Religious booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
RELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES tyred in El Salvador in 1980). Zagano concludes with a selected bibliography for each of the persons anthologized in the book. As befits a professor of communications...
...Torjesen is well aware of this trend, and remarks on it here and there, but does not explore it in a systematic fashion...
...Even the reformed Catholic liturgical calendar has struck the notation "penitent" from her feast day...
...For women to take an direct interest in the public sphere was a shame in the technical anthropological sense...
...I think, reflected both her sympathy for the suffragettes with whom she worked in her youth and her much later irritation with Peter Maurin (whom she deeply loved) who spoke of communities of laymen under a priest with a seemingly blissful indifference to women in this scheme of things...
...derstanding of the resources Day drew on...
...The interesting thesis of Torjesen's book is not difficult to summarize...
...was often depicted in art (Haskins is quite good on the development of her iconography), many churches were raised in her honor, houses for penitent women were dedicated to her as well as colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge...
...37-?100), born of a priestly family in Jerusalem, was a desert dweller (with the Essenes...
...Josephus had good reason for caution since he lived in an era of psychotic emperors...
...Since the early church was a kind of "domestic sphere" it was possible for Paul, for instance, to salute women who had clear leadership roles in the Pauline communities...
...As an apologia for his natal faith and culture, Josephus, in the final decade of his life, wrote The Antiquities of the Jews, tracing the history of the Jews from the creation narrative in Genesis to the beginnings of the Jewish wars...
...Haskins makes the intelligent point that various ages have added to or reshaped the image of Mary Magdalene according to the reigning Zeitgeist...
...When Torjesen sticks close to her intended topic, she is persuasive...
...It has been made more luminous by this well-written, extensively researched, and illuminating work...
...By turns, she is the converted sinner, the contemplative friend of God, or the weeper (the very word "maudlin" is a relic of that latter emphasis...
...By the early second century we already see the emergence of a monarchical episcopate (reflected inchoately in the Pastorals) in some writers...
...skimming over a millennium of history to link Augustine with medieval misogyny and then on to Luther (chapter 8) and a final brief chapter which deals, quite superficially, with feminine imagery for the divine...
...Those words...
...Because of Gregory's popularity and authority there arose in the medieval period an intense devotion to Mary Magdalene focusing on her status as a repentant sinner and a contemplative...
...To that list we can now add Merriman's book...
...Josephus was an eyewitness (and Roman spokesman) at the horrendous siege of Jerusalem which ended in the destruction of the temple, the slaughter of its citizens, and the Roman triumph commemorated by the Arch of Titus (Vespasian's son) with its bas relief depicting Roman soldiers carrying the temple menorah in triumph...
...The absence of even a short bibliography (one must construct it from the rather scanty notes to the individual chapters) is unfortunate...
...Furthermore, as Merriman documents, she was deeply marked by her lifelong engagement with the spiritual resources of the Eastern Christian tradition, nourished not only by her deep love for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky but through her friendship with the late Helene Iswolsky...
...What Merriman has done, however, is to thicken our unSearching for Christ: The Spirituality of Dorothy Day,by Brigid O'Shea Merriman, O.S.F., University of Notre Dame, $29.95, 360 pp...
...I must note, however, that this book is less successful when the author moves from art history to theology and church history...
...Deeply influenced by Benedictine monasticism, she loved both the liturgy of the hours and the Eucharist, the writings of the saints, and the great classics of the spiritual life...
...40 RELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES Josephus (a.d...
...What we end up with is a work containing fascinating patches of intellectual history combined with an intermittent attempt to exorcise the ghosts of the author's convent school education...
...I highly recommend it...
...I was also much taken by Merriman's chapters on "friends"—by which she meant not only the saints whom Day admired but also her own strong capacity for human friendship...
...As the Christian church moved from the era of the house church to the public arena of the state-funded basilica (early in the fourth century), it became less possible for women to have leadership roles...
...Alas, this outpouring of imaginative homage is based on a misreading of the Gospel, as Origen, writing centuries before Gregory, already understood...
...The final chapters reflect on the reception of Josephus (the early Patristic writers used him for apologetic reasons...
...My recollection of her, wearing a plain dress and sensible shoes, frail yet passionate, stays with me...
...This division was rigorously observed through custom, ideology, and law...
...work where one finds the famous passage in book xvii (An interpolation...
...Greco-Roman culture the social structure of society was such that the masculine sphere was oriented to public life while that of the feminine concerned itself with the domestic...
...for three years, and afterwards in Rome an ambassador on behalf of the Jews...
...Anyone who has stood near the Western ("Wailing") wall in Jerusalem, or climbed the serpentine path leading to Masada near the Dead Sea to see the extraordinary ruins of the last Jewish refuge against the Romans, should have Josephus in the back of their minds...
...the Jewish tradition tended to ignore him) in Western thought as well as more recent literary attempts to come to terms with his complex, and not always lovable, persona...
...It was one of the great privileges of my life to have met Dorothy Day just a few 39 RELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES months before she died...
...The end result is a very uneven and quite irritating book...
...Even the film The Last Temptation of Christ (and, earlier, Jesus Christ Superstar) relied on the myth of Mary Magdalene as a woman converted from a life of wantonness to what the mystic Julian of Norwich called a "Lover of Jesus...
...Accordingly, the Eastern church honors Mary of Magdalene as one of the myrrophores (ointment-bearing women) without the theme of penitent sinner...
...Much ink has been spilled about that issue) about Jesus...
...As befits a professor of communications (at Boston University), she appends the Library of Congress call number for each book in the bibliography...
...If there was ever a person nourished on the classic sources of spirituality, it was Dorothy Day...
...In When Women Were Priests: Women's Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity, by Karen Jo Torjesen, HarperCollins, $22, 278 pp...
...After being captured by Vespasian at the siege of Jotopata in Palestine, he was spared by the emperor to serve as his interpreter...
...To adopt such roles in public life was so culturally unacceptable that women doing so were considered "shameful...
...This provocative work would have been better had the author spent more time systematically exploring her basic thesis...
...we women especially are the victims of the long loneliness...
...There is much of interest in the book, although in places the nexus between her reflections on pagan culture and the actual life of the early church is not always well spelled out...
...In our century there has been a belletristic and dramatic interest in the putative erotic relationship between Mary and Jesus...
...A rigorously historical examination of that issue would have enhanced a book which is, despite its somewhat diffuse character, very insightful...
...Furthermore, modern feminist scholarship has rehabilitated her claim to the title of "apostle" since she is the earliest recorded witness to the Resurrection...
...Ably translated from the French, the book is an accessible, straightforward, and well-informed study...
...They will find the text readable and the end maps useful...
...What was the interplay between the shift from charismatic ministry to the institutionalization of charisma into office...
...This is all spelled out in ample detail in Haskins's book as she traces the somewhat convoluted story of the rise of the cult of Mary Magdalene from its gospel origins down to the present day...
...The book is amply illustrated and the art history sections are fascinating...
...Merriman focuses, as the subtitle indicates, on the sources and character of Day's luminous spiritual life...
...Marred with trivial errors of fact, a reliance on tendentious sources as well as citations almost always culled from secondary sources (and, thus, mostly unusable), the author trumpets her prejudices with wearying regularity...
...In 1929, Day, living in Hollywood, wrote that women needed a "community, a group, an exchange with others...
...What happened in the fourth century, to use Torjesen's words, was a shift from ministry to governance in the sociopolitical sense of the term...
...It is in that Flavius Josephus, by Mireille HadasLebel Macmillan, $20, 269 pp...
...If the thick volumes of Josephus prove too daunting to begin with, interested readers might make a beginning with this well-tempered study...
...a nice touch that I have not seen before...
...She Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor, by Susan Haskins, Harcourt Brace, $27.95, 518pp...
...All of this is well known to any reader of Day's wonderful "On Pilgrimage" column which for years graced the pages of the Catholic Worker...
...There is also a very fine chapter on Day's enthusiastic support for the retreat movement developed by the late (and controversial) Jesuit priest, Onesimus Lacouture, and its furtherance by Fathers John J. Hugo and Pacifique Roy who were close to the Catholic Workers...
...Pope Gregory the Great (died 604) identified Mary of Magdala, always cited as the leader of the women who ministered to Jesus in his lifetime, with the penitent woman who bathed the feet of Jesus (Luke 7) and Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus...
...U 41...
...Based on those works, as well as a somewhat prolix autobiography and a polemical work (Contra Apionetn), Hadas-Lebel, a Parisian scholar, gives us both a biography of this fascinating figure and a critical study...
...Her role in the early Jesus movement has received careful, and persuasive, attention from scholars like Elizabeth SchiisslerFiorenza...
...Dorothy Day has been the subject of some fine studies by William D. Miller (her authorized biographer) and Mel Piehl...
...She probes deeply into Day's connection with Saint Procopius Abbey in Illinois where she fed both her interest in Byzantine Christianity and her love for things monastic...
...Governance was the provenance of the male...
...Since early Christianity found its natural locus in the house church, it was possible for women to have leadership roles precisely because the "house church" was, in her words, an "interstitial space" in which "public" and "private" spheres were somewhat mingled...
...From those eyewitness experiences Josephus wrote his Jewish Wars in Aramaic, quickly followed by a Greek translation, which is a valuable (but not always reliable) resource despite Josephus's skittishness about laying blame at the Roman doorstep...
...The last two chapters are the least satisfactory (added to flesh out the volume...
Vol. 121 • November 1994 • No. 19
