Religious booknotes

...I am very partial to anthologies of prayers, both because they are welcome invitations to browse and because they are an excellent source for theological meditation...

...Does one believe in the sense of trusting or is it a matter of assent...

...Each section follows a recognizable pattern: a series of antiphons for the psalms...

...as models for further adaptation of the liturgical offices of morning or evening prayer to be used on special occasions...

...Obscure...

...He also informs us that as a subject it is one that has not been a centerpiece of recent theological writing despite the mountains of literature produced on the topic earlier in this century...

...The net result was that subsequent Roman practice was changed...

...In the penultimate chapters he has some wise words on two much-discussed issues: the relationship of faith to human cognitive development (with a focus on the well-known work of James Fowler) and the salvific nature of faith vis-a-vis the situation of "unbelievers...

...RELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES Letters, prayers & theologies Shortly after the conclusion of Vatican I, the German theologian Josef Kleutgen took up again an analysis of the act of faith which he called "the cross of theologians...

...The second part of the work (roughly the final eight chapters) then sets out, synthetically, the main parameters of a theology of faith: "Models" of faith...

...When Schillebeeckx was first denounced to Rome by a Dominican colleague, Karl Rahner was appointed as his advocate...

...Schillebeeckx describes both his education and his subsequent career as a university professor at Nijmegen in Holland...

...Marsh, an Irish theologian who teaches at Maynooth, traces Trinitarian doctrine from its biblical underpinnings through the history of the tradition and on to the current discussions of Trinitarian theology as refracted through liberation and feminist thought...

...We are well over a generation away from the great events of Vatican II...

...However, the rule of faith and the liturgy have always had a focus on the Trinity: We profess a creed that is constructed from Trinitarian truths and we pray in "the name of the Father through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit...

...The book is available by writing: Psalter/Carmelite Monastery/2500 Cold Springs Road/Indianapolis, IN 46222...

...the character of faith...

...The students I teach today were born a decade after the council finished, and the debates of those days have no more resonance for them than the documents of Trent...

...The singular merit of such a method, used by a master like our author, is organization, clarity, and a sure sense of what the issues are and where the author is going...

...Readers will also love her concept of sym-phonia as an overarching concept to think of a cosmos alive with the Spirit of God...

...the necessary dismantling of a rigid and sterile scholasticism which captured theology in an intellectual straitjacket...

...The order of the letters is curious in that it follows a pattern not uncommon in medieval times: the first letters are ranked according to the dignity of the person (Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, followed by popes, cardinals, etc...

...Schillebeeckx's life underscores, among other things, the critical importance of his encounter with the theological renewal emanating, in the 1940s and 1950s, from the French Dominican house of Le Saulchoir as well as its most famous exile, M.D...

...time of distress...

...Finally, contemporary readers will find much to ponder in her original vocabulary (Hildegard loves the noun viriditas, literally "greenness," which for her is an attribute of the world and of graced-people...

...This work is, to put it bluntly, "old-fashioned" theology but not (at least in my vocabulary) in any pejorative sense of the term...

...Rahner's apologia for this behavior was twofold...

...As I noted above, the periti now pen their memoirs and soon most of them will be gone...

...If the latter, is that impulse irresistible...

...This slight book (padded out with a few of Schillebeeckx's sermons) is no substitute for his own writings, but as a window into the thinking of an eminent scholar, now in the twilight of his life, it makes a quick read that brings us closer to one of the major Catholic thinkers of our age...

...Dulles is fair to all points of view, gingerly critical where he needs to be, and always faithful to the great theological tradition...

...for religious communities or intentional groups who pray in common...

...They deserve our support...

...Abbott/Gallagher translation but a far better source for this kind of language can be found in Norman Tanner's Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (Georgetown University Press...

...and a sanctoral cycle (based on the calendar) geared to the Holy Women (both canonized and uncanon-ized...

...and his relationship with Rome...

...This volThe Letters of Hildegard of Bingen (Volume I), translated and edited by Joseph L Baird and Radd K. Ehrman...

...It is a compressed work (in the medieval period we get a full discussion of Aquinas but only a sidelong glance at Bonaventure and nothing from the Reformers), but one that is a reliable survey of the long efforts of theologians over the millennia to clarify one of the central mysteries of Christian belief...

...One can detect the old divisions of analysis and reflection with concluding theses...

...It adapts the basic liturgical structure of morning/evening prayer (lauds and vespers) with a precise focus on the experience of women...

...Two scholars have now undertaken to give us careful translations of her letters...

...Rahner told him of the process despite being instructed to keep the process sub secreto...

...When the denunciation became public, Rahner again denied to the Roman authorities that he was the source of the leak...

...The best we can say about books like Pennington's is that they reflect a great sense of faith in the Spirit's guidance of the church...

...The letters also reveal a tough-minded fighter who stood her ground against prelates and, lest we think her an "advanced" thinker, a conservative (she did not like the new religious orders coming into existence in the wake of the Gregorian reform) and a bit of a snob (she admitted only aristocrats to her community, arguing that nobody hitches in tandem an ox and an ass to do plowing...

...The book ends with thirty-six short summary "theses" that seek to provide as much a synthesis as is possible on the topic of Christian faith...

...Vatican II is part of the continuing heritage of the tradition...

...Is faith certain...

...Judging from this present effort, these contemplative women have discovered the knack, as the Gospel says, of bringing forth "old things and new...

...the courage to think through the fact of modernity with more serenity and less de-fensiveness...

...More are undoubtedly in press...

...A moment's reflection on the question of what it means, in the Christian tradition, to say "I believe" sets out the problem...

...her creative approach to biblical exegesis...

...Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) is one of the most extraordinary people in the history of the church...

...The book is divided into two parts: a prayer service for special events (adoption...

...He further stipulated that an undue focus on the inner life of the Trinity (the "immanent" Trinity) has been so speculative that the theological implications of faith seem abstract...

...that professional theologians (scholastic, which is to say, dialectical theology was now aborning) wrote her for advice about theological conundrums or to strengthen their faith in new formulations (for example, transubstantiation...

...Along with their French Jesuit contemporaries, the generation of Congar, de Lubac, Chenu, Danielou, et al...

...Each letter has a very brief introduction, a few helpful explanatory notes, and, not infrequently, the original Latin text to help us to see how the translators worked on what is, at places, a convoluted and eccentric Latin style...

...One could envision this interesting book being used in a number of different ways: for ad hoc groups who want structured prayers...

...Can one really fall away from faith...

...the naLAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM teaches theology, and chairs the department, at the University of Notre Dame...

...Chenu, who had been banished to the Sorbonne...

...the traditional canticles for morning or evening prayer...

...The entire volume is prefaced by a very helpful essay on Hilde-gard's life and her significance...

...I very much like the range of people represented in this volume, the crispness of presentation (each person gets a brief biographical introduction), and the handsome typography...

...227 pp ume represents the first of what, one presumes and hopes, will be a complete English translation of the over four hundred letters available...

...for living alone...

...Unfortunately, the only collection of her letters was in a tendentiously execrable translation issued some years ago by the publishing house associated with Matthew Fox's Creation Spirituality movement...

...Pennington's book is also a retrospective look at the council but at a far less personal level...

...All of these and cognate issues have been part and parcel of the Christian theological tradition from the apostolic period...

...Fans of May Sarton (I include myself) will remember the high praise she offers this community in her published journals...

...the second part of the letters lists alphabetically the place of destination and includes letters from the lower clergy and religious...

...This well-produced book would make an excellent gift purchase for a friend or might well serve as a vademecum for personal devotion...

...At the end of the book there is a rather thorough topical index for those looking for prayers for specific times or themes...

...As such, it adds to that modest shelf of personal memoirs (like the late Karl Rahner's Faith in a Wintery Season) of those who were at the heart of the great renewal of theology which led up to the Second Vatican Council and beyond...

...her widely acknowledged authority as a spiritual counselor of the first rank...

...or, as in my own case, as a resource for understanding the possibilities of different forms of doxological language...

...that even archbishops wrote her for copies of her sermons preached in their home dioceses urging reform and peace...

...His separate chapters gloss the major documents and cite largish chunks of them...

...Here is what I loved about these letters: Hildegard' s tough-minded demand for reform in the church...

...hammered at a few basic but critical themes: the need to recover the biblical and patristic heritage of the church...

...It is the precise merit of Dulles's book that he gives us, in the first part of this work, a systematic tour of the theological tradition...

...It is not an adventurous book but, as I said to my graduate students when I read a small portion of it in class, if one wanted to get a sense of the sweep of the tradition using one topic as the leitmotif (in this case, faith), I could hardly think of a better book...

...Father Dulles, in a highly readable and very informative work, tells us in some detail why a theological consideration of faith is such a thorny and vexatious issue...

...The prayers and the psalter (based on the NRSV) use inclusive language in a sensible and sensitive fashion...

...In that sense, Dulles breathes new life into the scholastic mode of proceeding (and, in that sense alone, it is fashioned out of an old order of proceeding...

...Interleaved in this pilgrimage are moments now famous in recent Catholic history: the writing of the famous "Dutch" catechism...

...First published in Italian, this extended conversation between the eighty-yearold Flemish theologian and the Italian interviewer Francesco Strazzari puts into personal perspective the massive contributions of Edward Schillebeeckx to contemporary theology...

...the role of the various periti at the council...

...Van de Weyer settles for an alphabetical order (Adam of Saint Victor to Zoroaster), using, as his criterion of selection, an emphasis on prayers of devotion in which persons bring their own needs to God in personal words...

...I did think it unfortunate that Marsh consciously omitted a consideration of the Eastern Christian tradition since that tradition is so fecund (for example, in its discussion of "Divine Energies") and, further, so important for understanding the divisions (for example, the issue of the filioque in the Creed) between East and West...

...They were issues, of course, which were neuralgic in the period of the Reformation...

...I've carted this volume around for weeks in my bookbag, dipping into these letters with admiration and delight.pping into these letters with admiration and delight...

...Despite that lacuna, this is a book that could well serve as a first entry into the richness of Trinitarian theology...

...a prose passage for reflection...

...Schillebeeckx had a right in justice to know of the process, and Rahner felt that a "mental qualification" was in order when queried about it later...

...Does one "reason" to belief or does belief come The Assurance of Things Hoped for: A Theology of Christian Faith, by Avery Dulles, S.I., Oxford University Press, $35, from an impulse of grace...

...The book ends with some discussion questions keyed to each chapter, a rather brief bibliography for further reading, but, alas, no index...

...As a theological meditation, however, this little book, written in the readable style one expects from this prolific monk-writer, spends too much time looking in the rear-view mirror...

...in the early 1940s...

...She was a contemplative, author, encyclopedist, composer of music, musician, and confidante of a range of people from popes on down...

...We have major studies from scholars such as Yves Congar, Jurgen Moltmann, William Hill, Catherine LaCugna, Elizabeth Johnson, and the late Edward Kilmartin...

...Van de Weyer's collection (he is an Anglican priest at Little Gidding, a place made famous in Eliot's Four Quartets), drawn from the world's religions, is not organized into categories...

...Given his earlier work on apologetics and revelation one is not surprised that this economical survey shows a mastery of a vast literature expressed in a fair and readable style...

...We have been well served by excellent studies of her life and work (especially by Barbara Newman and Sabina Flanagan) and good editions of her works are now available in English translation...

...hair...

...Oxford University Press, $39.95...

...His hope is that his readers will go back to the conciliar documents and gain a fresh appreciation of what the council has done...

...Schillebeeckx did not know that he had been denounced...

...His excerpts attempt a gender-free rewriting of the Vatican B: We've Only Just Began, by" M. Basil Pennington, Crossroad, $13.95...

...In that sense it differs from George Appleton's The The HarperCollins Book of Prayers, compiled by Robert Von De Weyer, Bar, per Collins., $25.414pp Oxford Book of Prayers and Tony Castle's The New Book of Christian Prayers...

...the relationship of reason to faith (that is, its ground...

...reviewed in this column, October 12, 1990...

...Since Rahner wrote there has been a veritable explosion of studies on the Trinity with a special focus on the "economic" Trinity, that is, the Trinity as experienced in salvation history, as well as a new and intense interest in the work of the Holy Spirit in life and worship...

...In the late 1960s Karl Rahner wrote an influential monograph on the Trinity arguing that it was a doctrine that had been neglected to such a degree that most Christians lived as almost pure monotheists...

...As he himself admits, readers of his book are most likely to be "middle-aged or older...

...Thomas Marsh's tidy survey of Trinitarian theology is, in effect, a kind of summary of recent research...

...this first volume includes roughly fifty of her letters along with copies (where available) of the letters of respondents...

...The Woman's Prayer Companion is not designed for private devotional use...

...a responsory...

...and intercessions ending with a collect prayer...

...Lawrence S. Cunningham ture and object of faith...

...One must also wonder at her theatricality: her community, on feast days, dressed in long white robes with golden crowns on heads of free flowing (unwimpled...

...What he has to say about the conciliar documents is usually at the level of appreciation and exhortation but provides little that has not been said many times before at greater length by other writers...

...and a better historical understanding of what shaped the form of the church after Trent...

...We are once again profoundly in the debt of one of the truly distinguished Catholic theologians of our time...