Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits. By Allan Greer

298 History and Sociology of Religion

Eve’s Revenge: Women and a Spirituality of the Body, Lilian Calles Barger, Brazos Press 2003 (ISBN 1-58743-040-1), 224 pp., pb$14.99

Lilian Calles Barger’s book Eve’s Revenge is a wolf in wolf’s clothing.Ms Barger has perfected the art of cloaking conservative, right wing,antifeminist, homophobic ideology within postmodern religious schol-arship. Evident only in the bibliography and the occasional name drop,Barger has read (though not understood) theorists such as Kristeva,Foucault, Butler, and Iriguaray, to only name a few. Through quotestaken out of context and scholarly buzzwords, Barger etches out herthesis: by giving women the technology, the accessibility, and the rightto control their fertility, feminists have defeminized women. They havetaken away the very thing that makes a woman special: her ability tohave children. Barger’s book sets feminism back seventy-five years. Sheclaims that women are rejecting everything that makes women essen-tially women (having babies) and becoming more like men so that theycan ‘navigate the male-defined public world’ (p. 25). In a nutshell, Eve’sRevenge is a modern reiteration of the ‘salvation through childbearing’theology. There is no room in this ‘reclamation’ of women’s bodies forbarren women, lesbians, women who choose not to be mothers, or evensingle mothers.

Barger blames feminism for making women reject their feminin-ity and fertility so that they can blend unnoticeably into a man’s world. She claims that dependable birth control (i.e. ‘the pill’) hascaused women to have superficial, meaningless relationships. Shewrites,

We no longer need the commitment of marriage or the complementarygender to have ‘sex.’ Reliable contraception and abortion on demandhave provided women and men safety valves to let them engage in sexwithout bringing their whole selves into the relationship . . . (p. 72)

The severing of sex, gender, and procreation from the body is changingthe meaning of relationships at a fundamental level, making all relationships purely voluntary and without any binding biological connection. (p. 73)

Second, not only does contraception diminish intimacy and emotionalunity, it promotes lesbianism and androgyny, according to Barger. Inthe following quote, we shall see not only what Barger thinks of reject-ing a destiny of giving birth, but also that the way she approaches thetopic here is telling. It is a strategy that she uses throughout the book.

Reviews in Religion and Theology, 13:3 (2006)© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ,UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

She finds something that many women (including feminists) mightagree on. Then she inserts a bit of antifeminism or right-wing ideology.For example, as we see below, she begins with a critique of cosmeticsurgery and excessive dieting (this is also how she begins the book).Then she opens the gates:

Still, it is difficult to escape the marginalization of our gender when manyof us rush headlong into our own assault on the female body throughpractices like cosmetic surgery and excessive dieting. These are joined by contraceptive abuse, abortion, rejecting male sexual correspondence, or engaging in an obscuring of the female body through androgyny . . .(p. 25)

The book drew me in because she began with a narrative about a closefriend’s cosmetic surgery. But she subtly led me through an essential-ist diatribe about how women are their bodies. On the surface (i.e. ifone only cruises the bibliography and the index), this book appears to be a thoughtful, in depth consideration of a spiritually of the body.She lures the unsophisticated reader with name-dropping, hot-topicchapter headings, and various invocations of pop-culture, like ‘Sex inthe City’. The book felt manipulative to me.

I would, however, recommend that this book be used in a feministtheory course. It is a very good example of a kind of pop-theology and pop gender theory that seeks to justify a Christo-centrist essen-tialism of women. I would teach it alongside books by Christina HoffSummers.

In short, Barger offers an abundance of criticism yet no answers. Hermandate is for women to stop using birth control, not to get tattoos,not to have abortions, not to be a single mother, not to act like men,and to have sex only with men. Women should, according to Barger,be real women and do what God intended them to do: marry straightmen and have babies. Lots of them.

Teresa J. HornsbyDrury University

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The Birth of Christianity: The First Twenty Years, Paul Barnett, Wm.B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 2005 (0-8028-2781-0), x + 229 pp., pb $15.00

Theological libraries are filled with essays and books that attempt toprovide readers with details about the nascent years of the Christianfaith. Biblical scholars for hundreds of years have attempted to fill in

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© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

details for what they deemed to be missing or fragmentary in the NewTestament. Some have provided hagiographical or doctrine latticednarratives mixed with pietistic motivations to convince readers aboutthe veracity of the New Testament within a 1st century CE context.These motives are sometimes joined with a hope that faith in Christand trust in the 1st century documents as authoritative might ensue.Others draw on a wealth of language skills, knowledge of 1st centurycultures from extant materials and documents traced to the 1st century,familiarity with archaeological evidence, and knowledge of the Roman,Greek, and Hebraic worlds out of which Christianity emerged. PaulBarnett is among the latter. He is clearly not timid about identifyingproblems of a historical or hermeneutical nature in relation to the studyof the New Testament world and then tackling with them with schol-arly acumen.

Barnett’s book weaves together narratives from a life of study about an array of topics associated with the 1st century Middle Eastern world. By doing so, he provides plausible glimpses into aworld out of which Christian faith was formed and offers insightsabout the assertions made within the New Testament itself. Over thecourse of 15 chapters, Barnett takes readers on an intellectual journeythat parallels his own. In these chapters, he covers such topics as: EarlyChristianity and the Study of History, Time Borders and Christology,World History and Christian History, the Mission to Greece by Pauland others, Christians in Antioch, the Influence of Peter, the Gospel nar-ratives, the Acts of the Apostles, ‘Q’, and the land of Israel in the years34–39 CE.

Although one might contest some of his assertions, it is clear thatmost of what he proposes coincides with much of contemporary NewTestament scholarship. From the dating of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians to issues about the authority of the Acts of the Apostles,Barnett communicates succinctly salient details so that readers can rec-ognize phases of textual development and something of the textualcore. Constructing his narrative from previously unconnected pieces,Barnett provides readers a mosaic of Middle Eastern 1st century lifethat begins to breath life into what has been for some – flannel boardcharacters. He thickens the readers’ perception of the 1st centuryworld. No easy task.

What strikes me as new about Barnett’s work is his manner of ques-tioning the formation of early church doctrine. His method of interro-gating New Testament narratives enables readers to question alongsidewith him assertions made within the texts and by early church writersabout the teaching of Jesus, Paul, and the disciples. Readers puzzleover conundrums and difficulties identified in contemporary scholar-ship with Barnett as they piece together a picture of what would



eventually become known as the Christian faith. Barnett sparkswonder about how it is that Paul’s Christology seems to be so wellformed by the time he begins writing his first letters. Readers areinvited to consider what it was that prompted the development ormovement from Jesus the Jewish prophet or teacher to that of theMessiah who was declared to be the Son of God? One ponders withhim the motives of the 1st century writers. Readers are prompted toengage in reflection on what the contextual factors were out of whichthe narratives sprang forth. Barnett teases out details that may havebeen ignored or disregarded and thereby begins to piece together apicture of the first twenty years of Christianity that enables readerswith an opportunity to see old texts with new eyes.

Perhaps one of the most telling assertions in the book is Barnett’sclaim that, ‘. . . the birth of Christianity and the birth of Christology areinseparable, both as to time and essence’. The book unfolds around thiscentral assertion. Yet, the book does not become mired within it. Thisbook could serve well as a companion text for a course that introducesstudents to the New Testament and the challenges of tackling 1stcentury texts.

Paul O. MyhreWabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion

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Christology in Dialogue with Muslims: A Critical Analysis of Chris-tian Presentations of Christ for Muslims from the Ninth and Twen-tieth Centuries, Mark Beaumont, Regnum Books International 2005(1-870345-46-0), xxiv + 227 pp., pb £19.99

There could hardly be a more pressing topic in the disciplines of reli-gion studies and theology than interreligious dialogue in general andChristian–Muslim dialogue in particular. This work of missiology, inwhich Mark Beaumont analyzes various contributions from the 9th and20th centuries, offers much, so long as one is prepared to accept theauthor’s limited approach to ‘dialogue’ as the ‘presentation of Christ’from Christians to Muslims. This book, ‘substantially the same’ (p. xvii)as the Author’s 2003 PhD dissertation from the Oxford Centre forMission Studies, via the Open University, can be divided into tworoughly equal sections, analyzing what the author believes to be the‘outstanding presentations of Christ for Muslims’ (p. xx). The firstsection analyzes four theologians from several different Middle Eastern



churches in the 8th and 9th centuries engaged in writing apologeticsfor their own sects, directed at either or both Muslims and other Chris-tian sects. In the second section, it is primarily the work of Europeantheologians in the 19th and 20th centuries seeking dialogue withMuslims that are analyzed.

The book begins with an excellent chapter on Qur’anic Christologyand the significant Christological debates that have occurred withinIslam – both in dialogue with Christians and independently – over thecenturies. Indeed, it is suggested that the Prophet Muhammad himselfdebated Christology with Christians on several occasions (p. 2). Thisopening chapter – which would provide students with a solid intro-ductory overview of Islamic Christologies – is essential in setting forththe two major differences between normative Islamic and ChristianChristology that reoccur throughout this book. Most obviously, theMuslim rejection of Jesus’ divinity and the assertion of the figurative,not literal, ‘sonship’ of Christ and, second, the complex Muslimdenial(s) of the crucifixion, most commonly the literal denial that Jesusof Nazareth was crucified but also the denial of the death of the ‘Word’.

From here, we are given a brief overview of early Middle EasternChristian approaches to Islam, which were abidingly denunciation ofwhat was considered just another heterodox Christian sect to emergein the region. The focus is, however, on the 9th century, when dialoguein the form of apologetics seems to have reached its Near Easternzenith. In this religiously diverse region, dialogue, apologetics, andpolemic occurred among different Christian sects, as much as betweenChristians and Muslims. Thus we are presented with works from theChalcedonian Ab Qurra (Chapter 3), the Jacobite Ab R ’ita (Chapter4), and the Nestorians Timothy I and ’Amm r al Basr (Chapters 2 and5). Beaumont’s satisfactory approach to these theologians is briefly tointroduce their religious and historical contexts, then break down andsummarize their major apologetic works before analyzing and com-paring them. A particularly significant fact that Beaumont chronicleswell here is the rise of Arabic as the theological lingua franca of MiddleEastern Christianity, to the detriment of Greek and Syriac. The resultof both the Arabic turn and the interreligious dialogue is the formula-tion of new words and concepts in Arabic to communicate fundamen-tal Christian concepts. Thus, despite its clear missiological focus andlanguage, I suggest that scholars of ancient Near Eastern Christianitywill be most interested in this section.

The second half focuses on the far more recent work of abidinglyEurope theologians in the 19th and 20th centuries, beginning with the 19th century German Lutheran Karl Pfander, and ending with ananalysis of the missionary tract, S rah al Mas h (Story of Christ). Beaumont’s main interest lies with three latter-20th century theolo-gians, the Church of England’s Kenneth Cragg (Chapter 8), the

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progressive American theologian John Hick, and German Catholic the-ologian Hans Küng (Chapter 9). Beaumont provides stimulating analy-sis of each of these complex thinkers, revealing that inter-Christiandebates and the two abiding Christological themes – Christ’s divinityand crucifixion – are as topical today as they were 1200 years ago. Thus,although Cragg describes dialogue as moving ‘from bigotry towardsfinality’ (p. 140), he rejects ‘supine tolerance’ (id.), takes a problemati-cally selective approach to Qur’anic interpretation (p. 146), and main-tains a theology rooted in blood atonement that would not be out ofplace in the 9th century, perhaps. Equally, despite John Hick – a majorvoice in interfaith dialogue – seemingly going further toward an‘Islamic’ Christ in negotiating what he calls the ‘paradox of grace’, byholding that Jesus and Muhammad are both ‘true servants of God’ (p.156), his rejection of Christ as God incarnate, Beaumont argues, will bejust as alienating to other Christians as it will be attractive to Muslims(pp. 161–2). In the middle ground lies Hans Küng who has long beena fine exponent of interfaith dialogue, allowing for multiple truths toemerge from his many exchanges. Beaumont’s analysis of Küng’sexchanges with Seyyed Hossein Nasr (pp. 165–8) is example of whatinterfaith dialogue perhaps should be.

The abiding absences in this work are a discussion of ethics and, iron-ically perhaps, a sense of history. For those approaching this work fromoutside the field of missiology, and for those readers with a hesitant or perhaps ambiguous approach to Christian mission in the Muslimworld, Beaumont fails to provide a coherent ethical account of his and his subjects’ understandings of ‘dialogue’. The author correctlyacknowledges the increase in tensions between Christianity and Islam and yet the precise role that Christian mission may have playedin creating this tension, and precisely what it is that Christian mission can offer for a future de-escalation of tension remains unclear, despite it being an obvious concern for Beaumont’s 20thcentury theologians. Equally, with the exception of a brief section of the chapter dividing the two timeframes (pp. 113–16), there is scantacknowledgement of the enormous changes to beset the relationshipbetween Christianity and Islam between the 9th and 20th centuries.Useful for this study would be an analysis, following from EdwardSaid and Albert Hourani, perhaps, of the links between Western impe-rial interests and religious interaction with the Islamic world. Theresults of a complex and intertwined history are hinted at, but neverallowed to significantly influence what is at times a disappointinglynarrow approach.

Indeed, one could surmise that what is really lacking in this book arerelationships. After all, ‘dialogue’ – however one understands it – isonly as meaningful as the relationships that beget it and grow from it.We have hints of significant relationships at work here, between



Timothy I and the Caliph al Mahd (Chapter 2), between AbR ’ita and Ab Qurra (Chapter 4), and between Kenneth Cragg andIsm ’il al Far q (Chapter 8); unfortunately, none of them are depictedin sufficient depth or character to allow them to make a lasting impres-sion. Once loosened from the constraints of his PhD, the author couldcertainly have revised and expanded this aspect of the work. Ulti-mately, what we have is an explicit work of missiology that offers much beyond the limitations of that genre, if the reader is prepared to acknowledge the author’s specific approach. While there is muchmore to be said on Christian–Muslim dialogue – however one definesthat – this is certainly a meaningful contribution that those with aninterest in Christian–Muslim relations would benefit from dialoguingwith.

Ibrahim AbrahamMonash University

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Interpreting Christian History: The Challenge of the Churches’ Past,Euan Cameron, Blackwell Publishing 2005 (0-631-21523-9), xii + 292pp., hb/pb £50.00/£15.99

This book is an excellent summary of Christian history from the apos-tolic period to the current day and is written in an engaging way. Itwill be profitably used by scholars and students in all Christian tradi-tions and is a helpful text not only for introductory seminary churchhistory or historical theology courses, but also for historiography inuniversity graduate courses. There is good potential for fruitful use asbackground bibliography in seminary liturgics courses and, because ofChristianity’s pervasive cultural influence, in college Western Civiliza-tion surveys. The book’s ecumenical versatility and broad conceptionare its greatest strengths.

Chapter 1 is a fast-moving overview of church history. Cameron’sthesis is that there has never been a form of pristine Christianity unaf-fected by cultural context and historical surroundings. Though thisthesis seems hard to reject, Cameron devotes many pages showing howChristian scholars and controversialists of all stripes have over the cen-turies spent the better part of their careers trying to prove the oppo-site. In centuries past, many persons would have argued against this thesis in the effort to defend the transcendence of the Christianmessage, or their constituency’s version of that message, but the basic

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point is that someone’s ‘absolute truth’ was in combat with someoneelse’s ‘absolute truth’, which reflects a belief that ‘absolute truth’existed. However, especially since the Enlightenment and the growingacceptance of cultural relativity as itself an ‘absolute truth’, those whowould reject Cameron’s thesis of Christianity being at all times his-torically conditioned have seen themselves as saviors of the gospel.Subtly ironic is the thought that for Christianity not to be historicallyconditioned would actually strike at the essential doctrine of Christ’sincarnation as the enfleshment of truth itself.

Cameron confesses belief in an ‘essential Christianity’, but arguesthat this core is always obscured by constantly shifting cultural forms.Those who reject historical conditioning of Christianity Cameron calls‘positivists’, and their goal is maintenance of pure teaching as it hasbeen traditionally received. Cameron’s first chapter encourages exam-ination of how one conceives of the truth of historical propositions, aswell as the truth of theological or philosophical ones.

Chapter 2 takes up the second major thesis: that Christians of alltypes, individually as well as institutionally, tend to elevate secondarythemes at the expense of a more central expression of the gospel. There-fore, how and to whom one prays (God and/or saints) becomes moreimportant than if one prays. How one defines eucharistic presence and with what degree of liturgical ornamentation one celebrates theeucharist become more important than if one receives communion ina spirit of charity. Precise intellectual formulation of doctrine becomesmore important than application of doctrine in one’s life. Cameron callsthese and other examples ‘means to holiness’ and asserts that, depend-ing on competing cultural values, various means are always being pro-moted as ultimate ends in themselves. Cameron points out that notonly have Catholics and various forms of Protestants argued over these‘means to holiness’, but also even adherents within a single traditionhave done so.

Chapter 3 surveys various traditions within Christian historiogra-phy, arguing that there has been a gradual recognition by the differentchurches that the ways in which they have thought of their own historyhave changed over time. This points to a deeper reality: the churchitself has also changed. There has been a steady move away from astatic view of the church’s past toward a more fluid one, recognizinghuman foibles on all sides of every debate and that there is always adisconnect between the ideal and the actual church.

Chapter 4 represents a transition from pure history to historical the-ology and is the most theoretical portion of the work. Cameron herereiterates his point about the cultural conditioning of Christianity, butwarns against the extreme view that there are no norms of truth withinthe life of the church. These norms, however, may at times apply only



within a particular tradition or within a certain set of shared definitionsof terms. Theology can do certain things, and history can do others, butthe point of the final chapter is to engage in theological reflection uponthe church’s history, not an easy task because of the chasm betweensecular and faith-based approaches. Cameron’s reflection succeedswith admirable evenhandedness.

For instance, his treatment of Feuerbach’s thought as psychologicalreductionism best understood as anthropology instead of theology isapt. Another example of Cameron’s perspicuity is his clear explanationof Schleiermacher’s project as the rehabilitation of theology’s relevance,based not on dogma, but instead on the priority of religious feeling andexperience. This represented a way forward for theology in the face ofdevastating inroads from the Enlightenment.

The discussion of Barth and neo-orthodoxy was sophisticated andreflected the sometimes inconsistent and evolutionary nature of Barth’sthought. Especially helpful was discussion of Barth in relation to post-modernism, in which Barth was cast, along with Bultmann, as precur-sors for Derrida and Foucault, based on Barth’s in-breaking Word ofGod and Bultmann’s existentialism, both creative responses to the deadend of historicism in theological method.

The discussion of perspective’s critical importance for postmod-ernists, as well as loss of the independence of subjects and objects, willbe helpful to contemporary students in many disciplines, not justhistory or theology, seeking to navigate the shoals of critical theory. Asan example, the author points out that the relationship between Chris-tianity and culture is truly a ‘two-way street’, as both affect and nec-essarily change each other, a seemingly obvious insight but one worthnoting as it demonstrates the twin chimeras of an imagined pristineChristianity unaffected by culture and any supposedly inviolable inde-pendence of critical theory. Cameron’s wide-ranging appreciation forphilosophy as well as theology, literature, and history is evident. Hiseye for detail misses nothing, as evidenced by his identification of intel-lectual links between Milbank and Hans Urs von Balthasar, based ontheir mutual concern for aesthetics as a vehicle into theology.

Everyone has the right to limit the scope of one’s work, andCameron’s choice to omit discussion of the quest for the historical Jesusis understandable, given the space needed for such a task. Never-theless, some effort in this direction would have provided further elaboration of his two basic theses. Only on one occasion did the book descend to personal commentary on another’s scholarship (andthat only in a footnote regarding a recently defended dissertation by an enthusiastic Catholic graduate student). Still, Cameron’s workwas broadly charitable and a fine exercise in ecumenical scholarshipbetween positions that many would see as unbridgeable. A mark of thisauthor’s confidence is his ability to acknowledge his prejudices, rather



than pretending they do not exist. An example of something Cameronappears to dislike would be the radical orthodoxy movement, but heis nonetheless careful to appraise its strengths and weaknesses fairly.One hopes Cameron will write for many years so that the academiccommunity and others can continue to read such thoughtful and stimulating prose.

J. Elton Smith, JrFordham University

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Disclosures. Conversations Gay and Spiritual, Michael Ford, CowleyPublications 2005 (1-56101-228-9), 216 pp., pb $14.95

Michael Ford invites the reader ‘to enter the spiritual and psychologicallives of gay people from a variety of denominations on three continents’(Europe, North America, and Africa) and one is soon engaged by thepersonal stories that emerge in the following twenty-six chapters. Priorto this, an opening prelude sets the religious and secular context for thesubsequent conversations, summarizing on the one hand recent eventsthat led to the publication of the Windsor report and Vatican statementsopposing homosexual practice and same-sex unions; and on the otherhand, progressive state legislation for sanctioning civil partnerships.The prelude concludes with a discussion on the ‘psycho-spiritual’ effectsthis controversy has for those who identify as Christian and gay/lesbian, especially for those who fear the consequences of being outedand who are compelled to become ‘habitual liars’ in order to evade anticipated consequences. In words that seem more characteristic of the pre-1970s closeted gay lives rather than the more liberated post-stonewall atmosphere of the last few decades, Ford speaks of indi-viduals’ torturous existence, vulnerability, enforced deception habits,ongoing personal vigilance, and surveillance employed as part of their‘psychological survival kit for a homophobic world’ (p. 29). Yet this sadsummary is an accurate depiction of the experiences of many of his con-tributors. Such experiences are offset by those who have also, or simul-taneously, spoken out for the gift of homosexuality, and it is in this latterspirit that Ford publishes these conversations.

This publication provides an interesting insight into the way thatcontributors in a range of denominations and contexts have dealt withdifficult conflicts: between vocational calling and institutional religioushomophobia; love of scripture and the experience of having those scrip-tures wielded against oneself and one’s community; God’s apparent



hatred of homosexuality and the belief that God creates and loves gaymen and lesbian women; desire to remain within one’s confessionalcommunity and the knowledge that abandoning it would be the liber-ating and healthy thing to do. At a time when religious institutions areexploring or publishing positional statements on such issues as same-sex civil partnerships, the ordination of lesbian or gay clergy, trans-sexuality, and so forth, a publication such as this is most welcome as itincludes the voices of those who are in the thick of the discussion andyet whose voices are usually barely represented. As such, this book pro-vides a useful resource for congregations or working parties meetingto discuss the above issues. However, it could have a much wider audi-ence: those working in therapeutic environments, for example, wouldgain an insight into the significant effects upholding the dual identityof gay/lesbian and Christian has for some people. It would also be a useful resource for students of theology and religion, particularlyperhaps for those studying pastoral theology, liturgy, or contemporaryissues facing the church. Written in an informal, accessible style,Michael Ford brings to life the impact of contemporary church debateon those who identify as gay, lesbian, and bisexual (either secretly orpublicly) and their voices deserve to be heard.

Deryn GuestUniversity of Birmingham

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The Gospel of Faith and Justice, Antonio González, Orbis Books 2005(1-57075-611-2), xii + 179 pp., pb $24.00

The first generation of Latin American liberation theologians were men(and a few women) of courage, scholarship, commitment, and spiritu-ality. The movement began almost forty years ago. Some have died,others understandably repeat themselves, while yet others – RomanCatholics – having been silenced by the man who is now Pope, havetaken to covering their backs by writing systematic theology. God blessthem: they have given us in the West a wonderful gift. There is a secondgeneration of Latin American liberation theologians but, despite theclaims on the cover of this book, Antonio González is not one of them.This second generation, notably the Argentinian writers MarcellaAlthaus-Reid and Ivan Petrella, Jung Mo Sung and Nancy CardosoPereira from Brazil, are loyal to the legacy of their teachers but paytribute to them by exposing their blind spots and attempting to for-mulate a more contemporary agenda.



This is a strange book. It seems that its chapters have been translatedinto English, but they were not previously published as a Spanish book,nor are they acknowledged as having been previously journal articles:it is not all of a piece and contains many repetitions. It is catalogued asbeing on liberation theology. Of its eight chapters, 1 and 8 are on lib-eration theology, while 5 is simply a review of a book on Pentecostal-ism in Latin America. It is not just that the other five chapters have littleto do with liberation theology, rather that they exemplify a kind ofNorth Atlantic theology specifically rejected by the first generation. Ishall illustrate this from the first generation, as González seems to beunaware of the existence of a second generation.

The first generation always began with reality, with the reality ofpoverty, oppression, suffering. Many of them were priests or pastors.When they wrote they had in mind their own people, the people of theirparishes. When they spoke the faces of their congregations seemed to beever before them. When they read the Bible, God spoke to them aboutthe problems and the opportunities crowding in on the lives of the poorfamilies in their pastoral care. This is a very different hermeneutical per-spective from that which characterizes North Atlantic theology. Thus,González retreats into the Hebrew scriptures, to discuss the Exodus,Moses killing an Egyptian, the plagues, his double cultural conscious-ness. God creates a new community, which does not attempt to seizepower, a community liberated from both bondage and ‘grand ethicalprinciples’. It is not that the statements are platitudinous, that the con-clusions are problematic – what of the seizing of power in Canaan, thegenocide committed by the liberated, the ethical principles of the TenCommandments – it is that the process is the wrong way round. Liber-ation theology read the Bible, not from the perspective of the Jews 3000years ago, but from Latin American social reality. Not the Exodus fromEgypt, but escape from wage slavery to American capitalism; not Moseskilling the oppressor but the death of children at the hands of the secu-rity forces; not plagues of frogs but the toxification of the environmentby multinationals; not a double culture, but the deliberate destructionof their indigenous culture by foreign invaders.

González turns to the New Testament. Jesus forms a new commu-nity which is made possible ‘only by means of an attachment to hisown person which enables the disciple to abandon the securities whichcome from economic, family and religious positions’. In Latin America,those who turn to the Bible have no economic security from which tobe liberated. Far from wishing to abandon the security of the family,they are desperate to find ways to support their families. They mightwell consider abandoning the security of their religious position if thatmeans being told to accept their lot in this life.

González meditates on the Gospel of Matthew: ‘the reign of Godmeans the end of poverty and oppression’. Clearly after 2000 years, this



reign has not reached Latin America. ‘The hope of the poor is that God,from below and starting now, has initiated in the history of humanitya different society, in which hunger and thirst for justice are satisfied,in which lands and properties are shared, and in which all sufferingsare consoled’. Stones for bread, or is it opiate for the people. The firstgeneration of liberation theology asked why these things were not happening and turned to Marxist analysis – not for the gospel, but for an understanding of the social and economic reality.

In spite of the policies of Pope John Paul II, liberation theology hasnot died out in Latin America: see, for example, John Burdick Legaciesof Liberation. There is also the work of the second generation. In thisbook, González makes no contribution to this continuing and devel-oping movement. But finally, in dealing with liberation theology, it isnecessary to avoid voyeurism. We in Europe should not offer advice toLatin America without first asking how liberation theology applies inour situation. To be specific: on June 18, 2005, I was at the Puerto delSol in Madrid, the city in which Antonio González works, observing arally organized and led by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. It wasagainst legislation by the Zapatero government on the recognition ofcivil partnerships among gay and lesbians. The next day El País andother national newspapers carried editorials critical of the church forgiving priority to this issue and recalling that it never arranged demon-strations against the oppression so characteristic of the dictatorship ofGeneral Franco. Liberation theology begins with social reality, the morelocal the better.

Alistair KeeUniversity of Edinburgh

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Mohawk Saint, Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits, Allan Greer,Oxford University Press 2005 (0-19-517487-9), xiv + 249 pp., hb £18.50

Ask anyone and they will tell you that Native Americans were treatedbadly by their encounter with Christianity. Much of that view is valid.However, after reading Allan Greer’s excellent study, the true natureof that encounter becomes much more complex.

The Iroquois Indians (the five nations of the Mohawk, Cayuga,Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca) had an evolving relationship with theFrench traders and Jesuit monks who represented France and settledmostly along the St Lawrence River where today rise the Canadiancities of Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec. There was an uneasy



border between these Native Americans and the early American settlers – at about the northern edge of today’s state of Massachusetts.For example, at predawn on February 29, 1704, some 300 Indians anda few French surrounded the village of Deerfield, Mass, killed about50 of the settlers, and marched the 111 survivors 300 miles to Montrealin the dead of winter. Twenty more of the survivors were killed on theway, tomahawked by the Iroquois because they were either too youngor too old to keep up.

This openhanded cruelty, which pervaded the life of the Iroquois,was a subject of fear and amazement for the early European settlers.The clash of Christianity with Iroquois culture is a consistent themethroughout the book. And so it makes it even more remarkable that afully tribalized Indian maiden, Catherine Tekakwitha, should not onlyhave persisted in becoming a Christian but should do have done so to a state of perfection that has her today ‘beatified’ as a Saint of theRoman Catholic Church. Brian Deer, former director of the KahnawakeCultural Center which honors what was Tekakwitha’s sizable Christ-ian Community in Kahnawake, writes as follows: ‘Being a Mohawkfrom Kahnawake, I am very much aware how Tekakwitha has beenappropriated for other purposes since her death in 1680, and how thisaffects our view of her today. Allan Greer has restored her identity asan individual human being within a momentous historical and cross-cultural context, while giving us a close look at her contemporary Jesuitbiographers’.

Those two Jesuit biographers, Father Claude Chauchetière andFather Pierre Cholenec, found her life so fascinating that they wrote the first two biographies of Catherine Tekakwitha’s life. Over 300 books have since been published in more than 20 languages aboutTekakwitha. The two Jesuits were her contemporaries, living in thesame Kahnawake compound of Long Houses and a church, wellknown to each other and to Tekakwitha, but always in a formal rela-tionship. They each saw and wrote about the same attributes of saint-hood in this Mohawk woman. Author Allan Greer comes to the studyas a preeminent historian and an expert in this particular period ofCanadian history. Greer writes ‘I was hoping to gain a better under-standing of the larger processes of colonialization by taking as mysubject not “Indians”, nor even “Iroquois or Mohawk,” but a particu-lar native person, Catherine Tekakwitha’.

Life was not easy for the Indians, the Jesuits, or the Americans, par-ticularly in winter when game was often scarce. The Indians dependedon killing game to eat. Cruelty was a right of passage, particularly for the men. Hunting groups that ran out of game in Canada’s fiercewinters sometimes practiced cannibalism. Indeed, the name Mohawkis taken from the same root as the word for cannibalism in the Iroquoislanguage.



In the last two and a half years of her life, Catherine was a confirmedCatholic, taking regular communion. She went to Mass every morningat 4:00 am even during the severest winter weather. She and Marie-Thérèsa became constant companions, eventually copying mystic-ascetic practices of the hospital nuns of Quebec and forming a ‘convent’of Native Americans. Starting in February 1680, Catherine was part ofa circle of female penitents. Word spread that she possessed extraordi-nary powers and people began to seek her out. They came away withthe sense of having been warmed by a sacred fire that radiated throughher eyes, her gestures, and the words that she spoke. After her deathand continuing today, the spirit in her bones and the places she fre-quented appear to work miracles.

Butler’s ‘Lives of the Saints’ lists the Roman Catholic Vatican-approved saints who have reached either ‘Sainthood’ the highest category, or ‘Blessed’ the next highest category. In 1759, there were 1486entries and, in the latest edition, 1956, there are 2565 entries. MohawkSaint Catherine Tekakwitha is listed as ‘Blessed’ and many are thosewho support her elevation to ‘Sainthood’.

All in all, this book is a riveting read. This was an important ‘clashof cultures’, which gave birth to individuals of remarkable depth andspirituality. Understanding how this happens is illuminating. We oftenwork with monolithic and oversimplified pictures of the past. Thisbook takes us through such oversimplifications and demonstrates therange of responses to a particular moment in human history. It is well-written and worthy of being widely read.

Woorth LoomisHartford Seminary

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Race, Kenneth Leech, Church Publishing Inc 2005 (0-89869-495-7), xi +160 pp., pb $20.00

By coincidence, Kenneth Leech and I were operating in the same areaof the East End around the same time, the late 1970s and early 1980s.He was theologian-in-residence at St Botolph’s Aldgate, a churchfamous for its social outreach, including significant work among thehomeless, and gay Christians. I was a trustee at the world’s first everuniversity settlement, Toynbee Hall, modeled on the social philosophyof Arnold Toynbee, and we interacted with St Botolph’s. Hull Housein Chicago was established by Jane Adams on the same model asToynbee Hall. In addition, I was Hon. Secretary to the Bengali Liaison



Committee, chaired by the Rt. Hon. Lord Peter Shore. This witnessedto the high immigration status of the area which included Huegenot(including the reviewer) Jewish/East European, and latterlyBangladeshi. The scope for racial prejudice and misunderstandingagainst this backdrop was not unsubstantial. Inevitably Kenneth Leech draws upon this experience, and this is both a strength and aweakness. There is some impression that this was his golden period,and that the data and information on which he draws are too muchrestricted to this period. There has been updating, but it appears to besupplementary rather than mainstream.

The book may also be judged as a tad too personal, with interjectionsoften within brackets that are only tangentially related to the subjectmatter. He interjects that he knows white people in the UK who resentpeople in other countries not speaking English (p. 26). This observationis not particularly related to the surrounding argument, and would needmore exploration to make sense of it. In ascribing certain sections of the press as ‘gutter’ and changing little (p. 51), we are then treated to theunnecessary observation that the gutter has improved more than thepress, a statement open to dispute if one could work out on which planeit is intended. Equally we are treated to the author’s antimonarchicalviews, which are not related to the subject matter, although could havebeen. There are pubs which are inhabited by white racists (pp. 71–2), butequally there are ‘black’ pubs where whites are discouraged.

It is instructive when we learn (p. 11) that famous historical figures,otherwise known for their progressive attitudes, supported GovernorEyre of Jamaica in his suppression of the slave rebellion in which 439black people died, 600 were flogged, and 1000 homes were burned.Leech does not report that 15 white officials and three planters werekilled. Those famous people in support included Charles Dickens,Thomas Arnold, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Rushkin, and AnthonyTrollope. However, no date is provided for this event (it was 1865) andneither is there any explanation. Without such detail, it is difficult tomake much sense of such support, other than that Leech cites it withthorough disapproval. Were there mitigating factors, or should theseotherwise revered figures be reevaluated? Victorian England was splitdown the middle in its attitudes toward Edward John Eyre who hadshown compassion toward the Aborigines when in Australia which hedid not replicate in Jamaica toward the blacks. The book fails to reportthat, following the Royal Commission on the riots, he was relieved ofhis duties in 1866 and prosecuted, and this resulted in his neither beingfound guilty nor exonerated, which in itself reflected the ambivalenceof the British to colonialism in the wake of the official abolition ofslavery in 1833. This is one the faults of the book, in that it is too pithyand staccatto. It introduces matters with insufficient background andinformation as if the reader should automatically make sense of them.



The figures for racial attacks in the East End of London were 643 in1994, with dramatic fall between 1995 and 1998, but increasing againto 8898 in 1999 (p. 80). One presumes the true figure to be 898. Other-wise, there would have been clamor for a public inquiry. Police crimefigures are known to be inaccurate and misleading, and also changeover time in definition. One would need a breakdown to make senseof what would lie behind such figures. The late 1950s Kenyan Mau Mausituation is brought into play (p. 27) but if there is a ‘secret history’ tobe told, the author is silent on it. With the lack of historical knowledgeprevalent in society, one cannot assume that the bare mention of a his-torical event will immediately summons up all the details from the collective consciousness.

There is supposed to be considerable evidence that relations betweenwhites and blacks has improved over the years (p. 28), but none is cited.Much of what Leech argues seems to contradict this. The sacking ofRobert Kilroy Silk (p. 34), now a Member of the European Parliament,for his allegedly racist comments, and the swell of public support, isone such instance. However, this is not such a definitive example, andif anything at all, is not an example of generalized racism. It was acomment on Muslim dress customs alone, and there has been a degreeof legal and other support for the views expressed. As a suppressionof public debate on a matter that most non-Muslims are thinking, if notvoicing, this was not a clever move. It shut down a program that wasmeaningful to many people, and was a reaction to the Muslim lobbywhich on this may have harmed the cause of improving relations with Muslims. In terms of financial harm to Kilroy Silk, the successorprogram was part of his same production company! Had the authorwished to draw upon, and properly explain this example, it wouldhave been better under the ‘Demonizing Islam’ section (p. 136).

What is the point of quoting US statistics favourable to employingminority populations drawing upon the ‘fifty best companies forminorities’ (p. 38)? These are not representative of companies gener-ally, and we have no idea as to the basis of selection of such companiesand their size. No date is provided for the data, nor trends over time,and if you want to look it up for yourself, you cannot, because no ref-erence is given. It is quoted that in the USA a particular form of Chris-tianity has done more harm than atheism in the field of race relations(p. 102), but one is left in the dark as to what harm atheism, hardly anorganized group, has perpetrated. The Greek quoted in English letters(p. 108) seems exhibitionism, and adds nothing, and the Greek does notsupport the translation entirely. Given that the crucial word genos isused, there was an opportunity to write something of greater insight.

The final chapter enunciates ten points. Leech castigates PollyToynbee and the Labour Government for giving law precedence overreligion, which is ironic given the possibility of suppressing critique of



religions under legislation to prosecute racist and religious crime. Lessthan recent figures are presented in support of some of the 10 points,and there is no adequate ending. What there is too dramatic andabrupt, with no overall conclusion or recommendations. Point 10 issimply where it ends. Throughout the book is the failure to acknowl-edge the presence of illegal immigration and fraudulent asylumseeking. The book does contain material of interest, but one has to bein the know to make full sense. This had better have been a first draftto be worked upon and improved.

Gerald VintenInternational Professional Managers Association

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New Religious Movements in the 21st Century: Legal, Political andSocial Challenges in Global perspective, Philip Charles Lucas andThomas Robbins (eds), Routledge 2004 (0-415-96576-4), 364 pp., pb£19.99

This book started life as a 2001 special edition of Nova Religio. It hasbeen updated with eight items added, one being on Latin America toplug a gap. It is surprising that there is no chapter length treatmentaccorded India, although there is brief passing mention on pages 256–7,albeit not indexed. The introduction and conclusion really bring coher-ence to the whole. The term New Religious Movement (NRM) wasimported from Japan ‘to distinguish the spectrum of new religions that emerged following the imposition of an American style religiousfreedom on the country in 1945’ (p. 231). This observation would havebeen more suitable in the introduction.

The message is grim from this landmark publication: minority andNRMs are facing increasing an increasingly volatile situation, with dis-crimination and restrictions on their freedom across the globe. A largepart of this is down to the apocalypse precipitated by the terrorism atthe World Trade Centre and the aftermath. This included a perceptionof a growing threat to public order. It has all fueled the anticult movement, which has itself sought to go more global. Academics who have attempted to maintain equilibrium have sometimes beenmarginalized in favor of those with more sensationalized conclu-sions. Those traditional churches in Eastern Europe, who have benefited from the upsurge of nationalistic fervor, have jumped on thebandwagon to assert themselves and their cultural hegemony, over the NRMs.



A complementary approach is set forth by Rosalind Hackett in herexposition of the way African states respond to ‘false prophets’. Firstof all, they may pose a threat to political authority, especially those withviolent proclivities such as the Movement for the Restoration of the TenCommandments and the Lord’s Resistance Army, both stemming fromUganda. Second, they may be viewed as presenting a threat to publicinterests as they may exploit their members financially and sexually.Third, NRMs may challenge existing religious power and authority.

The Canadian contribution, while calling for balanced treatment ofNRMs, sounds one of the starkest warnings. Extending the analogy of Susan Palmer that new religions are like ‘baby religions’, and hencecan as babies be ‘heartbreakingly adorable or intensely annoying’, theanalogy then moves on to babies who get hold of a box of matches andcan go on to burn the house down. One would have thought that suchan escapade was down to those beyond babyhood. The writers continue into pure speculation, without a shred of evidence, that theatheist and nonprofit Raelian movement may be planning a mutatedvirus to induce male infertility to ensure the ascendancy of theircloning service. This extrapolation into the fanciful is entirely out ofplace. What is in order is the call for a new skepticism which respectsthe freedom of belief and association but examines closely the impli-cations of NRM actions and teachings for society as a whole. The toneof the book is to indicate that an informed skepticism would be anadvance over the ill-informed prejudice which often reigns supreme.

Given the ensuing vilification of Islam, Chapter 19, which deals withsects in the Islamic world, is particularly enlightening. The thesis is thatthe traditional sociological categorization of denomination, sect, andcult is equally applicable. The explanation required to achieve this isfar from straightforward, and it seems like shoehorning. However, itdoes have the advantage of providing valuable insights into the Islamicworld. The extent to which the tariqa is a source of social identity isdescribed as being as weak as that of the soccer team one supports (p.303), but this is to beg the question. It is not supported by articles whichdescribe soccer as sharing characteristics with religious observance.

Seeming paradoxes emerge. One is that the Cult Awareness Network(CAN), which evolved out of the Citizens Freedom Foundation, wasbrought to its knees by the very cults it sought to advise against. It hadcontinued to plug the brainwashing issue long after it had been virtu-ally discredited by academic research and the American PsychologicalAssociation had distanced itself from such a stance. Scientology, afterit had won its battle to win church tax status, then had the funds freedup to take on CAN. With the various legal depositions and inside information it gained on CAN, a Pentecostalist who had experienced‘deprogramming’ commenced legal action against CAN. The million-dollar settlement forced CAN into bankruptcy the next year.



Immediately, a consortium of organizations previously dubbed ‘cults’by CAN purchased the name, logo, and freephone number. The nextmove was to form a new CAN which now operates through a Scien-tology controlled corporation in Los Angeles.

In another paradox, there are grounds for arguing that South Korea,Japan, Taiwan, South Africa, Botswana, Mali, and Namibia may befreer than France or Belgium. The case of Japan is particularly instruc-tive. With the panic in the post-Aum Shinrikyo era, there was everytemptation to introduce general anti-NRM measures. Japan has stead-fastly refused to do this, other than directed in the 1999 law at Aum,which in an attempted makeover in 2000 changed its name to Aleph.Public sentiment tends to continue to regard it with suspicion, andthere is a thriving anticult attitude coexisting with the law courts whichdispense justice upholding religious freedom.

Footnotes complement the text and are of appropriate length and content. Occasionally, another one would have been useful – forexample, in 1963, the USA Food and Drug Administration ceased E-Meters from Scientology on the basis that they contravened laws reg-ulating the practice of medicine (p. 259). We are not informed whathappened, or what the current situation is. Equally, we are not toldwhat happened to the Unification Church adherent dismissed from herteaching position even though she had not passed on her beliefs to herpupils (p. 30).

The book presents an unprecedented opportunity to view the sce-nario across sample countries of Western and Eastern Europe, Eurasia,African, Asia and Australia, and North and South America. In additionto the insightful introduction, five chapters provide theoretical consid-erations. As this whole subject area is established as a matter of publicinterest and concern, this is the book to turn to for context and enlight-enment. It would not go amiss as a Blue Ribbon Committee, or a par-liamentary select committee.

Gerald VintenInternational Professional Managers Association

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Loving the Questions, an Exploration of the Nicene Creed, MarianneH. Micks, Church Publishing Incorporated 2005 (1-59628-008-5), xii +115 pp., pb $14.00

This lively book will be a good friend to those who seek to believe butwho are not too sure about the usual formulations of the faith.



The author, recently late, was a seminary professor of biblical andhistorical theology. She is clearly a born teacher, used to working withstudents, and I can imagine it will be students who will most appreci-ate this book. But it is not written in technical language, and wouldgrace the bookstall of any church where the members were interestedto explore that formulation of their faith they use Sunday by Sunday.Indeed, many clergy may find their sermons helpfully prompted. Herwriting is fresh, straightforward, biblical, clear, and frank. Her associ-ations with the World Council of Churches, if nothing else, meantMicks was used to facing ‘real’ contemporary global and church issues,and her book is not removed from such things.

As the title of the book suggests, Micks asks questions of the NiceneCreed (the ICET text). And they are mostly the questions we wantaddressed: who is God? Creator? Christ? Spirit? What is salvation?church? baptism? our future?

To such questions she seeks two levels of answer: What did the phrasesof the creed originally mean? and, What contemporary significance havethey for us? She examines the creed’s articles one by one, gently address-ing the kind of questions raised by those more used to modern worriesand doubts than to Patristic terminology and thinking. She seeks to clarify what the authors’ technical terms mean, and gives outlineaccounts of the debates and disagreements that the Creed was designedto settle. She admits that new information, unavailable to the 4th centuryFathers, has now to be taken into account, and does so. But at heart Micksis an orthodox church member, and sees the creed as ‘a punching bag’against which present-day Christians can check their faith.

More than once she makes much of the placing of a comma. A mis-print in a monastic service book helped me to appreciate more one ofthe creed’s phrases: God, of God.

John ArmsonHerefordshire

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Ancient Israel, Judaism and Christianity in Contemporary Perspec-tive. Essays in Memory of Karl-Johan Illman, Jacob Neusner, Alan J.Avery-Peck, Antti Laato, Risto Nurmela and Karl Gustav Sandelin(eds), Lanham University Press of America 2006 (0-7618-3362-5), ix +448 pp., pb $41.00

Karl-Johan Illman was a scholar and philosopher whose interestsincluded Oriental languages, Old Testament exegesis, Pauline Theology,



and the theology of Martin Buber. His deepest interests lay in the field ofJewish and Christian relations and he held firm convictions about theneed to promote Jewish–Christian dialogue, firmly believing that it wasnecessary to overcome any anti-Semitic ‘Christian’ notions of the past bycalling for a rapprochement and conciliation of past events such as theHolocaust. His firm convictions about the person and nature of God asfound in the Old Testament not only support his desire to build bridges,but also promote the narrative of the Old Testament as a salvation theol-ogy that speaks of a God who had a crucial role to play in the Jewish story.A well-respected and accomplished scholar in his field, it is to his workon Judeo–Christian dialogue that this collection of essays is predomi-nantly in memory and honour.

Many of the essays in this book speak of the means by which wemight understand and relate to others in the context of contemporaryreligion and culture. Each study raises awareness of the theoretical andphilosophical preconditions needed for understanding human valuesand religious belief systems and highlights the need for dialogue andinteraction with others as being a definite prerequisite to becomingaware of what it means have such beliefs. Our association with otherpeople helps us to understand, or rather appreciate, the way in whichlife appears to them and the values that appeal to them for such social stories define personality, create individuals, and shape religiousbeliefs and religious identity. Any mutual understanding of this iden-tity will surely bring an awareness of common norms that will not onlyweaken prejudice but also allow an interreligious dialogue that is concrete and secure. This is not to say that we should wholeheartedlyaccept beliefs that are contrary to our own hermeneutic in some sort ofpost-modern (I use the term loosely) universalistic agreement, rather, ourinteraction with others should be a catalyst for mutual understandingand an epidemiological paradigm to better relationship in the future.

Other research includes: the nature and position of Jesus Christ andChristological conceptions of early Christianity including the preexis-tent and eschatological character of Jesus as being both God and Manat the same time rather than simply a sapiential teacher with a divinecalling; the metaphorical use of light and darkness vis-à-vis the polar-ization of good and evil and its expression of God’s power over lifeand death as symbolized within the Johanine and other extra-testamental literature; the worship of alien cults during the Hellenisticage and the means by which Jews were influenced by traces of pro-hibited Canaanite praxis, be it active or passive, which was tantamountto apostasy and idolatry; and the Pauline notion of righteousness throughfaith, a concept deeply rooted in the Hebrew Bible. In this latter chapter,the author considers the possible continuity problems between the ideaof being righteous by having faith, as Paul seems to glean fromHabakkuk 2:4, and being righteous by living out one’s faith by acting



out works according to Torah, as James seems to glean from Genesis15:6.

Although the above-mentioned studies are only a selection of thematerial to be found in this book, they form a part of a whole that isboth interesting and informative and certainly worthy of recognition.In many ways, the studies presented in this material are saying nothingnew and, in some places, are a little too postmodern for my liking but,having said this, it is certainly a book that should be welcomed by stu-dents interested in the sociology and philosophy of religion, in par-ticular, Christian–Jewish relations and it would be a valuable resourcefor seminar discussion.

Benjamin BuryUniversity of Birmingham

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A Seat at the Table: Huston Smith in Conversation with Native Americans on Religious Freedom, Huston Smith (ed.), University ofCalifornia Press 2006 (0-520-24439-7), xxi + 232 pp., hb $24.95

Based on filmed conversations at the Third Parliament of World Religions in Cape Town, South Africa in 1999, this book consists of transcribed conversations between Huston Smith, and a number ofimportant Native American scholars and activists. All the subjects dealwith some aspect of Religious Freedom in the United States. Thegeneral chapters, and the persons interviewed, are as follows: The Spiritual Malaise in America: The Confluence of Religion, Law, andCommunity (Vine Deloria) 6–23; Five Hundred Nations Within One:The Search for Religious Justice (Walter Echo-Hawk) 24–38; Ecologyand Spirituality: Following the Path of Natural Law (Winona LaDuke)39–57; The Homelands of Rleigion: A Clash of Worldviews over Prayer,Place, and Ceremony (Charlotte Black Elk) 58–74; Native Language,Native Spirituality: From Crisis to Challenge (Douglas George-Kanentiio) 75–96; The Triumph of the Native American Church: Cele-brating the Free Exercise of Religion (Frank Dayish Jr) 97–112; The Fightfor Native American Prisoners’ Rights: The Red Road to Rehabilitation(Lenny Foster) 113–130; Stealing Our Spirit: The Threat of the HumanGenome Diversity Project (Tonya Gonnella Frichner) 130–45; The Fightfor Mount Graham: Looking for the Fingerprints of God (Anthony GuyLopez) 146–61; Redeeming the Future: The Traditional Instructions ofSpiritual Law (Chief Oren Lyons) 162–83; and The Healing of IndianCountry: Kinshop, Cistom, Ceremony, and Oratory (Vine Deloria)



184–200. There are a few footnotes from each chapter, and a four-pagebibliography.

With support comments printed on the covers from Bonnie Raitt andPeter Coyote, readers get the idea quickly – this is not an academicbook for those seriously interested in the complexity of issues of NativeAmericans and Religious Freedom in the United States. Virtually all ofthe people interviewed in this book, and they are significant voices,have either written major works themselves, or have had major workwritten about them, in far more detailed and scholarly books and projects. Furthermore, one should probably already be a great fan ofHuston Smith in order to overlook a bit of hero worship here and therein this book intended for popular audiences. Having attended the mostrecent Parliament of World Religions in Barcelona in the summer of2005, I know that these events are not always the best kind of forumfor serious discussion – but quite useful for introductions and generalconversations of interest – of which these certainly qualify.

As a source of brief overviews of some the issues, this book mightprove a useful resource for undergraduate courses that deal partiallyor in whole with Native American contemporary social issues con-nected to religious issues, but less useful for those whose major areasof interest would be Native American religious perspectives directlyand theologically. There was, incidentally, a strong orientation towardtraditionalism in this collection, and Native Christianity was hardlyrepresented. Along these lines, I was a bit disappointed in the inter-view with Frank Dayish, Jr, because it would have been useful to havea good overview of the life and faith of the Native American Church,many of whose iterations are assertively and clearly Christian, butalthough Huston Smith raised a number of potentially interesting areas of discussion, Mr Dayish was apparently not interested in pur-suing them, although it is hard to know the context for transcribedinterviews.

Daniel L. Smith-ChristopherLoyola Marymount University

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Spirit in the Cities: Searching for Soul in the Urban Landscape,Kathryn Tanner (ed.), Fortress Press 2004 (0-8006-3682-1), xv + 144 pp.,pb $10.20

In the final chapter of this slim but substantial volume, Ada María Isasi-Díaz invites us deep into the culture of what she calls ‘the city that



inhabits me’, La Habana, Cuba. Our tour of La Habana is at once inti-mate and systematic, a personal visit with the author to the places andwith the people who make La Habana her spiritual and vocationalanchor. We wait as she copes with airport authorities who single herout for extra investigation, ride in a ‘vintage’ cobbled-together car tothe heights of El Cacahual for a view of the city while visiting a shrineto the War of Independence from Spain, stop at Santuario de SanLázaro where Cuban popular religiosity blends with official Catholi-cism in care for people with HIV/AIDS, stand in line with Cubanworkers to buy small quantities of rationed food, pass by grand foun-tains that no longer flow with water – and by the gorgeous seacoastalong the grand but deteriorating seawall and highway, El Malecón.

That La Hababa ‘inhabits me’ reflects Isasi-Díaz’ powerful – andempowering – attachment to La Habana, but the attachment is inextri-cably linked to the reality that she does not, and cannot, inhabit La Habana. It is precisely the condition of being displaced, ‘from ourcultures/countries of origin as well as from what is normative in theUnited States’, that unites the author with other Hispanas/Latinas.And this groundedness in particular places – countries not only oforigin but also of temporary haven and of destination – supports par-ticipation in the mujerista proyecto historico, a wide-ranging project of ‘utopian work’ for the common good (elaborated in the author’s EnLa Lucha and other writings). By visiting La Habana and looking back from the United States, and by probing its meaning for and withIsasi-Díaz, we the readers participate in the social construction of this city, and of all cities, as places of resistance, humanization, andregeneration – and allow religious reflection, in the words of the editor, Kathryn Tanner, ‘to move with the spirit toward newly config-ured terrains of full human flourishing’ (p. xv).

Isasi-Díaz exemplifies the model of the book – to examine the tangi-ble realities of particular places – cities, and places within cities – andto probe the meaning and discern ‘the spirit’ at work in these cities.And, as Tanner notes in her unfortunately brief introduction, thisinvolves a reconceptualization of contextual theology in spatial terms,in order to account for the palpable realities of the postmodern, postin-dustrial, and global city under late capitalism, and to engage theinsights of contemporary urban and cultural theory. The chapters takeup the task in quite different ways, reflecting not only different placesand populations, but also different theological and ideological framesof the authors.

Sheila Briggs and Linda Mercadante show us the value of particulardetails, of carefully describing those details, of acknowledging the per-spective from which they are observed – and only then, gingerly andinductively, reaching for meaning. Briggs’s chapter, ‘Taking the Train’,shows us Los Angeles County, California, as commuters from exurban



Claremont might see it should they look up from their articles andlaptops. She points out the variety of humanity along the way, showinghow race, class, gender, and occupation are correlated with particularplaces and times – and with specific features of the built environment.This points her toward a revised incarnational theology, one that resistsreprivatization and commodification but recognizes ‘the God-bearingcapacity of our earthly cities’ (p. 16).

Mercadante sets her chapter even closer to the reality she observesin the North Ward of Newark, New Jersey, the working class neigh-borhood where she grew up. Her walking tour offers intimate detail ofstreets and buildings, the people that gave them meaning, and thechanges and continuities observable from a twenty-year perspective.We see the ‘bitter’ (physical deterioration, abandoned buildings, environmental hazards) and the ‘sweet’ (human scale housing andgraceful churches). From there, we follow along with the author as shemoves from description to suggest a ‘spiritual geography’ of the NorthWard, in which categories of ‘sin, shame, and scapegoating’ are usedto probe the meaning of the ‘bitter’ realities and ‘grace and beauty’ illu-minate the ‘sweet’. As a theology, this one is very close to the ground.

The remaining two chapters are methodologically quite differentfrom the others, using theology and social theory more explicitly toframe not only the analysis but also the selection and presentation ofdescriptive information. M. Shawn Copeland proceeds from her con-viction that, as an African American theologian, she ‘ought to assumeresponsibility for a theology of social transformation’ (p. 20), which shedevelops with reference to the Catholic moral theology of Bernard Lon-ergan. This theological project begins with ‘the tragedy that is Detroit’and specifically with a focus on the automobile factory as ‘a key insti-tution in the breakdown of the recurrent schemes that constitute thesocial order’ (p. 21). Drawing on histories of the Detroit auto industry,Copeland offers a poignant comprehensive portrait of its injustices andinhumanity, and argues, with Lonergan and others that, even with thebest of human action, ‘we men and women limp in the disequilibriumof our own moral impotence’ (p. 42). Put most succinctly, this is theproblem of evil, and the solution is transcendent, namely, the Christ.But theology must collaborate with the human and social sciences toforge practical, if imperfect, interim solutions.

Mark Lewis Taylor visits Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on a Fourth ofJuly, and shows us an eclectic group of tourists receiving a conventionalrecitation of Philadelphia’s glorious role in the history of Americanfreedom, and also a rally of Philadelphians who articulate a revision-ist history emphasizing the racism and classism of the city and thenation. The chapter is a project of theological reflection, which ‘bringsinto focus and analyzes particular experiences of transcendence’ (p. 77).This is a complex process, employing both theology and social theory



(including postmodern concepts like the ‘manufactory’, which is avariant of Bordieu’s habitus), as well as historical and literary accounts,to discern the alienation of humans from nature and from each other in Philadelphia. Taylor identifies a few communities – MOVE,The Other Side, welfare rights groups – that challenge the alienation, buthe is more concerned with ‘the new structural practices that any ofthese communities might manifest as transcending spirit at work in thecity’ (p. 93), which he outlines in general terms.

It should be obvious by now that these essays are richly rewardingto the reader interested in theological work on cities, work that engagesthe structural realities and lived experiences of cities in the postmod-ern era. The reward is the greater for the diversity of perspective andmethod. I have tried to show some of the linkages and contrasts amongthe chapters, but the potential for book-length achievement lies wellbeneath the surface. What a shame that the capable editor did not com-plement her quick introduction with a conclusion showing how and towhat extent the essays amount to a cumulative contribution about theimportant themes she introduced – especially, the spatiality of citiesand ‘the redemptive orderings of all these spatial forms’ (p. xiii). Thevalue of the chapters is in no way diminished by the fact that the needremains to articulate their collective, cumulative contribution to a moreadequate understanding of cities, urban people, and God (oops, ‘spirit’)– which is to say, to the regeneration of theology itself.

Lowell W. LivezeyNew York Theological Seminary

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Christ and Culture, Graham Ward, Blackwell 2005 (hb 1-4051-2140-8;pb 1-4051-2141-6), x + 277 pp., hb $84.95/£50.00, pb $34.95/£22.99

This is an extraordinary book in a number of ways. First, because itseeks to argue for and practise what it sees as a radical repositioningof Christology. Second, and perhaps most memorably, because of itsluxuriant, and frequently self-indulgent prose: this is initially alluringand pleasing, but eventually becomes a frustrating weakness. Thearchitectonics of the argumentation are frequently so vast and labilethat evaluation is often seemingly impossible, for this reader at anyrate. Third, and I would suggest most importantly, this book containsa number of exciting and rich theological exegeses of scripture, thoughdisappointingly, theological exegesis itself is not treated extensively,though the author’s distance from, but appreciation of, the guild of



biblical scholars is noted. I hope we can look forward to such a pro-longed treatment.

The text of this book is heady stuff: reading it is a bit like having agood night out: one recalls much enjoyment, but it remains unclear, themorning after, whether one will still be drunk, have a hangover, orindeed remember in detail what went on. Such, at any rate, was theuncertainty created in me: I felt delightfully inebriate in the first partand some of the last part, but sensed the onset of a hangover in themiddle part. In all these sorts of ways, this book clearly is a ‘challeng-ing’ one, true to the Blackwells series in which it appears. I am fairlycertain that it will expand most readers’ vocabularies. Have a go at:akoluthetic (p. 34), imbrication (p. 51), anagnorisis (p. 56), interpella-tion (p. 88), cathected (p. 132), amphibolous (p. 222), letteral (p. 244),syntagma (p. 252), or iterative litany (p. 257).

Like other books in that series, a number of the chapters haveappeared before, and the author tells us they come from a 10-yearperiod. They have been well edited together and fit well into the three parts: ‘The Economy of Response’; ‘Engendering Christ’, and ‘Theliving Christ: Economies of Redemption’. There are some misprints, butthese do not affect the sense (pp. 11, 18, 35, 38, 48, 54, 96, 143, 160, 177,262). At first, I thought ‘scarification’ (p. 255) was a misprint also, butlearned instead that it is a perfect partner for scourging. If you want to follow up the reference to Stephen Whittle’s ‘Gender Fucking orFucking Gender? Current Cultural Contributions to Theories of GenderBlending’ (p. 262), you will need to know that it is in R. Elkins and D.King (eds), Blending Genders: Social Aspects of Cross-Dressing and Sex-Changing (Routledge, 1996).

The book opens with an important introduction. It is here that Wardjustifies what is to follow in terms of dogmatic or systematic theology:this is crucial, for if this move does not work, then what follows is seenin a different (dogmatic) light. I think it is at least arguable that this relatively brief section strains under the weight put on it by the latersections.

Ward argues that the separation between reflections on Christ’sperson (metaphysical Christology) and work (soteriology, or functionalChristology) is an impossible one: Christ’s person is only knownthrough its operations. Christ is as Christ does, just as God is as Goddoes. This surely is the case for God, as the text Ward quotes fromAquinas as epigraph shows: ‘God is not known to us in His nature, butis made known to us from His operations’ (Summa Theologiae I. q.13. 8). But this then is taken to suggest that ‘the Christological questionbegins not with who is the Christ or what is the Christ; it begins withwhere is the Christ’ (p. 1). So the following chapters of the book areexplorations of these various sites of Christic operation, and thus to beseen as an exploration of Christ’s identity. First, one might note that



these moves, in weaker forms, are already around, for instance in themove in scriptural studies from exploring the christology of Christ’stitles to narrative christology, or in say von Balthasar’s identity of theSon’s processio with Christ’s missio (mentioned by Ward a number oftimes), so that Christ is his mission. Thus it is extravagant to claim, asthe author does, that he is correcting a trend in Christology as old asSchleiermacher (p. 1). There are two immediate questions: does Ward’sposition need to be as absolute as it is? Does criminalising the separa-tion of metaphysical and functional Christology mean foregoing theirdistinction as well? In particular, I am not convinced by the proscrip-tion of metaphysical christology: if Christ is only known in his opera-tions, why does Ward justify his position by showing the inadequacyof Barth’s Christology, and precisely in its metaphysical aspect (an-/en-hypostasis), surely this is not possible under his own rules, and further,the metaphysical inquiry into Christ’s identity seems remarkablysimilar to the frequently abstract analyses (mainly in phenomenologi-cal mode) of the ‘operations’ we receive later in the book. Isn’t a middleground possible and preferable that can accomodate both Christ’smetaphysic and operations? There is a sense in which Ward’s book isa Christological working out of the central idea of John Zizioulas’shighly influential and increasingly undermined book on the Trinity,Being as Communion: the persons of the Trinity are constituted by theirrelating. This points to why the epigraph from Thomas is misplaced:Christ is a hypostasis in a different, though (trickily) related way to the‘persons’ of the Trinity. He is a person like us, whereas they, in manysignificant ways, are not. The scholastic adage, operari sequitur esse(roughly: doing follows being), cannot be straightforwardly reversedor collapsed in the case of Jesus.

The very rich main body of the text looks at a number of those oper-ations. The first chapter, ‘Christology and Mimesis’, explores Mark’sgospel as the ‘realm of the in-between’, marked by its stammeringbeginning and endlessness. Its Christology participates in the crisis ofrepresentation to which all theology is subject: there are no spectators,but only performers. Because there is only a chain of imitation (thegospel’s imitation of Christ’s nature, and our called-forth imitation) thetemporal sequence itself is disturbed. Intriguingly, reading and salva-tion are identified here (p. 46), because Christ is the hermeneutic. Butthe crisis at the heart of the gospel, Ward maintains, is the question‘who is Christ?’, which, he suggests, gets no textual resolution. Peter’sconfession ‘You are the Christ’ (Mk 8:29) seems fairly unambivalent,though Ward suggests it is naïve (p. 49).

In the second chapter, ‘The Schizoid Christ’, Ward follows GillesDeleuze and Félix Guattari in exploring the therapeutic nature of‘schizophrenization’: a process whereby a fixed, definable identity isgiven up in favor of enacting diverse, mobile sites for desire, hope, love.



One’s identity, like that of the ‘schizo’ is these relational operations.Because Christ is the measure of human relation, because he is the rela-tion the Son is in the Trinity, then participating in these Christologicalways of life is doing Christology. Ward explores all this in an exegesisof the pericope of the woman with the unstoppable flow of blood (Mk5:24–34), and with acutely perceptive analyses of ‘touch’, ‘flow’, and‘relation’, the latter including a further exegesis of the story of Marthaand Mary (Jn 12:1–8).

This first section is concluded with ‘The Body of the Church and its Erotic Politics’. Here Ward wishes to move beyond a soul–bodydualism, arguing that the body is always in a ‘field of intentions’. Thisleads him to argue for a thicker notion of knowledge than the merelypropositional, or ‘head knowledge’: it is more like that of someoneplaying sports, combining a sort of unreflexive bodily knowing with a relational knowing – Ward makes his argument here using TimHenman as evidence. Making the body and thus relation constitutiveof knowledge introduces themes of desire. Here we are treated to anexegesis of the bread of life discourse (Jn 6:51–9), and Ward notesinsightfully the chiastic structure of the Church and the Eucharist,centred as it is on Christ’s abiding in us and our’s in Christ. This rela-tion does not take place in a third, but in the dislocation of the twoparties; it is a new form of relation: prepositions are transfigured.Oddly, Ward argues that this is not incorporation because there is noabsorption (p. 108). Well, surely there is no absorption, but that doesnot mean there is no incorporation, for what is presented here is a richarticulation of the theology of the mystical body of Christ, of how weare filii in filio, as Émile Mersch put it; here, as frequently in the book,it seems that the Christology of an-/en-hypostasis and its consequencesare actually particularly apposite to Ward’s project, despite his rejec-tion of Barth’s particular presentation of it in setting up the book in theintroduction. It is true though, that accounts of incorporation that carrythe freight of absorption are sometimes hard to distinguish from thosethat do not: witness the knife-edge use of the language of ‘mingling’and ‘mixture’ in Gregory of Nyssa’s christology.

In the fourth essay, ‘Redemption: Between Reception and Response’,Ward situates the body between the poles of reception and response,so that the latter two cannot be separated, and explores the economyof our response to Christ through the dialectics of self/other, differ-ence/affinity, distance/proximity, and the movement from sight totouch, as seen in the accounts of Mary in the garden (Jn 20:11–18), andthe encounter of Thomas with the Lord (Jn 20:24–8). The second essayof this section, ‘Divinity and Sexual Difference’, seeks to move beyondthe essentialism of the theologies of Barth and von Balthasar througha sustained engagement with the work of Luce Irigaray, and suggestswhat Christology might look like after Irigaray. Such a Christology



would be one which does not erase the question of Christ’s sexuality,which, it is suggested, can only lead one along a docetic trajectory. Itwill also be a Christology that takes seriously the distance on whichthe doctrines of incarnation and creation rely, and the desire and lovewhich also flow from that distance. If Christology takes the category ofrelation seriously, and therefore existence ‘as two’, it can move ‘frommutual masturbation to divine intercourse’ (p. 150). The final chapterof this section, ‘The Politics of Christ’s Circumcision (and the Mysteryof all Flesh)’, reflects on the way theology has shaped sexuality, and theway bodies are seen, by looking at the way one might understandLuke’s account of the circumcision of Christ as a ‘gesture against cultural hegemony’ (p. 175), thus differentiating it, say, from Michelangelo’s more accomodationist christology.

The third part opens with ‘Allegoria Amoris: A Christian Ethics’,which undertakes a major examination of kenosis. Ward talks fre-quently of the doctrine of kenosis, but it is far from clear that there issuch a doctrine, though what we do have is a mass of mutually bom-barding reflections dependent on one inflected verbal form (so not thenoun ‘kenosis’) in the New Testament. Ward argues that the historicalrise of kenoticism in 17th century Germany eventually led to the riseof Christian atheism, but that kenosis’ self-destructive narrative can beredeemed by dialogue with von Balthasar and Julia Kristeva’s under-standings of kenosis, for both of whom reflection on the mother–childrelationship was fundamental.

The penultimate chapter, ‘Spiritual Exercises: A Christian Pedagogy’argues for a more sacramental vision, an optic whose horizons areChristological and Trinitarian. This will allow us to see materiality(reality?) in its true context. A widened vision goes with a thicker epis-temology: knowledge of God is a lifestyle (p. 225). All these produce a‘diastemic discourse’ (S. Douglass) shy of idolatry which manifestscontinual slippage, and leaves a textual deposit of oxymoron andparadox. Christ is the measure and spanning of this diastasis. Finally,in ‘Suffering and Incarnation: A Christian Politics’, Ward enacts a con-frontation between postmodern secular construals of pain and suffer-ing with Christian ones, while recognizing that there is no such thingas a pure secular, or Christian, culture: all is mixed. It seems that in these contemporary secular accounts, such as those of Jacques Lacanor Slavoj ı ek, the lack of the fulfillment of one’s desire is pleasura-ble, so that one desires the desiring. Such an economy of desire ulti-mately negates the negation and is contradictory not paradoxical. TheChristian economy, by contrast, situates kenosis at the heart of creation and incarnation, and – as one sees throughout the New Testament –suffering goes with/is glorification, powers with/are submissions (S.Coakley): suffering is the wound of love. Like breathing in and out,kenosis and plerosis are two sides of the same coin, which therefore

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must interpret each other. So the Christian economy is seen to beenfolded within love, whereas the postmodern account relies on loveas not-having, and remains suspended on the brink of orgasm (p. 263).The text then trips over a reductio ad absurdum of the author’s argument:a linguistically impossible play on ‘coming’, relating orgasm with theparousia.

This book is something of a rollercoaster ride, but there are morehighs than lows. It is frequently visionary. I came away wonderingwhether the ‘culture’ of the title had all but disappeared. Certainlythere is an insightful meeting of Christology, hermeneutics, and phe-nomenology here, but is that what someone scanning the shelf in abookshop or library will understand by culture? There are, it is true,brief engagements with sculpture, painting, and film, but they remainentirely subservient. As von Balthasar noted in his first publishedwork, surely music is very fertile ground – perhaps more so than otherart forms – for the exploration of the Christic realm of the in-between?

Philip McCoskerPeterhouse, Cambridge



Documents

Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits. By Allan Greer