Religious Booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
RELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES fter an introductory discussion of the role of the Old Testament in church life, its moral i perspective, and some rules of interpretation, Birch follows the biblical...
...Protestants: The Birth of a Revolution, by Steven Ozment, Doubleday, $20, 270 pp...
...RELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES fter an introductory discussion of the role of the Old Testament in church life, its moral i perspective, and some rules of interpretation, Birch follows the biblical story in rough chronological order (beginning with Genesis and ending with the Wisdom literature) to tease out the major ethical considerations reflected in the text of the Hebrew Bible...
...It is also an explanation of why Weigel's work has had no staying power...
...Ozment has fine descriptive chapters on family life...
...Gutierrez has read the pertinent scholarship, is very sensitive to the original languages and how words get translated, and what the tradition makes of those words...
...Over the years his writings have taken on more and more of a spiritual and contemplative character...
...and where there are scholarly disputes, Birch tells us what they are and how he assesses them...
...Family resemblances Lawrence S. Cunningham courses but could also be used for adult education...
...if so, a few places were passed Right now millions of people in 42 countries are changing their lives with help from CARE...
...In general my impression is of an author who has a deep pastoral orientation in his biblical scholarship, a gift for clear exposition, and a fine grasp of the main contours of scholarly research...
...This present work is a meditation, to borrow Pascal's classic phrase, not on the god of the philosophers but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and, as Gutierrez notes in his introduction, that same God is the God of Jesus...
...There is a kind of appendix which gives brief biographies of the saints and ascetics whom tradition locates at the various monasteries...
...While reading this book I could not but mentally mut28: 23 October 1992 Commonweal RELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES ter to myself that we've come a long way...
...To those who saw the reform as sweeping away the rot of late medieval superstition, he assesses the opinions of revisionist historians like Bossy and Oakley who have a far more benign interpretation of late medieval religious practices...
...I read The God of Life each morning before the school day began and found myself going back to my Bible to annotate texts I had previously overlooked or undervalued in earlier readings...
...I think pastors, teachers, and serious readers of the Bible will profit from a reading of it...
...The God of Life, bv Gustavo Gutierrez, Orbis, $14.95, 214pp...
...I say that this work is one of biblical theology because it is on the biblical text that Gutierrez keeps his eye as he plumbs the mystery of the God of revelation...
...In all of these cases (or in a combination of them) there is an Enemy and, as the editors point out, it is common to all forms of fundamentalism that the Enemy is named, mythicized/demonized, and, subsequently, that Enemy becomes the force which provides the energy for struggle...
...there is an index of scriptural passages (always a plus...
...resurgent nationalistic sects in Japan...
...The project, sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, envisions a multivolumed report ending with some policy recommendations derived from the study itself...
...Finally, I take it from the omissions that syncretist cults in general (e.g., Santeria or Macumba or Voodoo or Rastafarianism) do not fall under the purview of what the editors consider fundamentalism, but why this should be is not plainly spelled out...
...Others may even get a small shock at the smug narrowness of our old Catholic world...
...The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period, by Yizhar Hirschfield, translated by Jeffrey M. Green, Yale University Press, $45, 305 pp...
...The best way to understand the method of Gutierrez (if there be a method) is to take seriously his conviction that finding the God of life demands the "silence of contemplation and commitment...
...What we have in this volume is, as it were, a phenomenolCommonweal 23 October 1992: 27 RELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES ogy of contemporary fundamentalism(s...
...the Jewish Heredim and their shaping of Israeli culture...
...Only the most dedicated soul will read these essays cover to cover...
...My suspicion is that time will judge Gustavo Gutierrez not only as one of the parents of liberation theology (his claim to that honor is rock solid) but as one of the premier spiritual writers of this generation who also happens to be a first-rate theologian...
...His nonRoman Catholic contemporaries often noted that his personal ecumenism frequently outstripped his very conservative theology...
...on the crucial role of pamphlets in the religion of the time (e.g., in the 1460s the biggest share of printing went into the production of indulgences...
...When the council was called Weigel was basically teaching on automatic pilot and still indebted to a manualist approach to ecclesiology that was innovative only by comparison with his more intellectually doltish contemporaries...
...Fundamentalisms Observed, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, University of Chicago Press, $40, 872 pp...
...Commonweal...
...I contented myself with an ad libitum look at things that most interested me...
...very little on Catholic fundamentalism in Europe outside the circles of the Lefebvre movement...
...In extremely well-written chapters Hirschfield not only describes these ancient sites but tells us, by a careful use of both literary texts and archaeological remains, about the different kinds of monasteries, the organization of their social life, how their days were spent, their vast knowledge of how to survive in a rather unforgiving setting, and the monastic routes that connected the various holy places...
...There is nothing in the book on syncretist sects in Black Africa (in fact, Africa is terra incognita except for Muslim North Africa...
...Hirschfield, an Israeli field archaeologist, has surveyed the entire Judean desert area of Israel to produce a catalogue of every Byzantine monastery built in the area from, roughly, the Constantinian period until the coming of Islam...
...In sum: a very readable and highly informative example of social history...
...Most fundamentalisms (note the plural...
...We are dealing with what Wittgenstein calls family resemblances) occur, it appears, as strategies of resistance (e.g., to modernization) or self-identification (e.g., in the face of cultural or economic elites) or bulwarks against cultural upheaval...
...In the last analysis what this book does is to provide a reliable archaeological companion to Derwas Chitty' s classical The Desert a City (1966...
...Those who think they know early Protestantism from reading Luther and Calvin would do well to read a historian like Ozment to find out what it meant to become a Protestant in sixteenth-century Germany...
...I used it for my own personal background reading while teaching an undergraduate course on biblical foundations of theology and, as a consequence, read in a rather unsystematic fashion (e.g., "Let's see what Birch says about the psalms") and over a four-month period...
...Weigel took up an interest in Protestant theology at the suggestion of Murray who needed someone to cover the area for Theological Studies...
...There were fine scholarly discussions about many of the troubled hotspots of the world in the appropriate essays: Sikhs versus Hindus or Hindus versus Muslims...
...Hirschfield's book is enhanced with clear photographs, architectural sketches, graphs, and maps...
...Gutierrez's inost recent work, like his fine We Drink from Our Own Wells (1984), locates itself at the intersection of theology and spirituality or, more precisely, in the area of what was once called "biblical theology...
...He is pretty much a forgotten figure today since his importance has been so overshadowed by his illustrious fellow Jesuit, John Courtney Murray...
...It may come as a surprise for people to know that there were a large number of such monasteries (that of Saint Saba exists down to this day, as does the more famous Saint Catherine's further south in the Sinai...
...I was then only beginning to read theology and received this warning carefully but afterwards read Weigel with a certain sense of adventuresomeness...
...his Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master was recently published by Paulist...
...A number of scholars have devoted lengthy essays simply to describing the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism in the various religious traditions of the world...
...Let Justice Roll Down: The Old Testament, Ethics, and Christian Life, by Bruce C. Birch, Westminster/John Knox, $19.95, 383 pp...
...He is a sure guide for the doing of both...
...Above all, he keeps his topic in focus: how the Old Testament enriches the way we live...
...A list of these omissions may seem like a cavil when handed over eight hundred pages of text and, to a certain degree, it is...
...His significance rests, as this biography shows, not on what he wrote (which is only of historical interest today) but on who he was and how he related to others in the fledgling days of ecumenical dialogue in this country...
...One cannot understand the Catholic tradition (broadly conceived) without taking into account the long history of the monastic life...
...in the 1520s into pamphlets advancing the reform...
...I would place Hirschfield's interesting volume (beautifully turned out by Yale University Press) on the monasteries of the Judean desert in that category...
...What Gutierrez requires, in short, is that we first listen and then act...
...I well remember being told by an American who would become one of the first periti on ecumenism how dangerous a thinker Gustave Weigel was...
...He reads and thinks with great faith and no sentimentality...
...a long, long, way...
...His current book, developed from some articles he had already published here and there, is, in essence, a picture of the German Reformation drawn from Ozment's wide knowledge of sixteenth-century social history...
...That counted for much in terms of his ecumenical contacts...
...the Shia' resurgence in the Islamic world as well as other Muslim movements like that of the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt...
...The book is very "user-friendly" for those, like myself, who are not professional scholars of the Hebrew Bible: the extensive bibliography is limited to English titles...
...Gustave Weigel, S.J., the pioneer American ecumenist, died before the council ended...
...Above all, he encounters the text with an openness to the reality of a specific time and place living among the Peruvian poor as he does...
...The purpose of the project is to get a fix on the deep structures of fundamentalisms and that may not require a comprehensive sampling of the phenomenon...
...It is not clear to me if this volume was to be the definitive tour of the fundamentalist world...
...It would make a good book for background reading in college ethics LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM chairs the department of theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...There is also an excellent bibliography of primary and secondary sources...
...Furthermore, he is good at dial - lenging the conventional wisdom...
...I must confess not to have read the book right through...
...While there are many excellent specialized studies of monasticism, every now and again one comes along that is both highly specialized and eminently accessible to the nonscholar...
...Weigel's great gift, as Collins shows, was for friendship and his great asset was a deep and abiding religious faith...
...a strict definition of the phenomenon does not work...
...Marty and Appleby co-direct a complex research project which, over the next few years, hopes to complete a worldwide survey and analysis of religious fundamentalism...
...on what it really meant for a sixteenth-century German city to embrace the reform...
...Readers who remember the events leading up to Vatican II will have a pleasant stroll down memory lane as they read this biography...
...The present hefty book reports the first fruit of this research...
...In an earlier column commenting on a biography of the Benedictine liturgist, Geoffrey Diekmann, I applauded efforts to acquire the stories of the major participants at Vatican II before they pass into history...
...Gustave Weigel: A Pioneer of Reform, by Patrick W. Collins, Liturgical Press/Glazier, $19.95, 287pp...
...It is an immensely satisfying piece of work in places but eccentrically thin in others (we get one-and-a-half pages as an appendix on the historiographical significance of the Reformation...
...Birch's work is not aimed at scholars, but at anyone who wishes to help make his or her learning come alive for others...
...omissions in the American scene ranging from the relatively benign Mormon polygamists of the West and the decidedly nonbenign purveyors of a hybrid Protestant fundamentalism, cum racist ideology...
...Patrick Collins's biography of Weigel (rewritten from a dissertation done two decades ago) is an act of pietas toward a priest-theologian who literally worked himself to death in the service of the church...
...Subsequent volumes will consider the impact of fundamentalism on social structures, political movements, etc...
...Catholic fundamentalism was first on my list since that is familiar territory...
...I would recommend the book as a perfect gift to anyone who loves church history in general and monastic history in particular...
...Steven Ozment is a fine historian of Reformation Europe whose textbook, The Age of Reform (1981), has been a boon to all classroom teachers...
...To the feminist historians who lament the reduction of women's roles to the household with the evaporation of the cloister (women's space), Ozment notes, using Luther's wife as an example, the rise of mercantile and entrepreneurial possibilities opening to women...
...The essay on fundamentalist movements in Latin America was exceedingly interesting and very well done...
Vol. 119 • October 1992 • No. 18
