of the predestination struggles unleashed by the Calvinist tradition and continued in the Catholic church in the ferocious battles between the Jesuits and Dominicans over the relationship of grace and free will...

...First conceived as a graduate institution for clerics, its tortuous history finally embraced both undergraduate and graduate education for clergy, religious, and laity...

...This kind of close explication du texte can be formidable for the uninitiated but Porter is blessed with a gift for clear prose, keeping an eye on the topic at hand and a sense of how Aquinas must be seen in the light both of his limitations (e.g., his faulty psychology...

...a theology conceived in Trinitarian terms...

...Nuesse's story, blessedly, counterbalances this lugubrious history with sharply etched portraits of distinguished scholars who gave luster to an otherwise badly funded and often beleaguered institution...

...These shards do not add up to a mosaic, and that fact alone impels Porter to attempt a rapprochement through the agency of the one person all the above ethicists read: Thomas Aquinas...

...Interestingly enough, his concern with children's religious discourse was encouraged by the master's daughter, Anna Freud, herself a distingushed child analyst...

...Secondly, the ponderous hand of Rome rested heavily on the administrative and academic programs...

...N. T. (Tom) Wright Dr...

...but none quite reach the high standards of literacy and visual production found in the new Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity...

...ERIC LINCOLN $19.95 paper Fortress Texts in Modern Theology THE CHRISTIAN FAITH Ernst Troeltsch Translated by Garrett E. Paul...

...Georgetown University Law Center Former Member, U.S...

...indeed, one of the burdens of this study is to show that the very problems that contemporary science raises for ethics (a point emphasized by James Gustafson with whom this book seems in dialogue) can best be addressed by starting from the Thomistic conviction that a natural theology need not be a priori ruled out of court...

...Ravier's study whets the appetite but, for this reviewer, does not quite set out a full meal...

...This book is the sixth volume of his series on children and it is one that should engage the attention of every sensitive parent and must be read by anyone who works in religious education...

...and the raging debate among Catholics over absolute and/or proportional ethical norms...

...Jon Sobrino's long introduction gives us both a context for understanding their work and a framework for seeing how they conceived of their task in the triple terms of their commitment to E1 Salvador, their vocations as priests, and their lives as Jesuits...

...with his belief that education is crucial for the well-being of the church ( he once said that an ignorant priest is worse than a malicious priest...

...indignation over institutional suppression/manipulation in the church at large and in Germany in particular...

...LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame...

...his static cosmology...

...Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies Baj~lor University Major presentations, to be followed by dialogue and discussion, will be made by: Keynote Speaker: ROBERT F: DRINAN, S.J...

...For nearly 2 decades, ASSEMBLY has been a quiet, but consistent voice in the cause of liturgical renewal r promoting the authentic spirit of the liturgy + unpacking the riches of our liturgical tradition + assisting its readers to pray the liturgy more wholeheartedly, to minister more effectively, and to link the mysteries we celebrate with the mystery of life in the world...

...That image, horrific enough, has now been enlarged by this hastily assembled but sympathetic homage to the six Jesuits and the two peasant laywomen slaughtered by members of the U.S.-trained army battalion in El Salvador...

...an intriguing and authentic appraisal of the forces that nurtured, shaped, and developed King and presented him to the world and history...

...The art is selected with sensitivity and is authentically illustrative...

...Truth in advertising demands that I acknowledge that Jean Porter is a colleague, but that relationship, I trust, does not preclude high praise for her stimulating book on Aquinas and ethics...

...Sandwiched between those chapters is the main bulk of the work which closely reads the Summa in order to construct Thomas's ethical theory as it rests on his notion of Goodness and his understanding of the virtues...