Religion booknotes

...Were depictions of the three young men in the fiery furnace or Susanna and the falsely accusing elders an allusion to persecution or did such representations have an eschatological significance, or both...

...Grumbach is a believer, or, more precisely, one who strives for belief...

...Is the goal (agenda) of the church, while showing compassion to gays, to support research to eliminate this objective disorder through means acceptable to the church, for example, genetic surgery in utero with no adverse side effects...

...Why was there so little reference to the cross (and almost none to the crucifixion) in early Christian art...

...Everything coming from Rome, the eminent theologian noted, must be interpreted by the theologian and must be received by the church...

...DIANE LAVOS Natick, Mass...

...Until such time as the church can move toward a more neutral stance on the interpretation of the orientation itself—at root, a difficult, but serious theological and philosophical question—most dialogue between the gay community and the church will remain one of defensive posturing ROBERT J. COMISKEY Springfield, Va The editors comment: We doubt that the official church is supporting research to eliminate gays through genetic surgery, or otherwise...

...Naturally, the party is really only scaffolding for Grumbach to look back on her friends (everyone from Gypsy Rose Lee to Dorothy Day), to chronicle her reading, and to ac27 count for her days Those days begin before dawn with the psalms and end when Sybil, her companion, closes the bookstore they maintain across the road from their Maine home...

...The title of Robert McClory's book is slightly misleading since not all the persons profiled in this highly readable account were "dissenters" in the technical sense of the term...

...One thinks, almost instinctively, of the contemporary travails of Dupuis...

...I cannot recommend it too highly, both for the beauty of the writing and the deep sensibility that informs every page...

...Using the seminal work of John Noonan, McClory details how theologians, bishops (including Charles Borromeo), and Rome tried to get out of the impasse of the magisterial teaching that condemned the taking of interest on loans as intrinsically evil...

...Neither Mary Ward nor the Australian Mary McKillop was a dissenter: they were very tough women who became victims of clerical stupidity and episcopal bullies and whose vindication came only after their deaths...

...one finds some consolation in knowing that Yves Congar suffered in a similar fashion only half a century ago...

...In the earlier period, the subject of the surviving visual artifacts falls into four categories: (1) borrowings from the pagan world...

...Grumbach vows to slow down while I am still hopelessly addicted...

...The first two deal with problems of definition (he includes the now classic essay of the late Walter 26 (Continued from page 4) it is a virtual certainty that, given the rapid advances in these fields, we will know with a high level of confidence its causes within the next several decades...

...She vividly captures the villagers' closeness to the soil but also the slow intrusions of modernity...

...Her extensive notes indicate how carefully she has looked at the scholarly record and the text shows how judiciously she assesses contending opinions...

...In the contemporary climate of theological debate it is good to remind ourselves of what Cardinal Newman wrote to a potential convert worried about papal infallibility...

...It is also a topic of great debate, as is readily seen by contrasting Charles Bernard's rather traditional approach to "spiritual theology" with an essay on spirituality and the academy by Sandra Schneiders...

...From his alienated peers Chen found the support denied him by the official exemplars of Mao's society...

...30 Principe) and methodology...

...Likewise, the fourth section on spirituality and theology is too limited to explore fully this crucial theme...

...they accepted Chen for what he was, inaugurating him into their fellowship in a way that comes right out of The Outlaws of the Marsh, one of the classic Chinese novels of outsiders banding together in a righteous cause against oppression...

...The famine was directly attributable to Mao's policies and probably cost somewhere around 30 million lives—a figure staggering even by the standards of other great twentieth-century atrocities...

...The range of essays in this collection stretches from the Evangelical perspective to the Anglican, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic traditions Still, any course in Christian spirituality must engage primary texts...

...Such recollections fit well into her approach to spirituality, an approach best summed up in a line she quotes from Proust: "Yet the more one is religious, the less one dares to move toward certainty, to go beyond what one actually believes...

...Jensen reminds us of how much the baptismal sermons of both the Latin and Greek fathers relied on the symbolism of fish and water...

...The pilgrims and crusaders who visited Conques spread devotion to Foy around the world...

...We do part company on cats (she for, I against), and I was a tad sad that she actually reads that episcopal windbag, John Shelby Spong...

...How did early Christian art depict the Resurrection...

...not only was he mistreated in school, but he was also not permitted to continue his education beyond a certain point...

...She also enjoyed the support of powerful people, including the redoubtable Bernard of Clairvaux...

...Liang Heng's Son of the Revolution, Yue Daiyun's To the Storm, Nien Cheng's Shanghai Diary, and Jung Chang's Wild Swans are a few of the better-known ones...

...McClory, a frequent contributor to the Catholic press, teaches journalism at Northwestern University One expects him to write clearly and persuasively...

...In other words, exceptions were made to the observance of a prohibition against a practice called "intrinsically" evil...

...Little Saint is more like a "novel, a literary work" that would draw on her experiences living in the French village of Conques in the 1970s, and on the cult of Sainte Foy, whose ancient image was guarded in the village...

...The editorial echoes the sentiments of many Americans, even beyond partisanship, yet speaks volumes about our resilient, but battered democratic system of government and the primacy of the vote...

...McClory is concerned with the ways in which certain figures stand in tension with the institutional church...

...She frequently records lines from her reading that seem appropriate for meditation...

...We both view computers with ambivalence (too easy to become prolix but a blessing when fixing bad paragraphs) and read too fast...

...Second, some kind of essay attempting to tie the seemingly disparate strands of the various "schools" into a more organic whole would have been desirable...

...28...

...Understanding Early Christian Art Robin Margaret Jensen Routledge, $25 99,221 pp...

...4) portraits of Christ and the saints...

...At one point a pope allowed exceptions for those who held 5 percent interest contracts if the persons were "miserable" (for example, widows...

...To those surveys I will now add this excellent book...

...After forty years in India, Dupuis tried to think through Christian faith in the light of the world's religions only to spend his older years writing memos to hacks in the Vatican explaining why he is not heterodox...

...At the heart of her life, however, is prayer, as she made even more clear in her earlier book, The Presence of Absence— a work I recommended in this column and recommend again...

...Though the Cultural Revolution (its official dates of 1966-76 are as good as any) has obviously not come close to matching the Holocaust in America's collective consciousness, there's a sense in which it plays a similar role: as the Holocaust sometimes seems the defining experience of modern Jewish (or perhaps modern German, or even European) history for many Americans, so the Cultural Revolution has become the defining experience of modern Chinese history...

...Saint Foy, an early third-century martyr, is best known for the magnificent reliquary, made in the tenth century and kept m the village...

...But I also agree with those who said Gore should have asked for the statewide recount first thing, so it wouldn't look like he hand-picked the counties where he expected the most support...

...Yet they are portrayed here as a sympathetic lot...

...In the third section a brief overview of "Christian Traditions" is provided...

...Yet in ways the real Chinese analogy to the Holocaust may not be so much the Cultural Revolution as the terrible famine that preceded it by a few years...

...This shows up not only in the discipline of her quotidian life but in her obvious penchant for those striking aphorisms—pensees—that stud her text...

...The final three sections feature essays on spirituality and sacred Scripture, the Trinity, and Christian feminist spirituality...

...Hildegard of Bingen, for instance, did go mano a mano with some local hierarchs, but her theological vision was not so much dissent as it was a fresh way of thinking about things...

...Such a synthesis could have provided a greater sense of coherence to this collection...

...What doctrinal understandings stood behind the depiction of Christ as Orpheus or Helios or the seated philosopher or lawgiver7 Further, how did the transition come about from Christ as a beardless youth to one who was bearded...

...After the Great Helmsman's death in 1976, the educational system which Mao had done so much to destroy began to pull itself together again...

...There were well-developed cults all over Europe, Latin America, and even in this country where she is honored under the name of Santa Fe in New Mexico...

...Perhaps that's because the Cultural Revolution, like the Holocaust, has clear heroes, villains, and victims...

...This work is a quantum leap beyond those dreary bestsellers in which expatriates go on and on about the joys of Tuscany or Provence...

...That process of reception, as this readable book makes clear, is not always immediate or gracious At times it results in disaster, as in Rome's ignorant reaction to the pioneering efforts of Matteo Ricci to inculturate Christianity in seventeenth-century China...

...To cite one example, the discussion of the frequent use of the image of the fish goes beyond the obvious explanation of the acronym by which the Greek word ichthys stands for "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior...

...The chapter on usury will be of particular interest for those concerned about the church's current teaching on contraception...

...Late in the process of writing Little Saint, Hannah Green saw that what she was writing was not history or art history or hagiography...

...One reads that story, briefly recounted, as something vividly contemporary...

...Chen is younger than the other memoirists cited above, and though his family went through difficult times because of its "bad class background" (his father had been a landlord), the author thus did not have the same kind of experience in, say, the Red Guards that others have written about...

...The more crucial question of interpretation, of course, is why certain subjects were chosen and what they meant...

...Chen found himself back in school, reflecting on the irony of sitting under a slogan from the chairman, of all people, urging intellectual excellence...

...Because she started writing the book in the 1970s, Green was able to converse with men who had done forced labor in Germany during the war and those who had worked with the French resistance...

...Consequently, this book is best used as ancillary material for a university or seminary course on Christian spirituality...

...Cheered on by the gang members, Da Chen buckled down to work, and the book ends as he and his elder brother win places in universities at a time when doing so was "as rare as hitting all six numbers in the lottery...

...Interlaced in this story are flashbacks to her career as a teacher, editor, wife, mother, and much-published literary critic...

...Such a thought sends tremors of fear and distrust into the minds and hearts of the gay community, who are already fighting an uphill battle for their legitimate place at the Lord's table...

...Bullied by those who resented the former privileges of his family or who found him an easy target in an age when denunciation was encouraged, Chen fell in with an older gang of boys who had not only dropped out of school but were thoroughly alienated from society as a whole...

...Green did not set out to write hagiography, but I think this is hagiography at its best...

...Green, an Episcopalian, recognizes the numinous quality of the veneration of this saint and its influence in the ancient village She investigated the historical background of the cult and, in the process, became a good friend of those who live in the modern village of roughly two hundred people...

...3) biblical narratives...

...She not only gives us a sense of village life but in the process reconstructs its ancient, preChristian roots...

...I will keep a copy of your editorial with my Boston Globe from the day after the election as a reminder of the preciousness of my vote and everyone else's...

...Doris Grumbach's latest memoir revolves around her plan to have a party for her eightieth birthday...

...She has an empathetic eye that allows her to see the power of the saint...

...Mao, the dictator, was the friend of the devils...

...that expectation is met Though not a professional theologian, he is quite capable of writing about theology and does so lucidly (see his chapters on Theodore of Mopsuestia and Hincmar of Reims...

...This is perhaps the thinnest of the sections because it covers too much material in too limited a space (Roman Catholic spirituality becomes limited to the excellent essay on the Carmelites by Keith Egan) Separate essays cover Orthodox spirituality as well as Anglican and various Protestant schools...

...In passing we learn about the thousand-year-old hagiographical tradition about Saint Foy, the patois spoken in the area (whose origins are in the Celtic and Occitan tongues), medieval poetry recited in Saint Foy's honor, the reliquary donated by Charlemagne in the ninth century, the great tympanum over the church's door done in the fantastic form of the Romanesque, and the dolmens found in the larger region...

...There is so much to admire (or, indeed, envy) about Grumbach's life...

...First, this book would have been enriched by a selected annotated bibliography...

...Exploring Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Reader Edited by Kenneth J. Collins Baker, $26 99,400 pp The subtitle of Collins's anthology on spirituality should be taken seriously...

...Jensen is careful to give all plausible scholarly opinions an honest hearing but is not afraid to express her own judgment...

...However, I do have two minor criticisms...

...There is a thickness to Little Saint—a density that comes from eminent sympathy for the subject, a good historical sense, and a keen religious sensibility...

...Was the art after Constantine's edict of toleration subtle propaganda for imperial power or did it reflect the orthodoxy emerging from the Christological debates and their concUiar resolution...

...The fish sometimes depicted in meal scenes in the catacombs—most famously in the catacombs of Priscilla— is plausibly understood to refer to the post-Resurrection meals of Jesus described in John's Gospel and hint of the messianic banquet for those whose bodies lie in the underground cemeteries...

...He wanted China in perpetual turmoil so that he could rule forever...

...2) neutral images which most likely have a Christian emphasis (for example, the anchor, dove, or olive branch...

...Such scenes, Jensen argues, are not eucharistic but eschatological (why not both...

...However, that same instinct led her to do serious research that puts the saint's cult into historical context...

...I also revel in the fact that Grumbach and I have many of the same prejudices...

...Yet he found himself brought up against a glass ceiling...

...This anthology has introduced me to Wesleyan and Evangelical materials I was only vaguely acquainted with...

...The essays in this collection only provide background for such an engagement...

...Though from the dust jacket we learn that, after his studies in Beijing, he went 25 RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham Early Christian art, as Robin Jensen understands it, falls into two rather distinct chronological periods: the pre-Constantinian art of the third and fourth centuries and the early Byzantine period which runs roughly from the mid-fourth century to the early sixth century...

...Catherine of Siena should be seen less as a dissenter and more as a prophetic figure...

...I often use examples of early Christian art from the works of Gradon Snyder and F. van der Meer in my classes...

...It is that modest chord that runs through this elegantly written and very moving memoir...

...If Mao had known what his Little Red Guards were doing, he would have howled like a lonely wolf in his icy coffin and cried his smoke-ridden lungs out...

...The Vatican has honored both, but one hopes that posthumous church honors will also include profound apologies for the way certain prophetic women have been treated by those who wield clerical power...

...In light of recent actions from Rome (think of the scandalous badgering of Jacques Dupuis, S.J...

...History, of course, is full of these cautionary tales, as McClory makes abundantly clear...

...The result is a book that seamlessly blends ethnography, culinary history, the milieu in which the village developed, and the enduring piety of those who were nourished for over a millennium by the spiritual power of the virgin saint...

...These wonderful details are intertwined with descriptions of daily life in the village and the occupations of its inhabitants...

...Her home in Maine is snug, her library extensive (I envy anyone who actually owns all twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary—my first purchase when I hit the lottery), and she is blessed with enough leisure to read all of Prousf s A la recherche while planning her party...

...Voting rights Your stand against the bombastic activities of the Bush campaign was courageous, ("Votes Count," December 15, 2000...

...We both love the writings of Thomas Merton with the same ardor with which we loathe Ayn Rand...

...Perhaps the most interesting section of Faithful Dissenters is McClory's account of the struggles over usury in the sixteenth century...

...Christian spirituality provides many opportunities for ecumenical sharing...

...In 1962, the year Da Chen was born, China was just beginning to recover from this catastrophe, and yet only four years later Mao and his colleagues engineered the disaster of the Cultural Revolution...

...Collins divides his collection into seven large sections...

...Conques was a celebrated stop, all through the Middle Ages, on the pilgrimage route to Saint James in Compostela...

...Jensen discusses these questions and others in an orderly, careful, and clear manner...

...This is one of the best books I have ever read on a saint...