Religion booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham The Church According to the New Testament Daniel Harrington, S.J. Sheed & Ward, $19.95,187 pp. When Carroll Stuhlmueller died in 1994, he left behind a...
...This close reading of the New Testament keeps a basic fact in mind: one must read with an eye both on what is behind the text (for example, the believing community which produced a particular gospel), and the way-and ways-in which the text is received once it has appeared...
...Along with chapters on each of the various clusters of New Testament texts (the Pauline, Johannine, and so forth), Harrington concludes with reflections on the church in the world, ministry, and ministers...
...The bishops at Vatican II wisely refrained from issuing a separate document on Mary, instead adding a wonderful chapter dedicated to her in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church...
...Schaeffer begins her admiring biography of Mary Queen of Scots with a moving account of Mary's execution in 1587...
...Parishes, schools, and religious communities may find this book a rich resource for constructing liturgical celebrations for feast days or other special occasions-for example, during the months of October and May...
...Schaeffer tells this complex story- replete with coded messages, dark intrigues, counterfeit documents, Elizabethan spies, etc.-with a firm narrative grip...
...His work as editor of New Testament Abstracts guarantees that there is little in the world of scholarship that he has not read and digested...
...Her third husband was a Protestant...
...Those who wish to keep Marian devotion alive are well served by this manual of prayers compiled by William Storey, a retired Notre Dame theology professor and a veteran compiler of prayer books...
...I am hard pressed to think of any fiction writer who gives me greater pleasure, and no modern writer who so dazzles me with the power of her prose, the sharpness of her wit, and the depth of her grasp of the sacramental imagery of the Catholic tradition...
...This wonderful study, blending fine scholarship with a keen sense of the psalms as prayer, honors the memory of a great priest and teacher...
...Both elements shine through this work...
...For example, along with such standard categories as lament, praise, and thanksgiving, he gives us a chapter on psalms for sickness and dying, as well as the royal psalms of David...
...Schaeffer has provided a readable account of the complex life of a woman who became most commendable in the way she died...
...Here he offers a lucid survey of the New Testament witness to the way the followers of the Jesus movement grew into an assembly (ekklesia) of believers, who carry on the tradition of proclaiming and celebrating who Jesus was, what he did, and why it is worthy of remembrance...
...Stuhlmueller provides us with many practical hints on how to read the psalms...
...Others take her claims seriously but insist on reading her stories as allegories when, in fact, they are not...
...Carol Dempsey, O.P., and Timothy Lenchak, S.V.D., completed the work, and we owe them an immense debt...
...I have a small collection of books on the psalms, which favors studies that draw upon the classic commentators, while addressing the life of prayer...
...They were joined in a Protestant rite (the pope was not amused), and the marriage was a source of scandal even in her own country...
...Why should the rather modest output of a woman who died from lupus before she was forty command so much attention and such intense scrutiny...
...So, after browsing through its pages, reacquainting myself with authors whom I know or have read, and after immodestly checking the index to see if my own name appears (it does), I will see that it gets to a worthy library...
...The result was to put the mystery of Mary in the context of ecclesiology and Chris-tology, reining in the excessive expansion of Mariological speculation...
...The opening chapters concern themselves with the place of the psalms in the Bible and in the Christian community, and with ways of studying and praying the psalms...
...Born in 1542, she married the French Dauphin in 1558 and became the queen consort a year later...
...The endings of her stories (look at the final paragraphs of "Revelation") were almost symphonic in their intensity...
...This brief biography does not measure up to the high standard set by An-tonia Fraser's splendid 1993 biography, but few biographies do...
...Flannery O'Connor died in 1964 at the age of thirty-nine...
...Mounting a stage before a roaring fire, she spent her last moments in great dignity, only to die at the hands of an incompetent headsman who missed her neck with his first stroke...
...The prayers presented here are keenly sensitive to the rich sources of the Catholic liturgical tradition, and the readings range from the apostolic fathers to contemporary writers...
...This volume fits my twin criteria: solid scholarship, combined with a sense of why the psalter is the prayer book of the synagogue and of the church...
...I read it while covering similar material in a class for first-year university students and found it to be quite illuminating and user-friendly...
...Morning and evening prayer are structured after the traditional offices of lauds and vespers...
...His reflections can be quite provocative: If there is no clear understanding of a fixed ministry (especially the concept of "priest") in the New Testament, does that mean that ministry is now a closed discussion or open to further developments...
...This bibliography came to me unre-quested-one of those over-the-transom volumes that appear in my mail now and again (an unexpected beneficence to a reviewer...
...Finally, O'Connor was a very careful writer whose sentences, densely worked over and pruned to avoid cliches, each carried more than the usual amount of freight...
...Darnley, generally feckless in everything including his faith, managed to avoid going to his own nuptial Mass, but to even things out, he walked out on one of John Knox's more thunderous sermons and went hawking...
...His taxonomy is not only useful but insightful...
...That suspicion led to her death...
...This passing observation, of course, has all kinds of ramifications for present discussions about ministry...
...Finally, he invites us to pray the psalms in accordance with the liturgy and the classic commentators...
...She entered the great hall of Fotheringay, which had been decked out in black velvet...
...One of my favorites is the Litany of Mary of Nazareth, so often identified with Pax Christi...
...that we look for key words and key ideas...
...Still, there is a puzzle as one pages through this Brobdingnagian compilation of book-length criticism, literary es-says, M.A...
...Darnley collaborated in the murder of Mary's secretary, David Rizzio, of whom he was madly jealous...
...As she knelt and put her head on the block, Mary prayed in Latin, "Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit...
...It is too valuable a work to stay on one's own shelf if one is not an O'Connor scholar, which I am not...
...When he died two years later-a man she had truly loved, despite his weak body (and mind)-she returned to a Scotland filled with nationalist and anti-Catholic fervor, stoked all the more by the fanatical energies of the totally unlovable John Knox...
...In any case, I am happy to have this handy volume...
...Here there is nothing maudlin (a common affliction in Marian devotion), and nothing that is not doctrinally sound...
...O'Connor's stories have frequently held pride of place in my syllabi...
...They had a son, James VI of Scotland (later James I of England...
...The book concludes with some litanies in honor of Mary...
...He suggests that we read many translations...
...Nor is it easy to grasp that she wrote comedy, in Dante's sense of the term (a work that has a happy ending), when the work is filled with violence and terror...
...In 1565, she married her cousin, Lord Darnley...
...This final section sets out the core issues treated in the chapter, and suggests the way these issues may touch contemporary discussions...
...that we identify our sentiments with Jesus, who was a reader and pray-er of the psalms...
...When Carroll Stuhlmueller died in 1994, he left behind a nearly finished manu-script on the psalms...
...This does not mean that Catholicism has abandoned its deep-felt veneration for Mary, the Mother of God, nor should it...
...The Protestant lords rose in rebellion, Hepburn fled to Scandinavia, Mary abdicated in favor of her son and sought protection from her cousin, the redoubtable Elizabeth I. The Virgin Queen feared Mary as a rival, so Mary ended up under house arrest for fourteen years before she was implicated in a murder plot against Elizabeth...
...Harrington concludes each chapter with a coda titled "Possibilities and Problems...
...My own sense is that many readers do not take seriously O'Connor's conviction that she was speaking in contemporary terms about the Incarnation, using a language that was analogical and allusive and that moved, as she once famously said, from manners into mystery...
...Successive chapters deal with the types of psalms...
...The Dauphin was a pious Catholic, but that was safe in France...
...Her enemies taunted her for marrying her husband's killer...
...What began with pomp ended in farce...
...She was faithful until the moment of her death, but had to struggle to be faithful to her religious duties in her own home...
...After her death there came another collection of short stories and a brilliant edition of her letters, compiled by Sally Fitzgerald...
...It was done with almost liturgical ceremony...
...His book is divided into three parts: morning and evening prayer for the Marian liturgical year...
...In addition to his scholarly contributions, he has the gift of putting that scholarship at the service of the church...
...Having lived a goodly portion of my life on the border between North Florida and South Georgia, I can also attest that what is often described by some as her penchant for the grotesque is, in fact, simply a matter of close observation...
...That would hardly happen, in any event, because John Paul II is famously dedicated to Mary...
...and a selection of daily readings drawn first from Scripture and then from church writers...
...During her lifetime she published two novellas, a short-story collection, and some scattered essays (posthumously collected) and reviews...
...Commonweal itself has published more than twenty reviews and appreciations of her works dating back to 1952...
...The Spirituality of the Psalms is a fitting tribute to a man praised in the preface to this book by his fellow Passionist, Donald Senior, as a person of "humane spirit" and "genuine holiness...
...morning and evening prayer for nine major feasts of Mary...
...When, after her decapitation, the executioner reached under her skirt to claim her garter as his prize, Mary's little Skye terrier came out from beneath his hiding place under her voluminous skirts...
...Incredibly, Mary married him after he divorced his wife...
...Darnley, in turn, was murdered by James Hepburn who, after a trial, was exonerated of the murder...
...She interweaves the story of the beautiful queen against the background of the religious wars of the day...
...The pope always-sometimes excessively, in the judgment of some-keeps Mary before our eyes...
...Mary, a devout Catholic, did little to impose her faith on Scotland, but had little support for this fidelity...
...It will find its place on my shelf along with the other collections of prayers I have accumulated over the years-collections I find useful when introducing topics or making points in my theology classes...
...There is no total agreement on the taxonomy of psalm-types, so Stuhlmueller has every right to make his own choice...
...Every college and university library needs this great labor of love on its shelves...
...It also has the merit of bridging the world of historical critical scholarship and the world of ecclesiology today: Harrington shows that there need not be any chasm between the world of the scholar and the world of faith...
...Daniel Harrington is one of the most productive and readable biblical scholars in the English-speaking world...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham is John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...theses, more than three hundred doctoral dissertations, and nearly two hundred foreign-language essays (a surprisingly large number in Japanese) so comprehensively assembled by the librarian who keeps order in the O'Connor archives at the Georgia College and State University in O'Connor's native Milledgeville...
...This book could be used as the center of a course on the church, or as a text for a catechetical or adult enrichment course...
Vol. 130 • January 2003 • No. 1
