The New Religious Humanists
DeLaura, David J.
that, contrary to the caption, the Lindau Gospels do not portray the four symbols of the Gospels. Devotional prayer and meditation as well as the sacred liturgy have relied on the efficacy of...
...Jacques Maritain, in works like True Humanism (1938), sought to preserve "Christian civilization" while upholding the dignity of workers in an enlightened capitalism...
...hopeful note, seeks a middle ground between current extremes: on the one hand, the anti-intellectual Evangelicals, as well as the juggernaut of late twentieth-century "industrial capitalism...
...Yes, Sister Wendy has convinced us that art is for everybody and you don't need to be a Cambridge art historian to appreciate it...
...Frederica MathewesGreen proposes the shared idea of "a world without abortion...
...All four of these writers are cited in this collection, which is in effect a residual version of that much older 2roject, but now in far less propitious circumstances...
...This almost Tolstoyan rejection of virtually all positions is one principled, though most will think too simple, option...
...But he rightly notes that the most fractious disputes pitting "social unity" against "religious liberty and diversity" occur in public school debates, ranging from school prayer to "textbook tampering...
...Most challenging is fl~e volume's postecclesiastical mood, and the indictment of mainstream Christianity for its "infection" by late-modern individualism and narcissism...
...A similar loneliness and permanent alienation from this culture, and the occasional descent into anger, mark some of the best of these writers...
...Still, even he admits, there is simply no "prophetic" voice now" like Eliot (or Solzhenitsyn), and no "philosophical artist" comparable to Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy...
...Wha~ I find lacking is the horizontal thrust-the loving concern for others...
...Kass calls for a politics that hears "the voice of what is eternal, true, and good," never indicating, of course, who (besides himself) already knows these absolutes in the contingent world of politics...
...Glenn Tinder asks whether a responsible pluralism, still based on the "dignity and equality" of persons, could survive "if Christianity declines during the coming decades...
...But there are some pressing topics addressed in a few essays...
...Still, Wolfe's project compels a searching look at one's own spiritual integrity...
...and whether one can do so while participating in so "broken" a world...
...1982), Richard Rodriguez--by now perhaps one of the most iiffluential Catholic commentators in this country--speaks, bleakly and movingly, of the liturgy as "a community of those who share with each other only the experience of standing alone before God...
...J David J. DeLaura is Avalon Foundation Pro lessor in the HL~mnnities at tile University of IJennsylvania, and fi~rmer chair o~ the English Department...
...Commonweal | 9 Man:h 13, 1998...
...Like the move to the "desert" in late-classical civilization, the impulse to live (as a poet once put it) "unspotted by the world," fuels current calls for a return to sexual purity and "traditional" roles for men and women in perfectionist movements...
...Os Guinness's principle of "covenantalism"--of citizens pursuing their interests but acting responsibly as members of a "commonwealth'--may seem abstract...
...Two thoughtful essays deserve close attention...
...In his autobiographical Hunger qf Memorz...
...The book's bland facade slips in an essay by Leon Kass, whose brilliant (and tendentious) reading of the Babel story swerves into a dark polarization between moderns who are given up to "total selfcreation" and those who live in "obedient dependence...
...See, The Peasant of the Gnronne, 1968...
...But unlike the more established figures he names, most of the younger writers he recommends will be scarcely known to readers...
...Andrew Kimbrell invokes "a sacramental vision," calling for a total halt to "desacralizing technology," especially as applied to the human body--by fighting in the courts and legislatures...
...I think finally of Maritain, who, having defined the elements of an "integral" Christian humanism, at the end turned away from the all-too-modern world, and from the "new" church, gone astray in a welter of relativism and Teilhardian pantheism...
...The book as a whole strongly affirms the vertical thrust of the Christian ethic, stressing dogma and submission...
...and T. S. Eliot remained a powerfully "prophetic" presence...
...It is our Christian tradition...
...Berry's backwardlooking turn to the green world aligns him with earlier machinery-hating social "prophets," from John Ruskin to William Morris to Eric Gill...
...KI Monsignor Joseph Fete is the rector of Sai~zt loseph Cathedral in Columbus, Ohio...
...His own special interest is with the Christian imagination as conveyed by reflective and "literary" writers...
...More gratifyingly, Tinder argues for "responsible hope," over against the callousness and greed of "capitalist and bureaucratic institutions...
...Oth ers--a "remnant"--seem condemned to remain, uneasy and less "pure," inside the degraded Secular City...
...Guinness pleads for a "commitment to universal rights...
...The questions raised in this somewhat mysterious project are indeed central ones for the seriously religious: how to live a truly spiritual life...
...and on the other, "secular" liberals, who have a parasitic relationship to traditional religion...
...Vigen Guroian outlines "a contemporary ethic of death and dying" tor the "postbiblical" near-future...
...Here and there come flashes of scorn for expected topics like identity and gender politics, and multicultural curricula...
...Somewhat unsettlingly, the reader has to dig into the footnotes to see that the work of key contributors is most likely to appear in or cite "right" journals like CommeJ~tary, Crisis, First Things, and The National Review...
...This collection is, in effect, a serious statement from the still informal coalition of conservative Catholics and moderate Evangelicals and some other Protestants...
...The "hopeful signs" the editor claims to discern, and the "profound spirit of openness to the world" he attractively proposes, do not, then, capture the larger drift of the bulk of these essays...
...Tinder voices a deep suspicion of "Enlightenment rationa l i s m ' - - b u t he ignores that even thoughtful Christians will, inevitably, live in problematic interaction with modernity and all its p o s t / p o s t / p o s t phases...
...After World War II, C. S. Lewis had a similar influence among serious readers...
...Devotional prayer and meditation as well as the sacred liturgy have relied on the efficacy of "visual theology" since the time of the catacombs...
...Her recommendation of "simple friendship and support" for women with unwanted pregnancies may seem feeble in this fiercest of debates, but it may refocus the discussion...
...Editor Gregory Wolfe, sounding a sacred art that is less opaque, less like a theology written in a foreign language...
...The presiding tactic is to so overstate the contamination of the "modern" as to justify a retreat into privacy, and {urning one's back on mere people and the intractable and "messy" problems (including one's own "divisions") of the fragmented present...
...The Illustrated ]esus sets before us a theological feast for the eyes and whets our appetite for more about LIMITED VISION David J. DeLaura ~ arly in this century, in an already post-Christian culture, the case for the reasonableness of Christianity was effectively made by G. K. Chesterton...
...Wolfe is correct that the taboo against "religion" in the secular media has been relaxed in recent years...
...her shrewd strategy is to attack the extreme rhetoric of her fellow prolifers...
...his weakness is a disdain for the bulk of the recalcitrant "issues" plaguing this society...
...And antitechnology utopianism reaches its apex in an essay by Wendell Berry, who defends a biblical enviromentalism and attacks both "the industrialist's contempt or hatred for nature" and modern "organized Commonweal | 8 March 13, 1998 Christianity's" lack of any "serious interest" in ecology...
...Of the nineteen essays, two pieces, finally, capture particularly well where "we" are, at the millennium...
...In an increasingly pictorial age, the science of theology may now be tuning in to this visual channel...
...This volume returns us to the knowledge that art is more than pretty pictures--it is a way of doing theology...
Vol. 125 • March 1998 • No. 5
