Religious booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
RELIGIOUS BOOKKOTES The First Urban Christians (1983) by Yale's Wayne Meeks was one of the most helpful books on the New Testament that I read in the past decade. His Origins of Christian Morality...
...Prayer derives both from the common memory and use of a tradition as well as the deeply personal articulation coming from one's own experience...
...As part of his pastoral ministry he regularly gives short courses for Milanese audiences which are carried on the radio...
...At the risk of simplification I will sum them up in this fashion: the making of a morality must always be seen in dialectical relationship with the making of community...
...The houses are built by a combination labor force of volunteers and the future homeowners who provide "sweat equity" and pay back the expenses through a kind of interest-free mortgage...
...The genius of the organization is that it brings together diverse Christian churches to work together (last summer here in South Bend they had an all-women's crew build a house...
...First, he does not attempt a definition of Christian morality...
...Castelli had the good idea of asking people from a wide range of religious backgrounds about how they prayed...
...It is a worthy project...
...It should not surprise us that Jews pray Jewishly, Christians Christianly, and Buddhists pray not at all (they meditate...
...Properly understood, Martini's approach might prove helpful both for individuals and groups...
...Second, his book is not about ethics-morality made self-conscious-but about that dimension of life made up of value-laden dispositions, inclinations, attitudes, and habits...
...Finally, the God of the Bible "will astonish those who are loyal to the story of God's past actions, but will not abandon them...
...Even Martini's custom of ending his conferences with points for further consideration and prayer reveals the influence of Ignatius's Exercises...
...Many things can be learned from a work ranging from the Hindu stages of life or centeredness to the normative books of prayer of church and synagogue to the deep richness of Buddhist meditation...
...What most interests me about Martini's book is not so much his biblical reflections (although they are carefully rendered and sophisticated readings of the texts in question) but the method he proposes for reading the Scriptures in the church...
...Meeks's aim is to undertake what he calls an "ethnographic project...
...Miller's book is an exhaustive taxonomy of the diverse prayer forms found in the Bible...
...his angle of vision is fresh...
...I recommend this wonderful book for both the clarity of its prose and its plan of execution...
...In an interesting introductory chapter, Martini notes that there is an old monastic tradition of reading the Scriptures sapiential-ly (the so-called lectio divind...
...I copied out some blessings cited by Rabbi Kushner but was also pleased to know that a Catholic convert like Jane Redmont finds much richness in them...
...Why was I heartened ecumenically to know that the Quaker, Richard Foster, cites the Orthodox "Jesus Prayer" as his favorite while the Russian Orthodox contributor cites John 3:16 as her favorite Scripture verse...
...Fuller's book weaves together two themes: his own personal story of conversion to an activist Christian life and...
...Why did it surprise me to learn that Norman Lear prays each morning while on his exercise machine and that the prayer he recites is the one ascribed to Saint Francis ("Lord, make me an instrument...," a prayer mentioned by others in this book...
...Miller goes through the Bible, sorting out the various kinds of prayers, providing, with each type of prayer, copious examples from the biblical text...
...At times I found myself a bit bogged down in the welter of detail...
...Both in his method and in his reflections on the Scriptures, he brings forth, like the good householder of the Gospel, old things and new...
...The idea behind Habitat is very simple: Faith must be incarnated, and one incarnation is that of housing the poor...
...His Origins of Christian Morality makes a fitting companion to that estimable work...
...It may be obtained from the publisher at 1400 Coleman Avenue/Macon, Georgia 31207...
...Prayer demands discipline of ordering time but it can also arise in the midst of the quotidian...
...I would especially commend it to those who have a keen interest in spirituality...
...It takes what the Buddhist would call "mindfulness" to read these chapters sequentially, given the vast amount of information Miller provides...
...The old monastic writer, Evagrius of Pontus, said that the person who prayed was the true theologian...
...ty years spearheading a movement to build decent housing for the poor...
...the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschen-busch...
...I was just finishing Miller's thorough work when Jim Castelli' s little book came to me in page proofs...
...An accomplished biblical scholar, Martini is now the cardinal-archbishop of Milan...
...To those four stages, Martini says one should also add the experience of consolation and discretion which triggers, in turn, deliberation and, finally, action...
...As a professor of Old Testament he is more at home in that part of the Bible but does provide us with a substantial chapter on the further "witness of the New Testament...
...There are things in this book which I fully expected and some that I didn't., Why does it not surprise me, for instance, that Martin Marty tells us that he prays every morning at 5:59 A.M...
...Meeks's strategy is to provide us with close readings of both canonical and noncanonical literature on a wide range of subjects, from the dialectic of love/hate for the world to the problem of the body, the "grammar" of Christian practice, the sense(s) of the endtime, and ritualized moral narratives and their place within the communities of believers...
...The point that Martini urges is that the prayerfully contemplative reading of Scripture should urge us to both personal and social action...
...Fuller pays tribute to the intellectual roots of his own theological vision: the radical dis-cipleship preached by Clarence Jordan...
...It was wonderful to read about the prayer life of Charismatic Christians and a Mormon psychiatrist...
...Jim Castelli has provided us with some excellent first-person narratives of these authentic theologians going about their daily lives in the presence of the One whom they lovingly and faithfully address...
...Meeks understands that it is very difficult to say what is distinctive about Christian moral practices (most of the moral observations have parallels in either pagan or Jewish sources or both) but he is at pains to attempt a description of what he calls the "Christian sensibility...
...It also has the laudable principle of tithing contributions to their work and setting aside those tithes to build houses in the poorest parts of the world...
...The book is extremely interesting, however, for its exegesis of texts, their classification (especially his careful attention to the root meaning of Hebrew words), and Miller's steady awareness that he is not writing for scholars but for pastors, students of the Bible, and those interested in the life of prayer...
...Martini's most recent book is scriptural commentary of a completely different sort...
...What I found most provocative about With cries To the Lord Lawrence S. Cunningham this very enlightening book are some final theses he sets out by way of reflection on his completed tour of the first two Christian centuries...
...Read the book and support the movement...
...The book has an exhaustive scriptural index but, alas, not a topical or subject one...
...This book will find an honored place on my shelf of biblical reference works...
...he desires, rather, to sketch out the "rough contours of that morality in its formative decade...
...Finally, let me note a little book by Millard Fuller who is the founder and head of Habitat for Humanity...
...A most satisfying work...
...To make that happen he sets out a number of parameters...
...Chapter 6 has an illuminating treatment of women at prayer in the Bible...
...An Evangelical Christian, first associated with Clarence Jordan's Koinonia Community in Georgia, Fuller has spent the last thirthe larger story of the rise of Habitat from its beginnings in the Koinonia Community (an interracial, radical Christian community started in the 1940s...
...His notes reflect a command of the scholarly sources but his intended audience is not scholars...
...Third, Meeks shares a conviction with contemporary philosophers like Martha Nussbaum and Alasdair Maclntyre that the building of morality is inextricably tied to the building of community, which is to say that morality broadly conceived is connected to a tradition of morality...
...A medieval Carthusian, Guigo II, wrote that reading should lead to meditation which energizes prayer and leads to contemplation...
...and for the utility of its conclusions...
...It should come as no surprise that he is especially concerned with the psalter...
...Prayer is seen as not only worship but as an integrating factor that gives coherence to life...
...for the fruitfulness of its reading of texts...
...In passing, he also discusses times of prayer, gestures of prayer, distinctions between public and private prayer, liturgy and devotion, etc...
...Beyond the obvious, however, there are certain common threads that run through the book...
...To contextualize his discussion, he has some nice pages on other forms and acts of prayer from the cultural milieu in which the ancient Israelites found themselves...
...I especially liked chapter 4, where he views prayer from the angle of God (that is, how the Bible has God answering the prayers offered to God) rather than from the perspective of the pray-er...
...This is an edifying book (in many senses...
...the simple gospel activism of Albert Schweitzer...
...While his categories are not surprising (petition, lament, doxolo-gy, etc...
...Faithfulness to the past must not be confused with nostalgia for a bygone "Golden Age" since early Christian morality is, in his words, "polyphonic" and morality requires not moral certainty but moral confidence...
...Our understanding of the early Christian moral community must be grounded in its past, especially in the Jewish experience...
...Obviously, these "stages" are not followed in any lock-step fashion...
...This present volume consists of a series of talks he gave on the Johannine story of the wedding at Cana and a later short course on some passages in the Gospel of Mark...
...First started near Americus, Georgia, Habitat now builds houses all over the world and ranks seventeenth in the home construction business...
...Those conversant with the history of spirituality will immediately recognize that what Martini has done (true to his own Ignatian heritage) is to marry the old monastic lectio to the Jesuit notion that a person should be a "contemplative in action...
...and the writings of Catholics Henri Nouwen, Thomas Mer-ton, and Dorothy Day (Day had been a longtime supporter of Koinonia, especially in the dark days of Klan activism in the 1940s and 1950s...
...In that sense, at least, the work might prove more useful as a resource since a reading from cover to cover (which is the way I did it) somewhat overwhelms with the generous citations and leisurely pace...
Vol. 122 • March 1995 • No. 6
