Religion booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham The story of John Henry Newman's intellectual and spiritual development from his childhood until his conversion in 1845 has been told many times, most...
...it was the core of the monastic office...
...and a final chapter on lay spiritualities...
...Still, there is a lack of any sustained consideration of how spirituality relates to concern for the world...
...What makes this book interesting is his angle of vision: Newman's slow evolution from the standard anti-Catholicism of the day, the development of his spiritual life (nourished by his lifelong meditation on the Scriptures), his single-minded fidelity to the liturgical sources of the Anglican Prayer Book and the Roman Breviary, his assiduous study of patristics, and his long engagement with Caroline Divines, especially the seventeenth-century bishop Lancelot Andrewes, who would later fascinate T. S. Eliot...
...As an Anglican priest, Newman slowly came to appreciate Catholic forms of devotion (he even tried to do the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius, but without a director), but was skeptical of the more rococo forms of post-Tridentine devo-tionalism...
...If this was the only volume Blehl had in mind, one would rejoice that we have it...
...Her negative tools come from the monastic tradition: guarding the heart, watchfulness of thoughts, fasting, dreams, and repentance...
...Gerald Browne's good idea was to translate the abbreviated psalter of the Venerable Bede (died 735), one of the earliest devotional manuals...
...He was the postulator for Newman's cause in Rome, and Newman was declared a fit subject for canonization in 1991...
...Are we to forget that Ramparts, the radical 1960s journal, was at its start explicitly Catholic...
...Perhaps in the future she can provide a fuller and more balanced picture of lay experience and public life in the United States...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.f Theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham The story of John Henry Newman's intellectual and spiritual development from his childhood until his conversion in 1845 has been told many times, most famously by Newman himself in Apologia Pro Vita Sua...
...Some may wonder at her somewhat facile distinction between apophatic and cataphatic prayer, as well as her surprising omissions...
...Paulist, $24.95, 452 pp...
...The final section on lay spirituality is a pastiche of elements from a number of sources (the charismatics, monastic renewal, and others...
...lay movements in the United States before the Second Vatican Council (our own beloved Commonweal takes pride of place...
...In the end, this is a rather disappointing study, because in its hurry it leaves out too much...
...That quibble aside, this is a rich work...
...There are, in addition, social tools: humility, ministry, and the common table...
...the rise of lay spirituality and its connection to family life, birth control, divorce, and other difficult issues...
...Similarly, it could contrast the lay voices of the National Review with those of this journal...
...never gets mentioned, but who would deny that his youthful God and Man at Yale was an "in your face" apologia for traditional Christianity, published precisely at the time that Paul Blanshard was writing anti-Catholic screeds...
...I am always on the lookout for good resources on the Psalms...
...Although he doesn't say so explicitly, Blehl wants to make a case for Newman the saint and wants to trace that sanctity back to its Anglican roots...
...This is an excellent and fair study by a devoted scholar of Newman...
...Readers may enjoy contrasting her approach with that of Paul Mar-iani's recent Thirty Days, a personal introduction to the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola...
...Some of his best writing on the Christian life during his Anglican years took the form of sermons preached at Oxford, which were later issued as Parochial and Plain Sermons, handily available in a single volume from Ignatius Press...
...There is an unbroken assumption that contemporary readers who wish to make use of these ancient monastic tools are sympathetic to the insights of the monastic tradition...
...Her positive tools: ceaseless prayer, manual labor, the cell, vigils, manifestation of thoughts...
...indeed, his scholarly writing on Newman goes back to the late 1950s...
...Commonweal gets due praise, but there is nothing here about the work of Sally and Joseph Cunneen who for years edited Cross Currents...
...I am greedy for books, though: for the time being, I shall keep it on my shelf...
...Bede had the fine idea of excerpting a verse or two from each of the Psalms, presumably indicating the essence of each, and compiling them into a single book...
...As I worked through this short but handsomely produced volume, I realized it might be used as an instructional tool: one could look at Bede's choice of a verse, and then ask, is this the verse I would choose...
...The work is enhanced by the inclusion of some of Newman's early prayers...
...Funk, like the householder of the gospel, is able to draw out both old things and new...
...Tools Matter for Practicing the Spiritual Life Mary Margaret Funk Continuum, $19.95,165 pp...
...In her earlier work, Thoughts Matter (1998), Funk explored the famous eight logismi-the "afflicted thoughts" (her usage), misnamed the "seven deadly sins" in the West-which the old monastic tradition taught as barriers to the purity of heart which, Jesus says, lets us "see God...
...Funk shows how a person might borrow from one form of spirituality in order to enrich another...
...Margaret Mary Funk is a Benedictine monastic who serves as the executive director of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue-an organization of Christian monks who pursue dialogue with other monastics, mainly those of the Buddhist tradition...
...This is a well-trod path and most of the controversies are familiar: the pacifism of Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez's blend of religious practice and social action, John F. Kennedy's privatization of religious belief, etc...
...He probably knew the psalter by heart...
...The omission of Ignatian discernment, though, is odd...
...Who knows if Father Blehl intended a second volume on Newman's life after 1845...
...First Things, I suppose, if one is not fastidious about association with the mean-spirited sarcasm of the editor...
...the tension in the public sphere illustrated by the friction between figures like Mario Cuomo and Geraldine Ferraro and the late Cardinal John O'Connor over the question of abortion policy...
...More important, Wolfteich tells a very one-sided story...
...As a former prioress, she is well equipped to share the wisdom of this ancient school of spirituality...
...I must concur with Blehl (as well as Ian Ker, the best Newman scholar writing today) that the sermons' underlying theme is holiness of life...
...The facts of his life are easily available to those who are willing to master the huge corpus of New-maniana...
...In her new book, she discusses the tools needed to advance in the Christian life...
...tury and to set out a statement of lay spirituality...
...In a scant 180 pages, Claire Wolfteitch tries to trace the emergence of the American Catholic laity in the twentieth cenAmerican Catholics through the Twentieth Century: Spirituality, Lay Experience, and Public Life Claire E. Wolfteich Crossroad, $24.95,212 pp...
...Pilgrim Journey: John Henry Newman 1801-1845 Vincent Ferrer Blehl, SJ...
...The book at hand is a fitting tribute to the memory of one of the greatest Newman scholars...
...While I am an unapolo-getic "Commonweal Catholic," there is a vigorous body of conservative Catholics who never get a whisper here...
...The many rich traditions of Catholic spirituality-Franciscan, Carmelite, etc.- have distinguishing characteristics, but no rigid boundaries...
...The book is organized around five large themes: a brief survey of the evolution of the term "lay" and of lay spirituality in history...
...Her good final full chapter speaks of tools for discernment and offers practical examples...
...Wolfteich's topic was too large for the book she wrote...
...Since Blehl made the case for Newman's holiness to the Vatican, there is no question of his competence in this area...
...Even in telling the "liberal" story this book misses some important things...
...Taking the conservative laity into account would have allowed a contrast between (for example) religious privatization in the thinking of a Geraldine Ferraro and the more aggressive Catholicism of an Antonin Scalia or a William Bennett...
...The core of such a chapter is already present in Funk's excellent but brief reflection on ministry...
...In plain English, Wolfteich takes us rapidly from the post-World War I church to Call to Action...
...That is probably the way I will use this slim volume, but it would also make a wonderful gift to someone who loves the Psalms...
...An added chapter on "tools for service" might have strengthened the volume...
...Does my choice or Bede's better capture the tone of a given psalm...
...Where does a Catholic who wants to write long articles without footnotes on broadly Catholic themes submit today...
...The psalter is at the heart of Christian prayer, and I use it when teaching about prayer in the classroom...
...Browne, following the great monastic scholar Benedicta Ward, thinks that this kind of book was meant both as a manual of prayer and a summary of the meaning of each individual psalm...
...William F. Buckley Jr...
...The sections on the development of a contemporary lay spirituality are superficial, and are not grounded in works that have near-canonical status, such as Congar's work on the laity...
...the issue of Catholics in the public sphere...
...Chapter six of Funk's book offers a brief introduction to various forms of prayer, including the Jesus prayer, the method recommended by The Cloud of Unknowing, Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection's practice of the presence of God, and the prayer of Saint Teresa of Avila...
...The Abbreviated Psalter of the Venerable Bede Translated by Gerald M. Browne Eerdmans, $18, 92 pp...
...Her title refers to the fourth chapter of Benedict' s Rule, 'Tools (instrumenta) for Good Work...
...Newman was a meticulous keeper of his own papers, a disciplined diarist, a prodigious publisher, and indefatigable letter writer...
...This chapter is more suggestive than complete...
...These journals are on the wane or have disappeared...
...What about Justus George Lawler's Continuum-one of the best intellectual journals published by a lay Catholic...
...Bede was offered as an oblate to the monastery of Wearmouth when he was only seven years old and spent his whole life as a monk...
...Vincent Ferrer Blehl, who died last November, is one of the most famous names in Newman scholarship...
...As a result, this is a walk down one Catholic American path, but it is not the only avenue available...
...They range from the writers in the decidedly odd Wanderer (lay founded and lay edited) to the occasionally interesting but generally cranky pages of the New Oxford Review and Crisis (both lay founded), to say nothing of the public intellectuals who serve as court theologians for corporate America...
...Reading sermons is not fashionable today, but a careful reading of Newman's sermons can yield brilliant insights into the Christian life...
...One may disagree with them, but who can deny their place in the world of the Catholic laity in this country...
...Such a work would be most welcome...
...Funk's book is inspired by that source, but is hardly a gloss on it...
...As a study of Newman's spirituality, this is more detailed and focused than Louis Bouyer's Newman: His Life and Spirituality (1958) which follows Newman until his death...
Vol. 129 • October 2002 • No. 18
