Religion Booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
or in the words of Evagrius: "If you want to pray, you need God, who gives prayer to one who prays." Lacking the ability to take even the first step, we must have the grace to pray before we can...
...Most of them seem predictable in their theological approaches are sentimental or hortatory in style...
...2. "Over the top rhetorically...
...Thus, the ecological crisis is not an isolated problem...
...Commonweal 2 9 January 16, 1998...
...Fax (606) 573-2311...
...404 pages, $16...
...It is the burden of Winston-Allen's tightly argued book to provide answers to these questions...
...then the Ave) for the 150 psalms sung by the literate monks in their monastic choir...
...4. "Learned about Catholicism in graduate school...
...Job Opportunity NATIONAL ECUMENTICAL JUSTICE organization seeks executive director...
...As a historian, I can't afford to be ignorant of the many legitimate reasons that many postwar Catholics decided that the brick-and-mortar church was a failure...
...He is a listener...
...I called Rolheiser's book my "automobile volume," which is to say that it was tucked away in my car so I could Against an Infinite Horizon: The Finger of God in Our Everyday Lives by Ronald Rolheiser Crossroad, $14.95, 179 pp...
...He engages, without pontification, people who have lost children or those on the verge of marriage or coping with illness or addictions...
...sideration of how spiritual practices give shape to, sustain, and identify believing communities...
...My questions would be: Accommodate to whose America...
...She may be right, but the church could help this process along in a variety of ways...
...I also learned the meaning of the Quaker word "cumber," which points to all the material baggage which distracts and burdens a person...
...But it did make me wish that someone would reflect on the changing place of the rosary in the contemporary church...
...and execution rarer still...
...On this point, I agree with the Tablet reviewer who wrote that Northcott would have benefited from reading some revisionist Thomists...
...Already in the nineteenth century, a Bollandist scholar proved that the identification of the rosary with Saint Dominic was false...
...Northcott, for example, judges the pope as "limited" because John Paul relies too heavily on an account of natural law which cannot give due balance to the moral significance or the moral goods of the natural created order...
...or M.A...
...Especially good are his reflections on imagination and the Christian life...
...Discounts and monthly billing available for repeat advertisers...
...He is an OMI not an OFM, but one could imagine him either...
...Neither she nor I apparently heard it clearly when Dr...
...The stated goal of the editors was to provide a matrix out of which people could speak about enhancing practices in the Christian community while keeping them close to the liturgy...
...We have a scholarship athletics program because of our commitment to student athletes...
...Curiously enough, the kinds of questions and experiments that the editors suggest are examples of the kind of discernment described in an earlier essay...
...Advance payment required...
...E - I [ . ] :1:11:41~1 :J[.]l ~. II .]1:41 : I[-II I (Continued from page 4) ["Catholic Women's Colleges," November 21[, Abigail McCarthy has made several errors, one of which is serious enough to warrant this letter...
...Rolheiser organizes his short essays under twelve large headings ranging from the presence of God in creation through sections on the moral life, family situations, the sacramental life of the church, the relationship of sacraments to social justice, and to the life of prayer...
...Reflections on contemporary Sabbath-keeping, discernment, forgiveness, healing, dying well, and the place of music and singing are also included...
...The book ends with some appendices listing the dramatis personae mentioned in the transcript, as well as the place names...
...The 6 f f i c e o f Campus Ministry a t the University o f Notre Dame under the direction of the Congregation of Holy Cross, seeks qualified applicants for a campus minister with joint responsibilities in religious education and spirituality...
...I regret misapplying the program to Saint Mary's, but I am not sure that it was '%izarre...
...Cecilia Ferrazzi not only prayed the rosary but, according to her autobiographical testimony, made before the Venetian Inquisition in the midseventeenth century, Our Lady of the Rosary Commonweal 2 6 January 16,1998 Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint translated and edited by Anne Jacobson Schutte University of Chicago Press, $14.95,101 pp...
...She came to the attention of the Inquisition because of her purported visions, miracles, and extravagant prayer life, as well as attempts to harbor and raise the illegitimate children of prostitutes...
...This book would be wonderful for parish discussion groups...
...Apart from those discussions, anyone interested in the history of spirituality and/or Marian studies will find this a useful text...
...He possesses a rare combination of authentic piety, lack of pretension, and a real concern for the problems of real people...
...Instead of focusing on the "domination" model (a clich6 since Lynn White's essay in 1967), he insists on the ordering of creation and, further, on the implication of the covenant...
...Our innovations stem from the mission statements which direct our institutions in creative and purposeful ways...
...The writer is president of the college...
...What we still need is a much thicker critical biography...
...Moreover, we're all post-Vatican II now...
...Generally, the essays are well written and informative...
...In addition, there is a fine bibliography and an adequate index...
...For a magazine that serves, in effect, as the religious supplement of the Wall Street Journal (complete, on occasion, with advertising from Forbes), First Things has a lot of nerve dissing you and your Protestant neighbors on Riverside...
...I especially liked Northcott's reflections on the Hebrew account of creation...
...There are wonderfully instructive patches in these nontechnical essays...
...the other is dust...
...P.S...
...Even when he is uncomfortable with what he hears, he is eager to offer support...
...pick it up while waiting, for example, for my daughter to get out of school for the day...
...It has been long known that the rosary developed from the custom of substituting prayer formulas (first the Pater...
...professorship at the Yale Divinity School...
...Tracy Schier (incidentally, a Saint Mary-of-theWoods alumna), report on the innovations at Saint Mary's, complete with references to the external degrees, the earth literacy program on the 1,600acre [sic] campus, etc...
...First, he surveys recent writing on religion and ecology by constructing a useful set of categories: humanocentric views of ecology (of whom the most famous exponent would be John Paul II...
...Theology degrees...
...A Protestant theologian, his most penetrating comments are often found in his extended footnotes...
...we have created a master's program in Earth Literacy because of our commitment to justice toward the Earth as well as its inhabitants...
...Cobb...
...we're all scrambling to figure out what it means to be faithful after the bricks and mortar of the preconciliar church have been demolished by the tremors, not only of aggiornamento, but of the broader history of modern America...
...I learned about Catholicism from my beloved parents, from the nuns and priests of Saint Joseph's Parish in Downingtown, Pennsylvania--and from graduate school...
...Responsibilities include small Christian communities and Scripture study groups, sacramental preparation, development of religious education programming for undergraduates, and student retreat programs...
...Winston-Allen's work is one of history...
...Rosary devotions and literature cognate to that devotion had close links to the observant orders like the Carthusians, to many lay-centered pious associations, and to the mendicants with their struggles against the hegemony of the secular clergy...
...For additional information call 212-662-4200 or write COMMONWEAL, 475 Riverside Dr., Rm...
...usually find it difficult to read books on theology and ecology...
...Magi Books, 33 Buckingham Dr., Albany, NY, 12208...
...Rolheiser speaks of the "paschal imagination" in which we can envision the death of the old as a prelude for the birth of the new...
...Full-time--40 hours/12 months...
...How did they get the rosary tradition...
...There's a sense in which the church always has and always will "accommodate" or "adapt to" America...
...ABIGAIL McCARTHY Unnamed heroines Sidney Callahan makes passing reference to the history of women's orders in her "Nunsuch...
...Oh yes, I hope Father Rolheiser, who thanked his Oblate community in two different places, did not feel offended by being turned into a Franciscan on the back cover of his book...
...While these devotional impulses had their abuses and superstitions (like hiring poor people to say the rosary on behalf of the rich, who might then accumulate indulgences), they were also a vehicle for genuine spiritual fervor and devotion...
...A number of essays focus on scripturally warranted community practices, such as honoring the body, the right use of goods, the character of Christian witness, asceticism, and the practice of hospitality...
...A brief bibliographical excursus is provided for each of the chapters, as well as a scriptural and topical index...
...Tolkien's remark to C. S. Lewis when the latter was on the cusp of religious conversion serves as a starting point: Your reluctance, Tolkein said to Lewis, " to understand [the mysteries of faith] comes from a failure of the imagination...
...Predestination Tours...
...Church officials were dubious about any ill-educated woman who claimed such religious authority...
...Here is a favorite (from the poet Wendell Berry): "The breath of God is only one of the divine gifts that make us living souls...
...312) 829-6436...
...Winston-Allen's book should be seen in the light of recent work by Eamonn Duffy, among others, who examine "popular" religion in a new and sympathetic light...
...Schutte argues, with a number of other scholars, against the "black legend" of the Inquisition, stating that the Inquisition's methods guaranteed the best legal proceedings to be found in early modem Europe...
...405, N.Y., N.Y...
...Lacking the ability to take even the first step, we must have the grace to pray before we can pray, so that salvation comes by our own love and humility formed and moved by the creative impetus of grace...
...Its solution requires a recovery of a sense of justice and of the common good...
...He lives in San Francisco...
...Beumer shrewdly notes that Nouwen left Holland before the seismic changes in the wake of the Second Vatican Council...
...Salary commensurate with education and experience...
...They reported on the Lilly Project at Yale a study of colleges founded by women religious...
...that the rosary should have been attributed to a fifteenth-century Carthusian of the same name...
...Finally, Northcott is to be commended for his attention to the role of the church in this issue...
...6. I'm coming to believe that "American compromise" is a phrase that should be given a permanent vacation...
...The mission of SMWC is threefold: We are a Catholic college, a liberal arts college, and a women's college...
...To which America...
...Okay, that's it...
...Each of these visions of the relationship of religion to ecology is subject to fair criticism...
...As a consequence, he was able to reflect on contemporary Christian spirituality with a sort of anguished confidence but without having had personal experience of disappearing theological faculties, emptying parishes, and "virulent reCommonweal 2 3 January 16,1998 ligious indifference" in his native country...
...I do plead guilty to the phrase "relatively isolated" but it was not meant to be pejorative...
...Application screening begins 1/1/98...
...The writer replies: Sister Doherty's difference is not so much with me as with the presenters at the Trinity College Conference on Catholic Women's Colleges...
...Later he held a Henri Nouwen: A Restless Seeking for God by Jurjean Beumer Crossroad, $19.95, 190 pp...
...You really should respond to Richard John Neuhaus's dumping on your new digs in a recent issue of First Things...
...15 percent, 12 times...
...Since I don't take it as a slap, I'll reply rather than turn the other cheek...
...It's back to my Dunkin' Donuts and coffee...
...Residential program...
...The late Henri Nouwen was born in Holland, ordained a priest for the diocese of Utrecht, did advanced work in theological studies in Rome, psychology at the Menninger Institute in Kansas, and, after a stint teaching in Holland, in the psychology department at Notre Dame...
...What interested me most was the author's argument that the development of the rosary and rosary confraternities was linked to church reform on the eve of the Reformation...
...that the use of torture was rare...
...he searched to deepen spiritual experience within the context of supporting communities, thus providing his writing, as the author says, with a certain graceful quality...
...By a careful, indeed somewhat tedious examination of these sources, she develops some interesting observations about the relationship of prayer to visual texts and their ritual use...
...Ferrazzi was a laywoman who belonged to an amorphous movement of women who were not nuns but who lived a life of seclusion from the world, engaged in prayer and good works...
...We've had a stable and riding horses since 1927, but we now boast the Mari Hulman George School of Equine Studies...
...National Farm Worker Ministry, 1337 West Ohio St., Chicago, IL 60622...
...We can only hope that they reach the quality of this one...
...As women's history flourishes, why not encourage our daughters, nieces, and students to become acquainted with the stories of those nuns who taught or nursed us...
...Telephone (606) 5739771...
...But if it's "deconstruction" to ask historically informed questions about the way people identify themselves--in this case, as "laity'--then I guess I'm unashamedly guilty...
...The first is a series of biographical notes on the individual patristic /11 authors cited and quoted...
...Let's begin the new year with a resolution in this regard...
...with experience necessary...
...OH YEAH...
...Chicago location preferable, but negotiable...
...To speak of us as "compensating for our relatively isolated location" fails to note that we are four miles northwest of Terre Haute, a city of 102,000--small, but certainly not isolated...
...His writing combined a testimony of personal vulnerability, deep reading of the gospel, compassion for the poor, and a sense of what touched people most deeply...
...For now we have a gracefully written first introduction to Nouwen's life...
...John The Environment and Christian Ethics by Michael S. Northcott Cambridge University Press, $21.95, 379 pp...
...Thus the bizarre and utterly incorrect reference to "a program for air-traffic controllers" would not be a likely choice unless we could substantiate how it serves our mission...
...Special Book RAISSA'S JOURNAL...
...Please send r6sum6 and three letters of reference before January 30,1998 to: Campus Ministry, Attn.: Kate Barrett, 112 Badin Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556...
...Sallie McFague...
...The essays collected in Practicing Our Faith derive from a seminar organized by Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass to inquire into the practices of Christians who live within various religious communities...
...Since today's reader might very well need a guide through the period and the subject, these pieces are a valuable adjunct to the book itself...
...To those classical biblical doctrines he adds a "thickened" view of natural law which, he argues, is manifest not only in the West but in several sources of Eastern thought...
...C16ment concludes the book with two appendices...
...1-800-695-9599...
...McCarraher bites back You people on Riverside Drive didn't show me your own responses to my "Starbucks" piece, so I felt a little ambushed when I read the introduction to "Smile When You Say, 'Starbucks'" [November 21...
...The general editors list ten other titles in the series...
...His applications of that insight would give everyone food for thought, especially his notion, to which I fully subscribe, that what often passes for lack of faith is really lack of imagination...
...These small insights do not exhaust the range or nourishment of this collection...
...According to Northcott, this reading of the natural law, most systematically represented by John Finnis and Germain Grisez, does not do justice to the medieval view of natural law either...
...Scotland Tour JULY 27-AUGUST 8. Islands, Edinburgh, and more...
...Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages by Anne Winston-Allen Pennsylvania State University Press, $28.50, 210 pp...
...Winston-Allen is also quite good, if somewhat rushed, in her discussion of how the term "rose" and its derivatives were linked to the most loved biblical book of medieval spirituality: The Song of Songs...
...Our 67-acre (not 1,600-acre) campus is singularly beautiful...
...Even more complex is how this practice came to be called a "rosary," even though the mystical significance of the rose is a commonplace in medieval culture...
...I also very much liked the brief excerpts from various writers adorning the pages of the essays...
...Candidates should have some experience with college-age students, have a commitment to student peer ministry, possess collaborative ministerial skills for ministry with 20 other staff persons and be practicing Catholics committed to the Catholic identity and mission of the University of Notre Dame...
...Any program added to our curriculum must be connected with that mission...
...If Nouwen had a fault it was that he was afflicted with a kind of furor scribendi which led him to publish too much with too many reworkings of the same material...
...SUELLEN HOY Notre Dame, Ind...
...I do want to make it clear that I would never intentionally do anything to diminish the reputation of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods...
...Anne Schutte, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, found, transcribed, and translated this fascinating document which consists of a series of interrogations that Ferrazzi underwent after being charged with feigning sanctity...
...A college adds programs to serve its students...
...Still, in the end, she feels sure that "the church will be blessed with the survival and revival of religious vocations...
...1-800-986-9585 ext 6012...
...Not a typical commercial tour...
...theocentric views (for example, J/,irgen Moltmann...
...The ecological crisis derives, he writes, from a breakdown in moral purposiveness and the demise of social justice...
...Ferrazzi's autobiography, on the face of it, is a loose narrative about running to confessors, convents, pious confraternities, of illnesses, purported cures, extraordinary graces, and so on...
...I was also impressed by his trinitarian approach to theology since it shifts (as Moltmann and others have insisted) away from monistic ontologies toward a vision of the outpouring Trinity where, at least in the formulation coming from Irenaeus, there is a "ground for differentiation of self and other, of the many and the one, for the diversity of human and nonhuman life, and for the embodied and material life in the cosmos, including the order of human life...
...appeared to her...
...Ministry Program DESIRE LAY MINISTRY...
...Restless is the operative word in the title of Beumer's book...
...In that sense, each essay sheds light on others...
...The book consists of brief meditations, first published, as far as I can determine, in Canadian and British Catholic newspapers...
...This autobiography is a window into the world of religious practice quite removed from that of the cloister and the theological studium...
...Beumer was a long-time friend of Nouwen who knows the Dutch scene well...
...Subsidy Publisher with 75-year tradition...
...And, while we're at it, why not promise never to see another remake of Sister Act or Late Nite Catechism...
...What he did best was to touch on real problems--fear, anxiety, death...
...Subsequently, in 1977, an earlier rosary text was founded datable to circa 1300...
...m-m ,m...
...Commonweal 2 4 January 16,1998 It was the "psalter" for the mostly illiterate lay brothers...
...His spiritual searching would lead him to a stay at a Trappist monastery in New York, an unhappy period at Harvard, extended visits to Latin America, and finally to the L'Arche community in Toronto, where he served as chaplain...
...In other words, to his sophisticated reading of current moral theory and theology, he also brings a pastoral concern for the world which has come to us from God as "good...
...10 percent, 6 times...
...Northcott's book, by contrast, is a sober volume that manages to do two things quite well...
...I have pleasant memories of speaking at the college and of a vacation with some of the sisters at a lake place they used...
...Most of our modern troubles come from our misunderstanding and misevaluation of this dust...
...21-25K + benefits...
...How this practice developed in tandem with meditations on the mysteries of the life of Jesus and his mother is a far more complex question...
...It is a study, in short, of spiritual formation...
...n.-m-m m a m ~mm .m RATES: $1.10 per word...
...Priesthood...
...This is not a book about spirituality for the individual, but a conCommonweal 2 _9 January 16, 1998 Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People edited by Dorothy Bass Jossey-Bass, $22.50, 232 pp...
...Rolheiser is widely read in theology, literature, spiritual writing, poetry, and psychology...
...If I have an "apostolate"-one of those preconciliar words I wish would come back into vogue part of it is to chart those tremors and determine their size, strength, source, and direction...
...It still is "Perhaps the spiritual classic of our century"--America...
...Such investigations are a response to those scholars, most conspicuously Etienne Delaruelle, who see late-medieval religion as a farrago of externalism, superstition, and quasi-magic...
...12 word minimum...
...the second is a series of three essays on Arianism, Monophysitism, and early monasticism...
...BARBARA DOHERTY, S.P...
...SO WHAT...
...In Schutte's hands, thanks to her informative introduction and ample notes, it is also a revelation about a whole range of historical material about which people have opinions but no facts...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...Tidy and user-friendly, this volume would be a valuable, inexpensive text for courses in gender studies, or for a study of traditional religious practices...
...Reviving Religious Communities" [December 5, 1997], but fails to mention the name of even one of the nuns who created this remarkable past...
...MATER DEI INSTITUTE at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA 99202-1849...
...It was in graduate school that I first read theology seriously, where I read religious, cultural, and intellectual history, and where I took my "frame of interpretation," not only from historians (certainly not the most pious bunch you'd ever want to meet), but from Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Milbank...
...No doubt the sisters at Rivier thought it was consonant with their mission to help the erratically scheduled controllers get a college education, just as the sisters at Saint Mary's thought a program in equine studies was consonant with theirs...
...Manuscripts Wanted MANUSCRIPTS WANTED...
...Every professional degree is built on the foundation of the liberal arts...
...3. "Deconstruction" is a word people are throwing around carelessly these days...
...He proposes that we embrace a renewed sense of the Hebrew vision of the created order as well as the Christian understanding of the Trinitarian creator and incarnate redeemer...
...Pax C h r i s t i . EUGENE MCCARRAHER ViUanova, Pa...
...The final chapter consists of a series of hints and questions to extend what has already been covered...
...This brief book is part of a series ("The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe"), to which the editors, Margaret King and Albert Rabil, provide a general introduction as a prelude to Schutte's introduction and translation...
...Toward that end, in some very rich pages, Northcott recommends the resources of the biblical tradition...
...A small number of candidates will be invited to interviews at the University of Notre Dame after February 15, 1998...
...Saint Mary of the Woods, Ind...
...I'm not a fan (or not much of a fan) of Derrida, De Man, and other honorary members of the Yale English department...
...Harold IsbeU's translation 0f Ovid: Heroides is available from Penguin Books...
...Only time will tell if some of his books have staying power...
...It obscures more than clarifies the historical and theological dilemmas posed for Catholicism by American culture...
...and ecocentric orientations (Matthew Fox...
...1. Yes, I'm under forty...
...Schier's list of Saint Mary's innovations segued into a mention of the air traffic controllers' program at Rivier College...
...His vocation was not to speak to the indifferent...
...Sister Doherty will find that I cite Saint Mary's as a pioneer institution in Catholic women's education both in my report on these colleges for the Neylan Commission and in my chapter in the book, Educating the Majority, published by the Commonweal 2 8 January 16,1998 American Council on Education...
...It seems not to be popular in the lives of my undergraduates here at Our Lady's university, but there is still a coterie who are there, beads in hand, praying at the grotto...
...She was evidently not at the conference and did not hear the director of the Lilly Project, Dr...
...5. I'm neither "free" nor "innocent" of the quarrels over pre- and post-Vatican II Catholicism...
...Presented by Jacques Maritain...
...The book provides a bibliography of Nouwen's work in English, but no index...
...Nouwen was one of the most popular spiritual writers of our time...
...These meditations are a felicitous blend of scriptural reflection, shrewd psychological observations, and generous portions of letters sent to Rolheiser and his responses...
...It seems to me that a principal vehicle for that greater union is to be found in the wonderfully rich tradition of mysticism shared by both East and West...
...We are surrounded by the 1,200 acres of the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Providence...
...From the editors: You said it...
...ALL TYPES...
...Discounts 5 percent, 3 times...
...Northcott goes on to set out his own vision of ecological theology...
...In an era which hopes for a closer union between the Eastern and Western church, the elements of difference must be seen not as barriers but as attractive qualities that will lead all of us to a closer union in the experience of our common faith...
...I took notes, for example, on the very nice linkage made between the Hispanic custom of the Christmas posada (shelter) and the need for sheltering the poor, and the equal need to think of the church as a hospitable community...
...Before sending in my column I double-checked my notes with the Lilly Project's chief historian, Dr...
...I contribute to Commonweal precisely because, as David O'Brien put it in his response, I "really care about the Catholic tradition and its promise...
...This work is very much a loving tribute to a dear friend and a great Christian...
...One could appeal an inquisitorial judgment, as Ferrazzi herself did...
...Why not make the names of Mary Frances Clarke, Katharine Drexel, Theresa Dudzik, Mary Kaupas, Catherine McAuley, Elizabeth Seton, and Mary Ward (to name just a few) as well known as that of Dorothy Day...
...Because we are a women's college, we added an external degree for women in 1973 and a residential student mothers' program with a day-care center in 1990...
...The writer is on the faculty of the history department at the University of Notre Dame...
...Individual readers interested in the history of the church and its practices will also find it worthwhile...
...This book could well be used by the homilist or the retreatant or those who simply have a bit of time waiting for the school bell to ring...
...M.Div...
...Schutte's presentation of the translated text also tells us a good deal about the practice of medicine (primitive and dangerous), social relationships, the myriad practices of popular religion, and Tridentine sacramental practice (the issue of frequent Communion, for example, is a key theme in this treatise...
...Cynthia Russett, who deemed my report accurate...
...10115...
...Winston-Allen investigates the extant vernacular literature, picture books, and artistic iconography to disentangle the long history of the development of the rosary and its enormous popularity as a devotional device on the eve of the Reformation...
...McCarthy praises our colleges for their innovative spirit...
Vol. 125 • January 1998 • No. 1
