Eve by Pamela Norris RELIGION BOOKS
Wheeler, Edward T.
only surprise in the work is the lack...
...Fresh tend to be more direct and intensely inroles within and without the church...
...The Next Generation of tentious debate between deregulation adAccording to Norris, the contempo- Environmental Policy vocates who wish to scrap antipollution rary goal for woman emerging out of the Edited by Marian R. Chertow programs wholesale and environmentalstory of the Fall is "to have knowledge and Daniel C. Esty ists who believe such a change of direction and the garden...
...She ranges widely and reads well...
...conferences, fourteen workshops, and Eve and her daughters find resonance dozens of papers are distilled into fifin sacrament...
...Life in a Sacred Universe chapters that allow Norris's Eve to throw These new ideas result from a twoEdited by Carol ]. Dempsey and off the yoke of traditional interpretation year initiative of the Yale Center for EnRussell A. Butkus point to the full expression of women's vironmental Law and Policy involving The Liturgical Press, $27.95, 313 pp...
...Again her plot summaries often un- physically, Drummond is seen weightangle in illuminating ways, the inter- ing the secular with the sacred...
...The moral subtext is enlight- Environment ness leaders, scientists, city managers, ened liberation in a strictly material Stephen Bede Scharper environmentalists, consumer advocates, world...
...Norris reads Paul and Augustine well and, drawing on the work of Peter Brown and other scholars, indicates the particular attractions for women of virginity...
...country (many consciously from "outThis is a thoroughly secular book, and Redeeming the Time side the beltway") and a wide array of its most overt judgments are essentially A Political Theology of the backgrounds (highway planners, busiaesthetic...
...Edward T. Wheeler is dean of faculty at the lies Darwin's Origin of Species...
...from stage to stage...
...Her theologians, weighed down by scholarblueprint, Norris judges, is one of woe- range is impressive: ancient narratives ship and doctrinal responsibility, [regisful subordination: "Ideas about male and modern novels are deftly summa- tering that] the Paradise of youthful sexand female sexuality and the balance of rized, and Norris finds her way easily uality had indeed been lost forever...
...nated analysis of the tradition, makes ing the theory of evolution to his stu- However, if skillfully brought togeththe need for articulation seem that much dents, the lawyer pauses in gathering er-as Thinking Ecologically is-the readmore acute...
...For example, an actianity...
...A Biography Genesis story, accompanied by accounts The genial tone and resolutely unreliPamela Norris that illustrate how prescriptive notions gious perspective do, however, produce a New York University Press...
...In that context, reading the process of goods production, the sershepherded as opposed to merely en- these three remarkable, contrasting vice-based economy, globalization, techjoined by the church...
...The protagonist development, market-based incentives, has underscored (November 19, 1999), Henry Drummond (played consum- advances in the science of measurement, the sponsa Christi has not "articulated a mately by Spencer Tracy) stands alone, and so on), chapters in such a collection broadly persuasive vision of women's the last person in the courtroom...
...But the situation was more complex than such an approach would imply...
...Eve/ Woman stands ac- tations from standard and non-tradi- measured stance she takes: "It is temptcused of vanity, moral weakness, and tional authors on virtually every page...
...The subsequent treatment of these themes in "Fantasies of Eve" takes up, among other re-embodiments of Eve, the Virgin Mary...
...The chapthis updated Eve, women can consider ter-by-chapter presentation of "new gen"the difficult choices and compromises of eration" ideas is offered not so much as adult life, the requirement to balance ex- All Creation Is middle ground between opposing forces, Groaning ploration and individuation with social but as higher ground where more proand family demands...
...a devotional Christian tradition that mil- Robert Jaquay A volume of essays written by nuitates against the argument...
...0 up his things to contemplate two books er will be rewarded for the extra effort central to the controversy...
...Here is the Christ's death...
...35, 496 pp...
...Norris's retelling of the negative he first woman became the temporary works offering subversive characterization of Woman throughout "blueprint for Woman, an retellings of the myth...
...ing, when dealing with the attitude of sexual frailty, while Adam/Man's role Yet the text is neither dense nor rebar- the early church to Adam and Eve, to in the transaction can be summarized bative, and the author provides sum- apply a pick-and-mix approach-to put by the familiar defense, 'She led him maries of the argument as she proceeds in a thumb and pull out the ripe plums of on...
...Norris's prefacing remark, that in Mary "women were pledged to an ideal of behavior they could never reali7e....It seems a curious, malignant, and ridiculous sentence," suggests a lack of sympathy for the material that is generally absent in the rest of her book, but once again reveals "t•' iICh o??f, if' = 17 tilI'r?1?,ti!'r ui paradise...
...sexuality and creativity without the stig- hundreds of experts from around the ma of temptation or Original Sin...
...The Christian church is now seen to exist first, "The Making of Bad Reputation," wholly apart from religious questions Eve is a survey of the commentaries on the of any sort...
...That and extraordinarily unpolemical...
...Under the tutelage of Yale LIHwcrsity Press, 616,271 pp...
...Two major timeless with time nor does the story of 240 pp...
...The concluding An Interdisciplinary Vision for ductive discourse is possible...
...is held in the other...
...Ironically, merous contributors can demand more at least for Christian readers, the lack of n writing about the envi- of a reader than a book written in a sinstridency in Pamela Norris's analysis is ronment, the breadth and gle voice...
...This is a very literary blamed...
...As Commonweal's books brought to mind a scene from the nology, private financing for sustainable recent discussion of Catholic liberalism film Inherit the Wind...
...twining of the myth of Adam and Eve Thinking Ecologically, the secular book in and their contemporary settings...
...midrash and early Christian commenT explanation of her charac- The book is well illustrated, and Nor- taries is unblinking, but she is gracious ter and possibilities," writes ris is very well informed, easy to read, enough to see the writers as "respectable the English critic Pamela Norris...
...In that light, "The Terrible Flesh" ior formulated in the first centuries after work with illustrative and thematic quo- may be Norris's best chapter...
...One could say the misogyny, the damning phrase or polemical statement that seems to confirm wholesale prejudice against women, and in particular a deep suspicion of female sexuality...
...the Bible Editors Marian R. Chertow and Daniel Williams School in New London, Connecticut...
...In addition to varying writbuilt on an assurance of that tradition's I complexity of the subject ing styles and subject matter (including irrelevance...
...Men are more blind than to be by, the prescriptions for human behav- ics, and painters...
...In one hand required...
...from victory defending a high-school formation-packed than those in a book This "biography" of Eve, in its deraci- biology teacher prosecuted for present- prepared by a single set of authors...
...there is no belief in an order allows for a wide range of land use, the effect of the automobile, external to the self, transcendent, and approaches...
...The power between the sexes derive from, through the theological debates and of- context of the times provides underone might say have been contaminated fers allusions to a myriad of writers, crit- standing...
...What a peculiar feeling it is teen chapters-each a separately written to end a book whose very weight of writ- essay-edited and arranged into a coten and iconographic evidence points to herent, accessible form...
...of gender evolved with the rise of Chris- certain leveling effect...
...Surely this is a strange omission...
...We follow Norris through perceptive readings of Commonweal 38 March 10, 2000 works scattered throughout the canon, Milton, Christine de Pizan, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anita Brookner....(But why SEEING GREEN no Wife of Bath...
...only surprise in the work is the lack of surprise, both in the indictment, never WITHOUT THE CORE pushed too hard, of male privilege, and in the matter-of-fact way in which a tradition shaped fundamentally by the Eve is divided into two sections...
...She does this imperfect analogy, ambitiously seeks a reader service in pushing the analysis Thinking Ecologically to reorient this nation's frequently conas deftly as she does...
...certain basic presuppositions...
...There is no intersection of the Conlinuurn Trblishing Conmpany, S76.95, farmers-among others...
...The second, "Fantasies of Eve," count of the Cupid and Psyche myth (and looks at the way in which the tradition the analogies to the Fall it provides) exists informed the imaginations of male and on the same plane with that of Augustine's Edward T. Wheeler female artists from ancient times to the struggles with the origin of evil in The City present-with female writers in con- of God...
...is neither needed nor possible...
...Mentally more than C. Esty introduce their book with a Commonweal 39 March 10, 2000...
Vol. 127 • March 2000 • No. 5
