Religion booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
~ arl Rahner complained that Christians profess a trinitarian faith in their creed and liturgy but live as if they were pure monotheists. Part of this problem derives, Rahner thought,...
...He argues that certain conStealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity by Bruce Bawer Crown, $26, 340 pp...
...Bawer deals mainly with Protestants...
...The author's snobbishly condescending description of worshipers in a little church in Georgia who, as he sniffs, listen to country music and don't read books, might have given the whole thing away: why can't they be liberal, educated, tolerant, and socially conscious just like Bruce Bawer...
...Hunt's book is not for the theologically timid...
...Muggeridge's life was interesting and richly varied...
...Wolfe sees Muggeridge as a nice counter-balance to the romanticism of Lewis and Chesterton...
...To his everlasting credit, while a journalist in Moscow in the thirties, Muggeridge exposed Stalin's genocide in the brutal attempt to collectivize agriculture in the Ukraine...
...The casual reader should not be put off by the long footnotes or the somewhat tedious disentangling of patrons and their families...
...Try to think of one memorable line written by Muggeridge...
...The book was about Saint Francis of Assisi...
...During all of these various adventures, he was a persistent philanderer (as was his wife Kitty...
...Howe, in this highly technical work of medieval history, untangles Dominic's life to demonstrate how a charismatic religious reformer of the eleventh century worked at a level beneath that of popes, emperors, and learned canonists...
...Hunt passes judgment on these thinkers after differentiating their work according to categories set out by Bernard Lonergan...
...Legalistic Christians are those evangelicals and fundamentalists who have strong traditional creedal and biblical Commonweal 3 ~ November 6, 1998 teachings...
...I have a soft spot in my heart for MalMalcolm Muggeridge: A Biography by Gregory Wolfe Eerdmans, $35, 462 pp...
...At a time of persecution he held the Cross as a standard, fiercely defended the Rule of Faith, and, in the judgment of Eric Osborn, was a more original thinker than Augustine, that other great Roman African...
...Bawer plows along chronicling the dim theories of Charles Dobson, Frank Peretti, Pat Robertson, et al...
...The tendentious nature of this book was all the more disappointing to me because I have read Bawer's literary criticism in the New Criterion with great profit...
...0-268-00833-7 $24.00 cloth Jan.'99 CONTEMPLATION IN A WORLD OF ACTION Second Edition Thomas Merton Merton focuses on our desire and need to attain "personal identity" in this now classic, newly restored and corrected edition...
...Still, Muggeridge certainly lacked Chesterton's capacity for the memorable phrase (Auden called GKC the greatest aphorist of the century...
...Where Tertullian is wrong, Osborn says so, and where his philosophical background (in Stoicism) colors his theology, Osborn shows us...
...Lewis's deceptively simple prose was rooted in a lifelong habit of thinking things through, in a deep level of scholarly attainment, and from a fund of personal tragedy...
...In addition to theological studies with a distinguished faculty, the M.Div...
...logical courses and seminars now begin with the Trinity in their ordo doctrinae and not in the more philosophically rooted doctrine of the One God...
...Dominic's houses are now mostly gone, absorbed by other orders, left in the backwaters of Italian ecclesiastical life with the rise of the Cistercians and the great abbeys like Monte Cassino...
...He agrees with Barnes that Tertullian was probably not a lawyer...
...Students include those preparing for ordained ministry and those who wish to serve the church as lay ministers in placements such as hospital chaplaincy, campus ministry, parish ministry and education...
...Nonlegalists" are liberal Protestants of various stripes who represent the once-upon-a-time "mainline...
...She further notes that their somewhat idiosyncratic efforts toward articulating a postmodern construction of things are similar to certain Reformed and Orthodox writers...
...First, there is a fine discussion of the role of hermits in early medieval reform...
...Howe's study will be of most interest to serious students of medieval history...
...Each of these theologians focuses on a different aspect of this mystery...
...colm Muggeridge (1903-90) because he once said something nice about my first book-- in Esquire, of all places...
...Born in FoligChurch Reform & Social Change: Dominic of Sora and His Patrons by John Howe University of Pennsylvania Press, $37.50, 220 pp...
...This book has some especially good chapters on TerMlian's rejection of Marcion's desire to separate the Old and New Testaments while restricting even the latter to a truncated version of Luke...
...Muggeridge experienced a constant battle between an active libido and a near disgust at physicality...
...Hunt judges each theologian's fidelity to the biblical message, appropriation of the theological tradition, and methodology...
...Such a picture of a good-and-evil religious universe allows Bawer to sympathize with the blasphemous ACT UP disruption of Mass at Saint Patrick's Cathedral while being scandalized at some rough language used by Christian Coalition members at the 1992 Republican Convention...
...Like his younger contemporary, Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian had a comprehensive doctrine of all things being recapitulated in Christ...
...Wolfe gets that right...
...Like many of his contemporaries, he served in British intelligence during the war...
...Hunt's book is a close look at four theologians who have begun their theological reflections on the Trinity with Lawrence S. Cunningham a consideration of the Paschal Mystery: the passion, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ...
...Wolfe duly catalogues his many affairs...
...no, he entered the monastic life, trained on Mount Subasio in Umbria (where much later Francis of Assisi would keep a hermitage), and spent the rest of his life wandering through central Italy as a founder of monasteries, a sometime hermit, preacher in parishes, and reformer of the clergy...
...Osborn's book is not a biography (for Commonweal 3 2 November 6, 1998 that we must still rely on Timothy Barnes's classic 1981 study), but a close examination of Tertullian's theology...
...These monastic communities evidently developed their own customs as need and circumstance arose...
...This present work, born, I suspect, from the perceived rough treatment gays receive in "legalistic" church circles, is too angry, too polemical, and too one-sided to be taken seriously...
...Bruce Bawer makes one central point in this book with which I am in complete agreement...
...Apart from that helpful insight, Bawer's book is very disappointing...
...My most serious reservation has to do with Wolfe's conviction that Muggeridge stands with G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis as England's greatest Christian apologists of the century...
...Tertullian (A.D...
...Those who have a broad theological aflture, however, will find this a cogent, well-written work...
...Osborn organizes his chapters around the twin themes of the strife of opposites (Tertullian has a debt to Heraclitus) and perfection in Christ, since it was a cardinal principle for him that what God made, God remade in Christ...
...Second, Muggeridge did not have the reflective character of a C. S. Lewis...
...Those interested in medieval history in general will be instructed by a number of Howe's observations...
...Second, these hermits served an important social function: they attracted people...
...his few excursions into Roman territory are almost always wrongheaded...
...servatives and fundamentahsts have appropriated the word "Christian" so that, in common parlance, the term has come to mean a very specific brand of Christianity...
...These books have come from Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformed theologians...
...What all of these theologians have in common is their unwillingness to consider the biblical material as "empirical residue" (she borrows the term from Bernard Lonergan), yet each judges the biblical material the necessary starting point for any serious trinitarian theology...
...1032) is a minor figure in church history...
...Indeed, Muggeridge's spiritual quest is the most compelling part of this book...
...98 MEDICINE AND THE MARKETPLACE Kenman L.Wong "[A] first-rate contribution to the discussion of the intersection of business and medicine...
...Bawer deals with a subject that has been treated too many times and, in some instances, by people who have the wit to ask why such religiosity shows such staying power...
...Though all root their reflections in the Paschal Mystery, each gives distinct and nuanced interpretations of this central Christian event...
...Beyond that episode, what I knew of him was that he wrote the book, based on a television documentary, that vaulted Mother Teresa to international celebrity...
...they provided hospitality for the traveler...
...His thesis, held by others, is that these early monastics formed "textual communities" (the phrase is Brian Stock's) which felt no need to follow Benedict's Rule ad litteram (Benedict probably did not mean his own "little rule for beginners" to be so observed...
...program includes field education, pastoral skills courses, homiletics and religious formation...
...He distinguishes, in his opening pages, "legalistic" from "nonlegalistic" Christians...
...Finally, neither Chesterton nor Lewis ever sounded like cranky curmudgeons when they excoriated the ills of the world...
...Try to think of what writing by Muggeridge you would hand to a person seriously interested in the daims of Christianity...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...She sees each coming to grips with a culture in which the older theological terminology and philosophical presuppositions seem attenuated...
...This highly readable and comprehensive work is a model of how historical theology should be done...
...that he appeared on William F. Buckley's "Firing Line" to excoriate the contemporary world and its vices...
...Who knows if this quaint practice (also known in Sicily) goes back far in history, since the practice can only be traced to the seventeenth century...
...0-268-00834-5 $14.00 paperback Jan.'99 CELEBRATING ELIE WIESEL Stories, Essays, Reflections Edited by Alan Rosen A celebration in honor of Elie Wiesel's extraordinary literary, moral, religious, and human rights contributions...
...He argues, against the conventional wisdom, that Tertullian never left the Catholic church even though he was very much attracted to the Montanist New Prophecy...
...Indeed, more than once, Wolfe describes Muggeridge's approach to Christianity as "Augustinian...
...Indeed, most advanced theoi i l l ~ , i , ~, The Trinity and Paschal Mystery by Ann Hunt Liturgical Press~Glazier, $19.95,198 pp...
...Since Rahner wrote that critique there has been a veritable flood of books reconsidering the doctrine of the Trinity in terms of the Christian mystery...
...Durrwell, an Alsatian Redemptorist, begins with Christ's Resurrection...
...For more information, please write to: Director, Master of Divinity Program Department of Theology 331-A O'Shaughnessy Hall Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 Phone: (219) 631-5682 We want to :bw: : from . ks you've been ~rohir~ for, ) . T / S . I ~ to ~ our.oata~ or vistt our website at: Commonweal 3 5 November 6, 1998...
...Bawer is also partial to the later work of Hans Kiing, who seems to be the only Catholic theologian he knows...
...Armed with a mastery of both the Tertullian corpus and the secondary literature, Osborn is not shy about expressing his own judgments...
...He was a brilliant master of rhetoric, a profoundly original thinker, a fierce moralist, and a devastating polemicist...
...What I did not known was that Muggeridge, with his searching mind and errant moral life, was haunted by religious questions from his earliest days...
...I was most impressed by Howe's arFALL BOOKS FROM NOTRE DAME CALLING ELECTIONS The History of Horse-Race Journalism Thomas B. Littlewood Coiling Elections examines how the treatment of elections as sporting events has come to overshadow the reporting of the campaign as a forum for the discussion of ideas...
...160-225) coined the word Trinitas (in his treatise against Tertullian: First Theologian of the West by Eric Osborn Cambridge University Press, $59.50, 285 pp...
...Finally, the provocative English Benedictine, Sebastian Moore, presents a psychological reconstruction of what it meant for the disciples to grasp in faith the fact that Jesus was raised from the dead...
...The bulk of this book is devoted to criticizing the usual suspects (Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Ralph Reed, James Dobson, and a whole gaggle of other televangelists, preachers, and political pundits on the right) and contrasting their pinchbacked version of things with such historic figures as the late Harry Emerson Fosdick and contemporary nonlegalists such as Marcus Borg (of Jesus Seminar fame) and, God help us, the ever fatuous Bishop John Shelby Spong...
...Wolfe is quite good in keeping Muggeridge's religious quest a constant theme amid the somewhat tedious accounts of travels, financial woes, free-lance writing, reporting, and editorial assignments...
...Ghislain Lafont, a French Benedictine, starts with the death of Christ...
...He was kept from total disaster by his long friendship with the Anglican theologianpriest Alec Vidler...
...and they provided models of sanctity...
...Hunt is quite good at the difficult task of summarizing the views of these theologians, especially those of the ever prolix von Balthasar...
...in the midst of these technicalities, there is much to be learned...
...Muggeridge's fascination with Augustine's Confessions began in his young adulthood and continued throughout his life...
...that he converted to the Roman Catholic church in his dotage...
...and that somewhere in my distant past I gave a positive review to the collected essays he published under the title Jesus Rediscovered...
...Part of this problem derives, Rahner thought, from the overly speculative treatment the Trinity received at the hands of theologians...
...Amateurs will benefit from reading it if they have any interest in how different ages have struggled to reform the church...
...Dominic of Sora (d...
...Hans Urs von Balthasar, the Swiss polymath, is famous for his aesthetic meditation on Christ's descent into hell...
...During the war years he was so despondent that he even made a desultory attempt at suicide...
...It was only through a reading of Wolfe's sympathetic biography that I have learned the details of Muggeridge's peripatetic, messy, and varied life...
...Medievalists will pass judgment on the reliability of Howe's research (I am a consumer of this scholarship, not a producer...
...A good point, but a minor one...
...He loved paradoxes as well as the seeming contradictions of the Christian faith...
...He brilliantly defends Tertullian's biting polemical style by showing how satire, scorn, and laughter were rhetorical topoi widely used in his day...
...Trendy Leftists of the day turned a stone face against his reportage...
...Christian" has become, as it were, a code word...
...All lay ministry students receive full-tuitlon scholarships...
...Those religious instincts found expression in his documentaries on Mother Teresa and Saint Paul, as well as in his keen interest in the writings of Augustine, Pascal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn...
...Wolfe's biography is a generous tribute to a person whom he dearly admires...
...Subsequently, he became editor of Punch and a "talking head" on BBC radio and television...
...What remains are the memories of Dominic in some of the hill towns of central Italy and some curious devotional practices involving the draping of snakes on his statue on his feastday by local serpari...
...T Praxeas) to describe the triune character of the Godhead...
...Scott B. Roe, Biola University 0-268-01440-X $26.00 cloth Feb.'99 Chicago Distribution Center, 11030 South Langley Ave., Chicago, IL 60628 Telephone: 773-568-I 550 ~ Fax: 800-621-8476 _9 Web: http:llwww.undpress.nd.edu Commonweal 3 ~ November 6, 1998 gument about the wide understanding the early medieval monks had of the Rule of Benedict...
...I can only lament that Howe was unable to reconstruct what Dominic's horarium was like...
...they developed economically marginal land...
...They may be enacting, Howe indicates, memories of when the people of the Marsican area of Italy in ancient Roman times were renowned for their snake-handling abilities...
...When one hears the phrase "Christian music," for example, it is Pat Boone, not Bach, that comes to mind...
...However, his claim for Muggeridge's lasting significance is a bit of a reach...
...The Graduate Program in Ministry at the University of Notre Dame The Master of Divinity program at Notre Dame is a threeyear, academic and professional course of study designed to prepare students for effective ministry in the Roman Catholic Church...
...I recommend it for serious students of theology...
...0-268-00835-3 $30.00 cloth Nov...
Vol. 125 • November 1998 • No. 19
