Religion booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham Largely inspired by the pioneering work of Latin American liberation theologians, there is now a wide range of theologians who write within...
...fourth, the church has a history, lives in history, and in relationship to historical moments...
...Hardly an auCommonweal 30 November 9,2001 tobiography in any sense of the term, the subtitle word "sketches" is an apt description of this book...
...It is highly readable, learned, full of interesting material gleaned from primary archival research, and amply illustrated...
...In the final chapter, Kiely tells us about his adventures as a master of one of Harvard's residential houses...
...Kiely's book was published by a rather out-of-the-way house (Medio Media in Catalina, Arizona) but it is worth tracking down if one wants to get into the heart and soul of a person whose humanity is nurtured by faith, prayer, and service to others...
...More crucially, there was the almost universally accepted story that Mary Magdalen, along with her brother Lazarus and her sister Martha, had evangelized all of Provence until she took up the eremitic life in the Maritime Alps...
...Nearly 20 percent of this fall's incoming class is Hispanic...
...One who does is Thomas Keating...
...The Better Part: Stages for Contemplative Living Thomas Keating, O.C.S.O...
...In addition, its abundant annotation and generous bibliography point the reader to sources for further investigation...
...It was also a fitting tribute to the French missioners of the nineteenth century who had built the church—their presence came alive for Kiely and his wife not in the stones with which they built, but in a simple Christmas hymn...
...Fernandez concludes with future trajectories of Hispanic theology and a survey of work to be done...
...Here Keating provides new ways to understand prayer in relation to the humanity of Jesus, the character of sin, the problem of suffering, and compulsive thoughts or temptations to evil...
...Contemplative practice tames the superego, promotes solidarity, and engenders peace...
...Years ago [November 4,1994] I reviewed in these pages Susan Haskins's Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor...
...fifth, the church's social character requires that it not turn in on itself, indifferent to the needs and demands of the larger world...
...Subsequent chapters chronicle his friendship with a young student through whom he developed a passion for cycling, his meditation practice, and his connection to a Montreal priory and the Sienese monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore that has deep roots in the meditation tradition taught by Main and by the English monk, Laurence Freeman...
...second, the church affirms the communion of saints, and is therefore larger than a sociological reality...
...theologians have recognized that the experience of Hispanics in the United States is not the same as their Central or South American counterparts...
...It allowed medieval preachers to inveigh against sumptuous fashion consumption...
...Fernandez is sensitive to the fact the very word "Hispanic" is a bit of an abstraction, since there are widely different cultural groups who live under that umbrella term...
...The Making of the Magdalen Katherine Ludwig Jansen Princeton University Press, $19.95, 389 pp...
...Keating, however, takes a somewhat different—indeed, brilliant—approach by recalling that their brother, Lazarus, died and was raised by Jesus...
...Former abbot of the Cistercian monastery in Massachusetts, Keating is now a monk at the Snowmass, Colorado, monastery...
...As those theologies grow, they become more specific to reflect lived experience...
...The varied aspects of the Magdalen's life enhanced the reforming movement of the medieval church which began under Pope Gregory VII and Saint Peter Damian and culminated in the reforming legislation of Lateran IV...
...Rightly called the "herald of U.S...
...Any person who wishes to get a panoramic view of modern ecclesiology will be well served by Commonweal 32 November 9,2001 this volume...
...Lastly, she is exhaustive in her search for materials...
...It has been argued that the current interest in contemplative prayer is a middle-class luxury for those who wish to experience some kind of spiritual frisson...
...The Better Part is a modest volume in size but capacious in its wisdom and common (spiritual) sense...
...Notre Dame has started a highly visible Center for Latino Studies, and aggressively recruited Hispanic faculty and students...
...Noted ecclesiologist Joseph Komonchak has argued that in order to avoid two conceptual pitfalls—that communion ecclesiology denotes vague feelings of fellowship or, oppositely, a highly mystified church unrooted in history—it is necessary to define what communion ecclesiology is (and is not...
...As Fernandez traces its history, HisCommonzveal 28 November 9,2001 panic theology derives mainly from the work of Paris-trained Texan Virgilio Elizondo (now at Notre Dame...
...a new stage of theological reflection may be needed...
...La Cosecha ("The Harvest"), Eduardo Fernandez's rewritten doctoral thesis presented at Rome's Gregorian University, is the first full-length assessment of the rise and significance of this relatively new theological movement...
...It would be wonderful for someone to interview Keating at length and publish the results as a book...
...To what degree can communion ecclesiology deal with the historical reality of the church's human failings...
...Doyle is fair in his exposition of different theological opinions while being open about what he sees as deficiencies...
...it was the 'Dark Ages' that honored her as a preacher and apostle of the Commonweal 33 November 9,2001 apostles...
...Should, for example, communion ecclesiology start from the exigent reality of the local church and circle out to the universal church, or must we give priority to the universal church replicated in the local communion...
...Little, for example, has been written on Hispanic youth, or the ways that theological approaches founded on immigrant realities might change when American Hispanics begin to reach a more assimilated status...
...Keating sees Lazarus as the model for the apex of contemplative prayer: he passes beyond sitting at the feet of Jesus (like Mary) and undergoes a spiritual death and rebirth not unlike the passage through the active and passive night of faith described by John of the Cross...
...In that vision, the pope stood at the apex of a pyramid with the laity forming the base line...
...the latter has chosen the "better part...
...Her converted life gave inspiration to the recuperation of "fallen women" by the establishment of hostels and asylums for that purpose...
...In this revision of her exhaustively researched Princeton dissertation, Katherine Jansen documents how this composite Mary figure became a source for medieval commentators and preachers...
...The tradition that she evangelized in France created a sticky problem for the medieval preachers: how to account for a woman preaching when women were not supposed to preach, according to Saint Paul's stipulation that women keep silent in the church...
...What is the precise relationship between the church and the larger culture...
...What does this present volume add which has not been said already...
...And it gives us the current status questionis in that it provides us a notion of where things are and leaves us with questions about where things will (or may) go...
...The final twenty-seven pages of Q&A are worth the price of the book...
...I hope that many students will be lucky enough to encounter a teacher who remembers his students and colleagues with such evident love...
...Main's method of meditation bears a similarity to, but has some differences from, centering prayer as practiced and taught by Keating...
...Is that relationship to be counter-cultural or dialogical...
...Perhaps the most original part of the book is the last section in which Keating answers frequently asked questions about prayer in general and centering prayer in particular...
...This book provides an articulate summary of the leading theological trends in the area of ecclesiology...
...He further argues that contemplative living is not a form of spiritual individualism...
...When the ordeal is over with the happy result of a healthy child, Kiely makes a litany of persons who aided their baby adding, beautifully, that the Good Samaritans of this world do not make the heavenly company redundant...
...I read this while traveling and found it a welcome companion...
...Utilizing the gospel story of Martha and Mary to speak of the contemplative life, Keating adds a new twist to an old analogy...
...ety," as Robert Bellarmine famously put it, possessing a transparent, hierarchical structure...
...I wished only for more...
...So great was Gregory's authority that the Roman church accepted his Magdalen for almost fourteen hundred years, until the liturgical calendar reform of 1969...
...Hence, the bibliography at the end of the work is particularly valuable as it provides an authoritative listing of all the major works of Hispanic theologians over the last generation...
...This, in a fine phrase of Keating, leads people to shoot people in Northern Ireland...
...Asian, African, and womanist theologies abound...
...For that reason, like-minded Hispanic thinkers have banded together to reflect on their Christian faith within the context of living in the United States...
...At Christmas, a vaguely familiar hymn, the Chinese version of the French II est ne, le divin enfant, moved his Czech-born wife to tears as she remembered her exile in France...
...It is the precise merit of Dennis Doyle's book to provide a history of the developments in communion ecclesiology from their roots in the nineteenth century to the work of twentieth-century giants Charles Journet, Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, and Joseph Ratzinger, as well as those who write from the particular perspective of liberationist, reformist, or social-actionist...
...hence, for example, the distinction between feminist and womanist theology, with the latter term used to designate women of color...
...Nonetheless, it must be said that when Jansen wants to make a point she does it with some sharpness...
...Anyone who pays attention to religious demographics in this country will not be surprised at the rise of such a theological enterprise...
...This more horizontal view of the church is called communion ecclesiology...
...Such an ecclesiology would have to do justice to five basic principles: first, the church has a transcendent dimension...
...Doyle ends his discussion of theologians with an interesting chapter on the thinking of three theologians who reflect, respectively, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Free Church positions: the late Jean Marie Tillard, John Zizioulas, and Miroslav Wolf...
...How the church responds to that rate, and to the perception that large numbers of Hispanics leave the church, is crucial...
...It is in this Q&A that one gets a real glimpse of how a great spiritual teacher thinks...
...But from the nineteenth century onward, theologians in Germany and England sought to recover a different understanding of the Commonweal 31 November 9, 2001 church by emphasizing the sacramental and creedal bonds between all Catholic believers...
...Her putative relics were housed at Vezelay, a primary spot on the Compostela pilgrimage road of the Middle Ages...
...Consider the last sentence of her book: "We must not forget that it is our own age that officially memorializes Saint Mary Magdalene as a disciple...
...Commonweal 34 November 9,2001...
...In sum: I highly recommend this wellresearched volume...
...on the contrary, he shows how the contemplative life is one characterized by deep sensitivity to the needs of the world...
...As Jansen's bibliography demonstrates, much scholarship has been devoted to the place of Mary Magdalen in Christian piety...
...A distinguished professor of literature at Harvard, Robert Kiely is a longtime practitioner of daily meditation developed from his encounter with the teachings of the late John Main, a Benedictine monk...
...First, Jansen limits herself to a discrete period in church history (she ends her story on the eve of the Reformation, during which the cult of the saints underwent an understandable metamorphosis), and focuses on medieval preaching...
...As the current interests of many of these theologians become conventional opinion (Is there anyone who doubts that popular religion is an important resource for theological reflection...
...His capacity to say profound things in a relatively brief space is pure gift...
...Jansen's ample documentation about this issue raises interesting questions about lay preaching in general and female preaching in particular...
...He clearly delineates the lasting articulations of theological ideas (he has a soft spot for Henri de Lubac) from those which are only for the moment...
...Vatican II embraced this vision of the church in its use of the metaphor "the community of the People of God" just as, decades earlier, Pope Pius XII brought the phrase "mystical body of Christ" to the fore...
...In brief but dense chapters linking prayer, attentive reading of the Scriptures (lectio divina), and the Eucharist, Keating offers a vision of an ever-deepening life of spiritual transformation...
...Subsequent theologians have built on his pioneering insights into popular religion (Orlando Espin and Timothy Matovina), pastoral issues (Allen F. Deck), theological methodology (Roberto Goizueta and Alex Garcia-Rivera), and the nexus between popular religion and the transcendent (Jaime Vidal...
...What is pertinent to one group may be irrelevant to another...
...Neither those looking for "spiritual experience" of an emotional sort, nor those who base their actions on unexamined inherited images of God are on the right contemplative path...
...Second, Jansen has a genuine gift for relating the story of the Magdalen to the larger religious and social history of the period without the usually tendentious "gender studies" palaver that many such works feel a need to include...
...Mary was a symbol of, among other things, the repentant sinner (the presumption was, without evidence, that she had been a prostitute), the contemplative life (since she sat at the Lord's feet while her sister Martha busied herself in active service), and, the "apostle to the apostles" (apostola apostolorum), a title she merited as witness to the Resurrection of Jesus...
...It provides the best overall picture of Hispanic theological efforts within the United States...
...Use of the term is not without peril...
...Two chapters narrate Kiely's sabbatical year teaching in China where he must adjust to an entirely different culture, a university unlike Harvard (to put it mildly), and the demands of a population hungry for learning and discussion...
...Hispanic theology," Elizondo, one-time rector of San Antonio's cathedral, was first to ponder the significance of "reading the Bible in Spanish," the meaning of Our Lady of Guadalupe, as well as the theological resources behind Hispanic liturgical practices, popular devotions, and symbolic actions like the Christmas Posada...
...It is a loving portrait of his work as a teacher-scholar at Harvard (along with a sly critique of the pomposities of the faculty), his dealing with student unrest, and a moving account of his care for the emerging presence of gay students...
...Fernandez himself notes that within a decade Hispanics may account for 50 percent of all Catholics in the United States...
...In the year 591, Pope Gregory the Great preached a sermon in the church of San Clemente in Rome in which he argued that the one and same Mary who washed the feet of Christ with her tears in the Gospel of Luke was the sister of Martha in the Gospel of John, and was Mary of Magdala whom Jesus exorcised of seven demons and who later became his devoted disciple, according to the Gospel of Mark...
...Their common purpose has given birth to a professional association and journal, both known by the acronym ACHTUS (Association of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States...
...Traditionally, Martha is identified with the Commonweal 29 November 9,2001 active life and Mary with the contemplative...
...Finally, nagging pastoral issues, not least of which is the need for Hispanic priests in communities beyond the traditional Sunbelt states, require further thought...
...Doyle argues that the articulation of a coherent communion ecclesiology can hold in helpful tension various tendencies within the church, whether "liberal" or "conservative," and thereby mitigate the dangers of sectarianism and dysfunctionalism...
...A vast number of medieval churches are named for her and there are widespread depictions of her life in the period's art...
...Different theologians respond to these and other questions in quite different ways...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...Continuum, $14.95,128 pp...
...Since, according to the legend, she retired as a hermit, her example could be employed to sing the praises of the contemplative life...
...Indeed, if there is a criticism of this work it is that in its transformation from dissertation to book it might have benefited from some judicious pruning but, to be fair, not much...
...Many contemporaries aspire to, but few deserve, the honorific term, "spiritual master...
...Over the past thirty years, a growing number of La Cosecha: Harvesting Contemporary United States Hispanic Theology (1972-98) Eduardo C. Fernandez Michael Glazier/Liturgical Press, $19.95,206 pp...
...To that objection Keating intelligently counters that too many religious people live with a religious "superego," by which he means the tendency to act out what we have been taught to think...
...Most poignant, in my estimation, were his treks to a Catholic church where he joined a Chinese community that worshiped in face of the official displeasure of local authorities...
...Still Learning: Spiritual Sketches from a Professor's Life Robert Kiely Media Media, $14.95, 205 pp...
...Included is a very moving account of the birth of his last daughter—a preemie who had to fight for life...
...In his arresting spiritual memoir, Kiely describes his encounter with Main and what the practice of contemplative meditation means to him...
...That story is a standard topos in patristic and medieval literature...
...The polysemous Magdalen image provided rich resources...
...He is an indefatigable teacher of "centering prayer," a regular participant in interreligious meetings, and the guiding spirit behind the "Contemplative Outreach" movement...
...I very much enjoyed these sketches, and look for more in the future...
...RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham Largely inspired by the pioneering work of Latin American liberation theologians, there is now a wide range of theologians who write within specific historical and/or existential contexts...
...Her conversion also tied nicely into the importance that the church (after the Lateran Council IV) put on confession of sins to preachers, especially mendicants, who were not slow to use her as an example of the penitent life...
...third, the church, both local and universal, is sacramental...
...Fernandez also includes an account of the pioneering work of women theologians Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz and Maria Pilar Aquino, as well as Protestant theologians like the prolific Cuban-born Methodist, Justo Gonzalez...
...One of the significant shifts in Catholic theology has been away from understanding the church as a "perfect sociCommunion Ecclesiology Dennis Doyle Orbis,$24, 196 pp...
...He ends with an imaginary fresco of All Saints in which he places the people at Harvard who have nurtured and edified him over the years...
Vol. 128 • November 2001 • No. 19
