Religion booknotes

...The eleven chapters that make up Living Catholicism first took shape at a series of retreat conferences...

...I read this book while preparing to teach a short course on prayer through our campus ministry office...

...I picked up a number of Lax volumes while visiting there a few years ago...

...He devotes a whole chapter to Sister Annette Walters, a Josephite nun who not only had great standing in the field, but who saw early on the application of clinical psychology to the formation of those in religious life...

...Behr-Sigel recognizes that Orthodox women are not permitted to preach within the liturgy itself, and that the possibility of ordination to the presbyterate seems a dim prospect...

...In structure and in substance, the book is very much an elementary introduction...

...It is the merit of Gillespie's book that he shows how academic psychology spurred Catholic clinical work and experimental research...

...The compact biography of Behr-Sigel by Lyn Breck is useful...

...I only wish that he had further reflected on theology where the category of "experience" threatens to replace "faith formation" as a central part of theological hermeneutics...

...After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the city of Paris provided a home for an extraordinary group of Russian Orthodox emigre intellectuals who, among other things, founded and sustained the Saint Sergius Theological Institute...

...Quoting Cardinal Newman, Strange says that watchfulness is "the very definition of a Christian...

...I can think of no better way of praising Strange than to say that I was tempted to Xerox his chapters on prayer and hand them out to students in lieu of lectures...

...These meditations take into account the reality of Jesus Christ as the center of our faith, the way(s) of discipleship, and the character of that discipleship as it is lived within the believing community...

...Yes, Sigmund Freud was suspect both for his reductionistic theories about religion and his penchant for talking about that most delicate of subjects-sex...

...He divides his subject into four parts, Creation, Torah, Commandment, and The Holy One, and each section is composed of brief chapters that focus on a particular theme...

...Elisabeth Behr-Sigel must be numbered in that illustrious litany...

...Roderick Strange is an English diocesan priest who has served as Catholic chaplain at Oxford University and as a parish priest...

...The collection of her occasional papers and studies is particularly interesting because we do not often have the opportunity to hear an Orthodox woman speak to the wider Christian world about "women's issues" and, in particular, women's ministry...

...These poems are spare and visual...

...His attacks triggered a reaction from Catholic psychiatrists as well as those knowledgeable in both experimental and clinical psychology...

...Ask for this small volume and get hooked...

...The bridge figures to our time include the Jesuit psychoanalyst William Meissner, the late Henri Nouwen, and others who drew closer lines between the traditional care of souls and the insights of psychology...

...A personal addendum: Among the many pleasures of writing this column is discovering worthy books from small and neglected publishers...

...Because she is active in ecumenical circles she knows other traditions and frames her own reflections in that context...

...Phyllis Zagano has devoted a recent book, Holy Saturday (Crossroad), to the same set of questions from the perspective of Roman Catholicism...

...Still active, Behr-Sigel was born in Alsace and became, in 1926, one of the first women on the faculty of theology at Strasbourg...

...Read aloud they are frequently revelatory, and the revelation (and holiness) often comes packaged with shrewd humor...

...he issues a sober warning about the trivialization of psychology in certain areas of "spirituality...

...If, and here he borrows from Sister Wendy Beckett, we stand unprotected before God, God will come and "take possession of us...

...Since those days she has pursued her life's work as a lay theologian in the Orthodox Church...

...Likewise, the rabbinic example of the ram's horn-the shofar-which makes no sound until breath is blown into it, reminded me that a person prays when God's breath (spirit) moves through him or her...

...Even though the analogy is not exact, it is an excellent point for interfaith discussion...

...Kushner draws on sacred Scripture, rabbinical writings, and the wisdom sayings of both Jewish theologians and Ha-sidic spiritual masters to introduce Christians to Jewish spirituality...

...Two lines of inquiry caught my eye...

...Jewish Spirituality: A Brief Introduction for Christians Lawrence Kushner Jewish Lights, $12.95,128 pp...

...He notes the crucial role of psychology in dealing with sexual abuse, addiction, and other serious traumas, and the ongoing efforts to develop serious programs in pastoral ministry...

...I was struck that the same text, in the hands of the church Fathers, was seen as a reference to the Word...

...From this volume of essays we begin to understand why Behr-Sigel is known as the "living memory" of Orthodoxy...

...While studying in Paris, she came in contact with the Russian community and was eventually received into that church largely under the influence of Lev Gillet, a former Benedictine who had become an Orthodox monk as well as the founder of the first French-speaking Orthodox community in France...

...How we got from a situation in which Catholics reacted against "psychology" in any but its narrowly Thomistic sense to the acceptance of all stripes of psychotherapy and its cousins is the subject of Gillespie's highly readable and informative history...

...Rabbi Lawrence Kushner (not to be confused with Rabbi Harold Kushner, the equally esteemed author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People) is one of our most creative religious writers...

...Lax, who died last year in his native Olean, New York, after spending many years on the island of Patmos in Greece, was a poet, mystic, solitary, peacemaker, onetime New Yorker writer, and lifelong friend and correspondent of Thomas Merton's...

...Fulton Sheen, that charismatic windbag, railed against psychoanalysis in print and on television...

...To inspire the desire for such an exchange is high praise for any book...

...When you do, try to track down Lax's Circus of the Sun...

...Kushner, citing Proverbs 8:26, points out that the rabbinic Fathers taught that Torah existed in the mind of God before creation...

...He is currently the rector of the Beda College in Rome-an institution dedicated to older men studying for the priesthood...

...Best known in this country for his The Catholic Faith (1986), a highly readable explanation of Catholic doctrine, Strange moves, in this new work, into the realm of spirituality...

...Prayer, before it becomes words or while it is words, is a kind of open alertness...

...In a concluding chapter, Gillespie surveys the current scene...

...Most of Lax's work was published in Switzerland in bilingual English/German editions but are distributed in the United States by Paul Spaeth of the Fried-sam Library of Saint Bonaventure University...

...Elsewhere, fully aware that Orthodox theology finds ordination of women to be unacceptable for reasons rooted in liturgical symbolism, Behr-Sigel poses the essential question: "Does the ordination of women to the priesthood constitute a genuine heresy, a rupture with the teachings of Christ...

...In Strange's words, it is a perceptiveness, the eyes of faith, a cast of mind, and a way of looking...

...She does not assay an answer but, citing with approval the thinking of the late John Meyendorff, says that such a question is not unrelated to the issue of distinguishing the holy tradition of the church from human traditions that express revelation only obscurely and, often, "even oppose and obscure it...

...Behr-Sigel asks whether the ancient order of the deaconess could be restored since it has never been formally abolished in Orthodoxy...

...Nonetheless, she has thought deeply on both issues...

...And Kushner's assertion that the term Torah is more accurately understood as "teaching" or "instruction" helped me to understand Psalm 1 as it prefaces the entire psalter, as well as to deconstruct Saint Paul's narrower understanding of law in opposition to grace...

...Anyone interested in the intellectual history of the American Catholic Church will find much to learn in this well-researched book by an active teacher and scholar in the field of pastoral counseling...

...RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham One need only pay a bit of attention to what passes for spirituality to affirm Phillip Rieff's 1966 argument that therapy was replacing faith in people's estimation...

...Strange's skill with the well-timed anecdote derived from his pastoral experience and his wide-ranging reading adds to the attraction...

...This present work uses some material from his previous The Book of Miracles, but as the title indicates, targets sympathetic Christians...

...Robert Lax's final volume of poetry, Peacemaker's Handbook, is such a volume...

...But there was a tradition of academic psychology at, among other places, The Catholic University of America that had been pioneered by Edward Pace and continued by Thomas Vernor Moore...

...The book would have been enhanced by a bibliography and an index...

...Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.ogy at the University of Notre Dame...

...Although my own interest in psychology is tangential, I found this a most helpful book...

...The fruition of psychological research among American Catholics came on the eve of Vatican II with the work of Gregory Zilboorg, Francis Braceland, and John Cavanaugh as well as the extraordinary labors of the Dutch-born priest, Adrian Van Kaam...

...It is a slight volume of a little over one hundred pages, but it will see you through any winter...

...Nor did Pope Pius XII eschew the field of psychotherapy, if one credits his allocutions to those who practiced in the field...

...Seminars, conferences, and retreats advertise-and I am only speaking of Catholics here-everything from twelve-step programs, enneagrams, and Jungian analysis to pottery and massages...

...Those observations open the volume and, in various guises, appear in his treatment of the prayer of Jesus, the resurrected Christ, the church as communion, and other topics...

...In the Jewish view, even the greatest sages have not plumbed the depths of the mystery of God since, as the psalmist says, "the whole world and everything in it belong to God" (Ps 24:1...

...Nevertheless, I found it full of wonderful vignettes...

...One can only hope that present duties will not keep this engaging writer from his desk quite as long as it has taken him to write this companion to The Catholic Faith...

...It was good to be reminded of the brilliant work of Edward Pace (a fellow Floridian), the spiritual itinerary of Thomas Vernor Moore (who ended his days as a Carthusian monk in Spain), the work of the Italian priest-psychiatrist Agostino Gemelli (who, alas, had a dubious record during the Fascist regime in Italy for, among other things, his barely disguised anti-Semitism), the exemplary labors of Van Kaam, Nouwen, and Annette Walters...

...As I read this deceptively simple book, I wanted to talk with Kushner, both to learn more and to add insights from the Christian perspective...

...She further wonders: What would a restored order look like...

...A discussion (even an argument or two) would be a good thing as Kushner shows because, above all, arguing and disputing is a traditional rabbinic exercise (sanctified by that great questioner, Job...

...Particularly compelling is how Strange portrays Jesus as fully human, without compromising the Christian conviction that Jesus was also the Son of God...

...That ability to affirm the faith in its fullness (see his wonderfully fresh account of the meaning of the Eucharist), without falling back on the ponderous formulations of the dogmatic theologians, is one of the more attractive aspects of this work...

...Great thinkers like Vladimir Lossky, Paul Evdokimov, Sergius Bolgakov, and Nikoli Berdyaev not only provided a corpus of important theological writings, but also, because of their decades-long dialogue with Roman Catholic French thinkers, brought their insights to bear on the great flourishing of theological thinking that prefigured Vatican II...