Teresa of Avila

...Her Latin was sparse, her writing style is not elegant (in the autobiography, she has a multichaptered digression...

...There is an eerie symmetry between these two women: both of Jewish background, both powerful intellects, both nurtured in the mystical tradition of the Carmelites, and both writers...

...Nonetheless, we must be grateful that she resists the reductionist temptation...

...Rolston's thesis at the end is relatively straightforward: God accounts for the dramatic emergent events that have occurred on the earth over the course of evolutionary history...

...her main focus is on the life of Teresa...

...It was also the century of the Protestant Reformation as well as the Catholic reform whose energies were crystallized in the work of the Council of Trent...

...Genes remain anthropomorphized, as smart, discovering, searching problem-solvers...

...God is the atmosphere of possibilities, the metaphysical environment in, with, and under first the natural and later the cultural environment, luring the earthen histories up the slope...

...We meet William Devery, "the obese and corrupt chief of police who once owned the New York HighCommonweal 2 8 January 28, 2000...

...The word "master" meant a theologian who could expound the Scriptures...

...Might it not be a category mistake to analogize evolution from biology to culture, to posit societies acting like species...

...Others may well take issue with the language which shapes his constructive account...

...For my grandfather, cops--much like baseball players and army veterans-acted as if their uniform gave them a license to behave boorishly...

...The divine spirit is the giver of life, pervasively present over the millennia...

...Visiting DistinguiSMdProfessor program, " please call or write to theDepartment of Religious Studies 300 College Park, Dayton, OH 45469-1530 Telephone: (937) 229-4321 Fax: (937)229-4330 Web Site: http://www.udayton.edu/~ relstudy Commonweal 2 9 January 28, 2000 Carmelite convent in Cologne, Germany, taking the name Benedicta of the Holy Cross...

...In her own lifetime Teresa had the good sense to ally herself with outstanding supporters such as the observant Franciscan Peter A1cantara and the famous Dominican theologian, Domenico B&5ez...

...All of these works were written out of need or out of obedience...

...In this project, McDonald is largely successful...

...M. Therese Lysaught teaches in the religious studies department at the University of Dayton...

...Barely a generation before her birth in 1515 unconverted Jews were expelled from Spain in the same year that Christopher Columbus sailed west for the Indies...

...Teresa, as Medwick makes clear, was not by the standards of the day a letrado (a "lettered one...

...They were not close friends but esteemed colleagues...

...For instance, in one passage, the author describes his mother's life as the matriarch of a cop family: "Sometimes, as she listened to her son's cop's talk, she would put down her crossword and close her eyes like someone listening to a sad aria...

...My Father's Gun also works because it is more than a memoir...

...This is not an argument from design, not the anthropic principle...

...Stl Mary's College , Winter 2000 ~, M! Shawn Copeland, Ph.E of Marquette University L 9 ./ For further information.on our M.A...

...These criticisms notwithstanding, Rolston's book is a must-read for anyone interested in this conversation...

...The author's father was one of the first twelve New York City cops--dubbed later the "Apostles"-to break department rules forbidding cops to live outside the city and to move his family into this suburb across the Hudson River...

...of Fordham University,, of Mt...

...Sixteenth-century Spain flourished both economically and culturally...

...Medwick is no theologian, so her analysis of these texts is fairly conventional...

...Both events would impact Teresa's life...

...Mary's College ::7 AND IS HONOREDi;:TOWELCOMAES VISITINGD IS~ING.UISHEPDR OFESSORS Fall 2000...

...To aid her reforming efforts she enlisted a young Carmelite friar, nearly three decades her junior, named John of the Cross, to begin a reform among the male Carmelites...

...They tended to make a lot of noise, drink too much, and act insulted when their bar tab actually reflected how much they had consumed...

...and her reading depended very much on what she could find in the vernacular...

...Later in her life, her religious foundations would benefit from the monies her brothers earned in the New World...

...I realize now that that song had played for the whole of my mother's life, and, for her, it was both painful and impossible not to listen to...

...And then there is her masterpiece, The Interior Castle...

...McDonald comes from a long line of cops (his maternal grandfather, father, and brother all served in the New York Police Department) and his book recounts their years at home and on the job...

...Still others will find that his account of the divine bears little resemblance to any actual, living religion...

...Her own family came from converso stock who fell under the suspicion of the Inquisition...

...She accomplished this by surmounting obstructive civil authorities who saw no need for yet another convent in their cities, by surviving wrangles with church authorities over how the convents were to constitute themselves, and by besting ever intrusive aristocrats who would supply monies but felt their generosity allowed them the right to determine how the nuns were to live...

...In particular, the author focuses on how his blue brethren--none of them particularly heroic or corrupt-were able to hold down such an exacting job and raise a family at the same time...

...Medwick, in short, presents Teresa at face value while keeping a keen awareness that the formulations and the vocabulary of a sixteenthcentury nun whose wellsprings are a spiritual tradition that goes back into the early patristic period cannot but sound strange to the modern ear...

...But as this biography makes clear, she was an authentic religious genius...

...McDonald nimbly maneuvers his narrative from a history of his grandfather to a history of the department and some of its most colorful characters...

...John was her sometime confessor and perhaps the only person, male or female, before whom Teresa stood in awe...

...Nor was the Inquisition disposed to tolerate vernacular translations of the Scriptures, or writers too much influenced by such humanists as Erasmus...

...If nothing else, Rolston provides a potent counterpoint to E. O. Wilson's recent and widely-acclaimed Consilience...

...A simple approach, yes, but not one which has been done much before--by writers or television producers...

...She wrote, at the instigation of her confessor, her autobiography (Mi Vida), which shows the influence of Augustine's Confessions newly available to her in a vernacular translation, as well as The Way of Perfection, her book of Foundations, and a commentary on the Commonweal 2 6 January28, 2000 Song of Songs...

...He teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame...

...As sociobiology reflects the 1970s and '80s, Rolston's rhetoric is '90s vintage---information, diversity, cybernetic, sharing, values, love, justice, freedom...

...God is the "ground of information or an ambience of information," that interjects quanta of needed "information," or value, into creative processes...

...ONE SHREWD LADY Lawrence S. Cunningham eresa of Avila's life spanned the better part of the sixteenth century...

...A Roman nuncio of the time described her as an "unstable, restless, disobedient, and contumacious female who, in the name of devotion, devised false doctrines...

...The Spanish Inquisition busied itself not only with the rising tide of mainly female visionaries and mystics whose experiences needed the check of orthodoxy but also with Judaizers among the conversos, and the infiltration of Protestants who went under the generic term of los luteranos...

...Nor, we might note in passing, is her book burdened with that tedious jargon that mars so much contemporary academic writing about Teresa...

...In this regard, McDonald sets out to help all of those who (like my grandfather) may have some distaste for cops understand the stories behind police dramas and the 11 P.M...

...McDonald also gives us a rare portrait of the cop hamlet known as Pearl River, New York...

...In that same period, her sisters brought Teresa's teachings on prayer to France...

...news...

...i i ~ - - i i - ~ ~ --~-i COPS & BARTENDERS Maurice Timothy Reidy A s a saloonkeeper in the Bronx in the 1940s, my grandfather was always wary when a cop walked into his bar...

...When she finished, she tells us that she said "this is the truth...

...For him, policemen weren't good customers...

...Radiating from those French Carmels, the influence of Teresa helped nourish the seventeenthcentury movement we now call the "French School of Spirituality...

...As McDonald ably shows, this town--packed with over-worked men trying to leave the violence of the city behind--is a sociology dissertation waiting to be written...

...The son of Irish immigrants, Skelly entered the police department when Tammany Hall ruled New York politics...

...A year later, she sought baptism and subsequently entered a The University of Dayton DEPARTMENT OF REHGIOUS STUDIES WAS HONORED:TOIN CLUDEA S :E VISITING DISTINGD1SHED PROFESSORS...

...In addition to plumbing the depths of three generations of family drama, McDonald gives us a sharp history of the NYPD...

...In the midst of all her labors and travel, Teresa also managed to compose some significant books and a vast corpus of letters...

...Medwick traces Teresa's early years, her entrance into the genteel life of the Convent of the Incarnation in Avila, her second conversion as a person of prayer, and her subsequent trials as a founder of reformed monasteries of women under the austere rule of Mount Carmel...

...In his recent encyclical Fides et ratio, John Paul II lists Edith Stein as one of the figures he sees as a model for those who have integrated the life of the mind with the life of the spirit...

...In the summer of 1921 a young philosopher, Edith Stein, picked up a copy of Teresa's autobiography and read it straight through one evening...

...In 1588 Luis de Leon edited Teresa's writings for publication and included an apologetic introduction indicating that her work was firmly rooted in the tradition of Christian spirituality...

...in Theological Studies, M.A...

...William L. Pottier, Ph.D...

...For information about the Franciscan Friars and Sisters of the Atonement, contact: Vocation Director ~r Gravmoor ,~.J~ PO Box 300 Garrison, NY 10524-0300 914 424 3671 of McDonald's book is that he chooses to pay attention to the neighborhoods and families behind the men in blue...

...God orchestrates such selforganizing, steadily elevating the possibilities, making for storied achievements, enriching the values generated...

...of .Mt...

...FOR FALL 1999 Michael W. Cuneo, Ph.D...

...Lawrence S. Cunningham writes the "Religion Book Notes" for Commonweal...

...Readers disinclined to learn much about the ecclesiastical and civil machinations of the period may sigh with impatience at the author's attention to these matters...

...William L. Portier, Ph.D...

...in Pastoral Ministry or Ph.D, in Theotogyprograms or our...

...He gives a compelling behindthe-scenes look at the life of a New York City cop...

...This portrays a loose teleology, a soft concept of creation, one that permits genuine, though not ultimate, integrity and autonomy in the creatures...

...The McDonald family saga begins with Thomas Skelly, McDonald's maternal grandfather...

...By the time of her death in 1581, Teresa had founded more than a dozen monastic houses...

...Her commentary on the Song of Songs was a daring enterprise since women were not considered to be capable of teaching theology...

...Teresa called him, jokingly, "half a friar" (because of his diminutive size) and her "little Seneca" because of his learning and discretion...

...In meeting these three tasks, Rolston provides ample fodder for his critics...

...for Rolston, ecological biology refutes any claim that either human life or the unique transitions in evolutionary history were inevitable...

...However, they will not fail to see, in Medwick's telling, how this extraordinary woman, with her relentless will (Teresa called it muy determinada determinacion), her overwhelming sense of the presence of God, her extraordinary administrative skills, her mastery of diplomacy, and her capacity for the subtle application of flattery--as well as her uncanny ability to get her way while being obedient to her superiors--became one of the most luminous and attractive figures in the history of Christian holiness...

...Teresa's right to teach, however, would not be vindicated until our time when the late Paul VI named her a doctor of the church...

...This was the century of Ignatius Loyola, Philip II, Cervantes, E1 Greco, Zurburan, Saint John of the Cross, to say nothing of Teresa herself...

...In 1622 Teresa was canonized...

...I was reminded of my grandfather while reading Brian McDonald's My Father's Gun...

...teaching as if she were a master in spite of Saint Paul's order that women should not teach...

...She allows Teresa to speak, she takes seriously the saint's self-understanding that she has had deep spiritual experiences, and she never explains Teresa's writings as mere erotic sublimations (although there is a deep strain of the erotic in her writing) or some sort of psychological construct...

...In fact, the greatest asset "Experimenting with tradition since 1898...

...Sociobiologists will counter his counter-arguments...

...Cathleen Medwick pays glancing attention to these swirling eddies of intellectual and spiritual experimentation...

...It is worthwhile to remember that a friar who was her contemporary spent some years in a prison for translating the Song into Spanish...