Religious booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
RELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES s readers of these notes should know, I have a soft spot for reference books. Pye's is a onei volume dictionary of terms from the various religions of the world. Anyone...
...Macquarrie is an extremely Paths in Spirituality (2nd...
...edition), by John Macquarrie, Morehouse, $10.95,168 _W________________________________ accomplished theologian, a true person of the church, and unafraid of swimming against the tide...
...Indeed, it would strike me as a dereliction not to be conversant with what these theologians add to the theological enterprise as they teach us how to bring forth "old things and new...
...Who might find this book useful...
...27...
...This work is another of those markers which tell us that the theological enterprise is undergoing a sea change...
...This dictionary omits proper names, but is not evenhanded on personal titles...
...At the heart of Christian spirituality (Macquarrie is in reaction against those who too exclusively root themselves in the Word) is the Eucharist, and Macquarrie has some fine words not only on the litur26...
...To think through the implications of that sheds new light (at least it does for me) on a whole range of issues...
...For Macquarrie, prayer is a kind of "thinking"—a thinking which is passionate, compassionate, responsible, and thankful...
...Responses to 101 Questions about Jesus, by Michael Cook, 5.7., Paulist, $8.95, 124 pp...
...The entry "dying-and-rising-god" describes vegetative gods whose death/rising mirrored the seasonal cycles...
...In an easy and readable fashion, it provides a quick survey of the history of spirituality...
...Holt takes a straightforward historical approach, even though it is clear that spirituality is not simply history...
...He sees the Christian life as founded on three pillars: doctrine, worship, and deed...
...I may pay it the compliment of requiring it for background reading for my course on spirituality...
...Again, Susan Ross invites us to think of sacramentality in terms of embodiment, as does Lisa Sowle Cahill from the perspective of ethics...
...Its most conspicuous merits are a blend of biblical scholarship, fidelity to the tradition of the church's teaching, and an ear for the kinds of questions people ask...
...might find Cook's little catechetical work helpful...
...Why did Christ die on the cross...
...LaCugna, quite explicitly, organized her book in such a way that it could be used in university/seminary courses...
...ning with Sandra Schneiders's excellent reflection on biblical theology: a topic which has been the subject of her thinking for some years now...
...The text still smacks of the 1970s with its references to "religionless Christianity," but is well worth reading...
...This little book on spirituality, first published in 1972, has recently been reissued with some additional essays...
...Is Jesus meaningful for the big world we live in today...
...I think that theologians who teach the standard curriculum in Catholic theology (as well as their students) would benefit from a reading of these essays...
...Some of this book shows its age as well as its preoccupation with the life of Anglicanism (although Macquarrie is an authentically ecumenical thinker) but it contains much wisdom and well repays a close reading...
...Anyone contemplating such a lexicon recognizes immediately that the editors need to be ruthlessly selective in what to omit and equally rigorous in holding writers to word limits...
...Cook is a theologian with at least one foot in pastoral ministry...
...Thus Mary Catherine Hilkert appeals to apophatic spirituality to assure us that not everything is (or can) be said of the mystery of Christ, just as Elizabeth Johnson evokes the sophia strain of Christology to set before us Jesus the Christ who is the Wisdom of God...
...rect" his rather linear approach to the history of spirituality by reading Philip Sheldrake's estimable Spirituality and History (Crossroad, 1992) which was not available to Holt as he wrote...
...Did those miracles happen...
...What the "this" refers to defeats me...
...3:16) comes as a result of the Fall...
...Some readers might also want to "corThirsty for God: A Brief History of Christian Spirituality, by Bradlev C. Holt, Augiburg, $8.99, ISO pp...
...34.95, 319 PP-_____________________________ derstanding...
...He has a sense of what people ask about Jesus and the New Testament...
...It is, however, a book for the beginner...
...If we believe that in Christ we are a "new creation," then the mending of the Fall would seem to be also a falling away of subservience...
...3 June 1994 RELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES gy but also in defense of such "extensions" of the liturgy as Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament...
...For instance, Pye gives us a definition of "Buddha" (which is a title) but not "Christ" (which is also a title...
...Most compelling for me is the way in which (spiritual) experience is called into play to restate theological issues...
...As the introduction says, there is a need to "recontextualize" the long theological tradition of Christology (which runs from the Johannine literature through the councils down to our own day) in terms of what the earliest witnesses tell us about Jesus the Christ...
...Keeping those three in some kind of healthy tension is absolutely necessary if one is not to fly off into spiritual quagmires: deeds without worship end up as pious social work while worship without grounding in doctrine runs the risk of sentimentality...
...The very questions raised by these theologians not only are new questions but they undercut the previously impermeable walls of the traditional theological tracts...
...In other words, what these theologians have done is reflect on some classical theological themes (Trinity, church, sacraments, etc...
...On a scale from one to ten, ten being the top, I would judge this dictionary to be about a seven...
...Let me just cite one example...
...LaCugna herself reads Trinitarian theology in such a manner as to make applications to everything from ethics to anthropology, while Anne Carr's exemplary essay on method raises fascinating questions about everything from ecclesiology to theological authority...
...This is an adequate dictionary and the entries refer to a bibliography at the end where more information might be gleaned...
...from the perspective of their own experience as Catholic women and "marked by the Catholic concern to be in continuity with the Christian tradition as much as possible, indeed, to search to the fullest extent for liberating elements within the Christian tradition...
...The study of spirituality is part of any serious theological curriculum...
...The working out of those motifs is worth the price of the book...
...It is not a perfect text, but it is quite "user friendly...
...That is surely borne out by a close engagement with this book...
...Without patronizing, Cook answers these and similar questions by re-presenting the best of biblical scholarship combined with a genuine sensitivity to the pastoral needs and concerns of people...
...The book concludes with a very brief glossary, a short bibliography but, alas, no index either of scriptural quotations or topics...
...Likewise, there is an attempt to provide entries that cut across religious traditions (e.g., "mysticism" and "myth") but in an uneven fashion (there is no entry on "monasticism" or "asceticism"—terms amenable to transreligious treatment...
...In very brief chapters he moves from the world of the Bible through the patristic, medieval, Reformation, modern, and contemporary periods, with an eye on the varieties of Christian traditions, Orthodox, Catholic, Reformed, and Evangelical...
...These minor irritants, however, should not detract from the value of the book...
...The clarity of the prose might also entice those who are not theologians to use this work to see what some of the newer voices in Catholic theology are doing...
...What struck me over and over again reading these essays was the fresh biblical perspectives they provided, beginFreeing Theology: The Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective, edited by Catherine LaCugna, HarperCollins, $18, 266 pp...
...My colleague, Catherine LaCugna, has had the happy idea of soliciting a number of prominent American Catholic theologians to write essays on the traditional theological tracts from the perspective of a feminist hermeneutic...
...At a time when there is so much psychobabble and Jungian sludge passing for spirituality it is comforting to see a genuine theologian turning his attention to the nexus between doctrine and praxis...
...What has been needed, especially for those who use classic texts from the spiritual tradition, is a brief history of the Christian spiritual tradition in order to orient students and contextualize their reading...
...His chapter on prayer is one of the finest in the book...
...Each chapter ending has a modest list of further readings, as well as some practical hints on how to put into practice what one has learned...
...In a panorama this broad it would be natural enough if some elements of the tradition get skewed and some judgments could be questioned: The Jesuits are not monastics, Trappists do not have a "vow" of silence, etc...
...You could look it up Lawrence S. Cunningham one that I might put in the hands of my students as background reading...
...One of the lasting contributions of liberation theology is the insight that biblical texts look quite different depending on where they are read or who reads them...
...a more thorough historical survey is as yet a desideratum...
...In a few places, brevity does not enhance unThe Continuum Dictionary of Religion, edited bvMichael Pye, Continuum...
...One could go on and on...
...For that reason I welcomed Holt's little book as LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM is professor and chair of the department of theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...I'm not sure that it would make a coherent textbook in Christology, but both individuals and religious educators might find it helpful as a resource book and as a model for presenting the faith...
...Cook does that at a level which the alert layperson will find useful and the religious educator more than useful...
...The entry then ends on this enigmatic note: "In no case is this proven...
...Macquarrie, now emeritus from Oxford University, is a profoundly satisfying theologian...
...Mary Aquin O'Neill notes that the subservience of women to men in marriage ("Your desire shall be for your husband/and he shall rule over you"—Gen...
...Given the mountains of books published on the New Testament, the person who merely wishes to "keep up" or even frame some coherent answer to the biblical question "Who do they say the Son of Man is...
...The "as much as possible" signals that there is operative in these essays both a hermeneutics of trust and one of suspicion...
...Each chapter combines both systematic and historical elements and ends with an annotated bibliography for further study...
Vol. 121 • June 1994 • No. 11
