Book Review -- The Way of the Heart

		By Way of the Heart: Toward a Holistic Christian Spirituality		43 used & new from $2.99
by Wilkie Au Well-intentioned, but deadly dull, December 26, 2006 It kills me to rate this book so low. It says many of the right things about Christianity and the soul's longng for God. It describes the pitfalls of the pharasaic life and the idiocy of striving for God's love via acts of good behavior. It speaks of the need to balance community and solitude, ministry and leisure, and self-esteem and self-denial. But it is so boring! One third of the way into it, I had lost interest. There are so few anecdotes, so much lecturing and abstraction! It is Christianity as a Zen discipline. Maybe I am just too lazy for that, maybe too shallow. But this was just not for me. Too bad, because Christians (Catholics foremost among them) are besieged by voices pulling them toward the very forms of idolatry that Jesus decried. Be it scriptural literalism, papal authoritarianism, anti-scientism, cults of personality or religion-cum-nationalism, our churches are sliding into the chasm of irrelevance and superstition. Wilkie's heart is in the right place. Perhaps this book would attract those who enjoy Eastern thought. Sadly, it didn't do much for me.

Book Review -- Speak Truth to Power

Powerful and frightening, December 26, 2006 In the interst of full disclosure, I have not read through this book in its entirety. Nor to I contemplate doing so soon. The perils faced by the men and women who work for justice are often too hard to read in large doses. The savagery of the human heart is grotesque and seemingly insurmountable. Yet men and women of good will, as beautiflly told in this book, find the courage and strength to look into the face of evil and tell it "No." The stories are taken from all over the world -- the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. They tell of the lonely struggle of those who seemingly cannot stop themselves from pursing freedom and dignity for their fellows. The stories are simultaneously ennobling, terrifying and challenging. Why are we not all fighters for the rights of our neighbors? WHy are we so often craven and complicit with oppresive powers? Why are so few able to face and withstand the fire of persecution? As I said, "Speak Truth to Power" is not a light read. But the stories are inspiring and need to be told. For this, I thank Kerry Kennedy Cuomo for her introductions and her selection of material, and to Eddie Adams for the stark and powerful images of the men and women who raise us as a species above the level of beasts.

Book Review -- The Misunderstood Jew

That Amy-Jill Levine is a Jewish professor of New Testament studies was a surprise to me. Why would a Jew teach the stories told of the Christian Savior? But when I thought about it, why not? Didn't I take courses in Old Testament from a Christian professor?

Which helps to make Levine's point. Our biases unconsciously affect our categories. And, as Levine argues in "The Misunderstood Jew," our categories often make Jews the bad guy in order to make Jesus look good.

I have been a Christian religious education teacher for a number of years and I recently received a Masters degree in theology. But I found Levine's thesis at once fresh and engaging, if not completely convincing. Her basic idea is that Christians, usually in an effort to make Jesus more palatable to secular, pro-feminist and pro-multicultural worshippers, often do so by making his Jewish culture more rigidly pietistic, misogynistic and insular. Take the divorce issue. It is not uncommon for progressive Christian preachers to state that Jesus's prohibition against divorce was actually a pro-feminist attempt to counteract the misogyny of Jewish custom. These customs (we are told) allowed men to put women aside for trifling faults, such as bad cooking. But Levine shows that the portrayal of Jewish customs is based on a single utterance by rabbi engaged in testing the hypothetical limits of just causes for divorce. Hardly was this statement the mainstream view of Jewish scholars or rabbis. But by claiming it was, Christians can water down Christ's absolute prohibition into a pro-female statement. Levine's familiarity with the New Testament is evident. In the case of divorce, she uses the gospel texts themselves to make a compelling case that the divorce question was not intended as a referendum on male domination, but a return to the Creator's intent as expressed in Genesis.

Levine takes on other Christian biases about Judaism's supposed hatred of the poor, its hyper-ritualism, supposed ban on corpse-defilement and many other issues. She relentlessly cuts down the forest of false opinions and bad scholarship to bring Jesus more into focus as a Jew of his time.

In some senses, I think Levine goes too far, even when she has a point. She disagrees with Christians who refer to the Old Testament as the "Hebrew Scriptures" on the grounds that the books were not all written in Hebrew, that Orthodox Christian Churches use the OT's Greek translation, and that Protestant and Catholic Churches include different books in the OT. Fair enough. But she goes into wince-inducing territory by claiming that using the term "Hebrew Scriptures" is subtly anti-Catholic. Also, one wonders what becomes of the Christian Jesus when he is blended so seamlessly into the background of his culture. Is it unfair to think that Jesus opposed some of the religious tendencies of his day? Must we assume (as Levine does) that no Jews were involved in his arrest and death? Perhaps one could see Jews as exhibiting the same tendencies - both good and bad -- of all religious people, including my own Roman Catholic coreligionists. Isn't it a human thing (not a Jewish thing) to confuse particular style of piety with love of God?

In any event, Levine has done a signal service to Christians as well as Jews with this book. Anyone who gives voice to the unspoken biases that inform our religious education and worship does a good that deserves praise.