Religious booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
RELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES I am not quite sure how to characterize Friedlander's book. It is, in one sense, a broad-brushed survey of reactions to the Nazi extermination campaign against the...
...To the overview of the theologians, he adds a generous history of literary attempts to articulate what the camps were like (Elie Wiesel, Primo Lcvi, Schwartz-Bart, etc...
...lander provides snapshots of various countries and their connection to the Shoah, ranging from the naive Sabra machismo of Israelis (how could they have walked so passively to the ovens...
...His harshest criticisms are directed toward those of his coreligionists who have so bound themselves to orthodoxy (Friedlander is a Reform rabbi) that they effectively excommunicate those who do not stand within the tradition of the Heradim...
...to the reluctant Italian partners of those who pressed for the Final Solution...
...Reasons ior hope Lawrence S. Cunningham is eminently fair to the "dawn riders" who are Christians (his favorite Christian writer seems to be the German theologian Dorothy Soelle, although he writes sympathetically of a whole range of Christian thinkers...
...For that, 1 will always be grateful...
...Ewert Cousins deserves high praise for one of the best ideas in recent religious publishing...
...Cousins and I meet on occasion...
...What higher compliment can one pay a work...
...The great achievements of the Greeks, the Hebrew prophets, Confucius, the Buddha, and the writers of the Upanishads all moved toward this goal...
...He has a vision of religious experience which serves as the foundation for both projects...
...the nineteenth century...
...Is the book too Jungian (not one of my favorite people...
...With his collaborator, Richard Payne, Cousins developed the series "The Classics of Western Spirituality," which 27 RELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES has been one of the most useful set of texts for the study of spirituality available in English...
...His ecumenical credentials are clear and his quiet willingness to work for sane social policy is effective enough that he gets a sympathetic public ear for what he has to say...
...he LAWRENCt S. CUNNINGHAM is professor of theology and chair of the department at the University of Notre Dame...
...Why not a bibliography for further reading...
...The Maryknoll foundress, Mother Mary Joseph (born Mollie Rogers), was an energetic Smith graduate who shaped and guided her fledgling community from an ancillary group whose members basically worked as servant/secretaries for the Hearts on Fire: The Story of the Maryknoll Sisters, by Penny Lernoux, Orbis, $22.95, 294 pp...
...His support for Humanae vitae is clear and his opposition to abortion unequivocal, but he has made neither issue a test case of orthodoxy in any narrow way...
...Profoundly shaped by a monastic life of prayer, he is a natural contemplative...
...He finds much nourishment in a thinker like Raimundo Pannikar whom he sees as the very model of what theologians ought to be doing...
...it should not surprise us that this approach docs not merit unmitigated praise from the Right...
...In addition—this is a panoramic work—FriedRiders to the Dawn: From Holocaust to Hope, by Albert K. Friedlander, Continuum, $24.95, 328pp...
...In my estimation, one cannot overestimate the central role religious women played in the success of American Catholicism in this century...
...We are at the end of an era with respect to a certain kind of religious life, es28 RELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES pecially women's religious life...
...As I read this book I could not help but remember the years when The Field Afar (now Maryknoll magazine: my mother still subscribes) came into our home...
...I read Cousins's book with much sympathy because he is an excellent reader of texts and a person who writes in new and compelling ways about the Trinity and Christology...
...In the contemporary period, the numbers of Maryknoll Sisters have dwindled but the increasing participation of lay missioners and an intense discussion over the meaning of mission assures us that the spirit of the gospel is still alive...
...He went beyond that project (which still flourishes) to found the World Spirituality encyclopedia, which is still in progress...
...Or, at least, provide us with the sources of his direct quotations...
...or reflections on how culture is shaped by that experience (George Steiner, Levinas, etc...
...His own upper-middle class background has allowed him to gain the confidence of political and social leaders and his admirable desire not to be an ecclesiastical showboat has permitted him to be an effective bridge builder and consensus maker...
...When Basil Hume was appointed archbishop of Westminster by Pope Paul VI in 1976 he was plucked from Ampleforth Abbey where he served as abbot to preside over a vast urban diocese far from the rustic quiet of his previous monastic home...
...His most public acts have involved his desire to move Europeans to aid the suffering peoples of the world, especially those in Ethiopia...
...Especially moving is the chronicle of those years when the missioners were imprisoned or interned in the Far East after the outbreak of the Second World War...
...Cousins is not just a producer of the series...
...The next time we arc together I will ask him some questions...
...Friedlander chooses Elie Wiesel, George Steiner, and the late Leo Baeck...
...In the period after the war, the congregation boomed (I counted over a hundred faces in the postulant class picture from the late 1950s) in number and variety of apostolates...
...And, again not surprisingly, he has devoted much of his life to interreligious dialogue, especially with non-Christian thinkers from the Hindu tradition, utilizing a strategy called by my colleague, John Dunne, "crossing over"— i.e., a sympathetic entry into the world of the other in order to return home enriched spiritually...
...Judging from Stanford's account, Hume has been extremely successful in guiding the church during the heady days of the 1980s and 1990s...
...His reflections on people like Bernard of Clairvaux, Eckhart, Bonaventure, and Francis compelled me to bring his volume to class to read to my undergraduates currently struggling with these difficult but powerful persons...
...My own judgment, based on this book and what little I know of the cardinal from reading the Tablet etc., is that we could do worse...
...Because of this broad process understanding of the future, it should not surprise us that Cousins has devoted a good deal of his energies to reading those theologians in the Christian tradition who have a penchant for mysticism, especially the ecstatic theology of the Franciscan tradition, on which he is an acknowledged authority...
...When Sister Gemma Shea died at the age of ninety-eight in 1993, she was the last woman who belonged to the original band of religious sisters founded in 1912 to work with the Mary knoll Fathers/Brothers in the foreign missions...
...He gained much publicity for his efforts to free unjustly convicted Irish prisoners who had been imprisoned for terrorist activities...
...But there is a larger reason why this book (and books like it) need to be written and read...
...Judging from afar, I would say that he has many characteristics which make him an ideal hierarch...
...It is, in one sense, a broad-brushed survey of reactions to the Nazi extermination campaign against the Jews and, at the same time, a kind of terminus a quo for those who wish to honor the fact of that terrible event and yet not be paralyzed by it...
...Those questions are not antagonistic, merely provoked by a stimulating book...
...In the last part of the book, Friedlander argues that we should seek a "dawn rider" (or more than one) in order to live toward the future with some sense of trust or hope...
...Is Hume papabilel Stanford does not take up the question even though he is obviously a very sympathetic biographer...
...Recasting some of his earlier essays, he lays out that foundational paradigm in this book...
...The rigor of their lives, living in alien cultures, their sense of purpose and sacrifice, and the assumptions they brought to the missions are told in great detail...
...Hume's compassion for the needy is clearly demonstrated by his work obtaining housing for the poor and the complex set of services he provides from his own cathedral parish...
...I have learned so much from this book that I must make one pointed criticism of it because it held me back from learning even more: Friedlander's notes are sparse to the point of unhelpfulness...
...Stanford's book on Cardinal Hume has two purposes, as the title indicates...
...Briefly, Cousins's vision is that the first axial period, as outlined by Karl Jaspers, is now giving way to a second...
...Nonetheless, there is something admirable about a man who prides himself on not harping on sexual matters since he feels, rightly, that he has little constructive to say about the issues involved beyond what the church says...
...Only those who know this group of women at close hand will be interested in every name and mission recounted in this story...
...Everyone, however, will be moved by the vignettes of those who died martyrs' deaths either because their health and well-being was destroyed in Japanese internment camps or, in more recent memory, because they were murdered in El Salvador...
...First, he wants to describe the episcopal life of Basil Hume and, second, he wishes to do that against the larger historical background of the history of the Catholicchurch in England after the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in the first half of Cardinal Hume and the Changing Face of English Catholicism, by Peter Stanford, Geoffrey Chapman, $22.95, 214 pp...
...His book is meant for a wide audience...
...Friedlander gives us a fair account of the whole spectrum of Jewish theological opinion about the meaning of the Shoah as well as a survey of the halakic responses of the rabbis who have been called upon to interpret the Law in its shadow...
...He captures that latter purpose in his title...
...In the twentieth century, at least, the English Catholic church bears a striking resemblance to our own...
...To neglect the stories of these pioneers in the faith is not only a betrayal of history but an act of injustice...
...If this all sounds somewhat familiar it is probably because Cousins has been a longtime sympathetic reader and exegete of the late Teilhard de Chardin...
...It was a time of "brick and mortar" Catholicism in which energetic bishops built schools and churches to accommodate largely working-class immigrant congregations...
...His approach to the abortion issue is similar to that of those who propose the picture of the "consistent ethic of life...
...It was a church vigorous in its papalism, moralizing in its theology, and strictly hierarchical in its administration...
...Maryknoll priests into an order that sent women, first to China, and then to missions around the world...
...Lernoux is especially good in retelling the encounter of Maryknoll with the emergent revolutionary consciousness that struck Latin and Central America in the post-Medellin period...
...How does history fit into all this since the Incarnation is an event in human history'.' (I find it significant that he spends very little time on the Hebraic tradition...
...Why could he not have helped us by telling us what writings of Nelly Sachs or Paul Celan or Dan Pagis (a stunning Israeli poet who was new to me) were available...
...Before that era does end, it is incumbent on the church community to see that the stories of these women (and those of many other congregations) are recorded, told, remembered, and celebrated...
...The broad survey I mentioned above is by far the most satisfactory part of the book...
...or poetic attempts to capture its horror (Celan, Sachs, etc...
...Unflinching public fidelity to Rome has not led him to craven acts of obedience to prove his party credentials...
...That view explains his broad sympathy for a dialogically open Orthodox thinker like Michael Wyschogrod...
...the riders are those who emerge from darkness and gallop toward a dawn of some possible hope...
...We donated to "save pagan babies" and to "spread the gospel" but, more fundamentally, the missioners gave me, as a teenager, the sense that I did belong to a universal church...
...What about the reality of sin in the world?—a topic that bedevils every Teilhardian...
...1 29...
...What does he think of the liberation theologians whose focus is not on the cosmos but on the hie et nunc, etc...
...We are now, Cousins thinks, on the cusp of the second axial period, a time not just of individuated consciousness but of cosmic consciousness and a corresponding convergence of spiritual striving characterized by a unity in diversity...
...The first axial period, emerging roughly in the six centuries before the time of Christ, moved human consciousness toward the self and to metaphysics...
...The story of these valiant women is told with obvious sympathy and unstinting admiration by the late Penny Lernoux who, herself, found her way back to the church through the witness of missionaries...
...Christ of the 21st Century, by Ewert H. Cousins, Element Books, $14.95, 206 pp...
Vol. 121 • September 1994 • No. 16
