Archives: Product Reviews

“Award-winning author Rowan A. Greer, Professor Emeritus of Yale University Divinity School, attempts to make sense of the dynamic variety of scriptural approaches within the Anglican Communion. Although Scripture plays a singular role within the Communion, it has rarely been employed in a prescriptive manner. Many Anglicans assert that it is important to listen to the voice of God and this listening has led to several of the current controversies today, especially in the Episcopal Church. Greer avoids these mostly moral controversies as, he writes, they would muddle his deep respect for the past and the placement of Anglicanism within the context of ecumenism. Greer admits in a wonderfully illuminating ‘A Foreword Written Afterwards’ that it is difficult to speak of an Anglican identity. He affirms there is no single Anglican view of Scripture or a single theological perspective. This is the beauty and genius of the Communion but also can be its curse as we witness the headlines concerning gay and lesbian issues and the ordination of women.

The fascinating beginnings of the Anglican approaches to scripture are highlighted in the work of Joseph Hall, William Chillingworth, and Henry Hammond, three theologians (1600s) who support the episcopacy and the Prayer Book.

Scripture needs to be interpreted and this interpretation can vary not only from diocese to diocese but also from parish to parish. Greer questions the most common assumption within the Communion of the three-legged stool (tradition, scripture, reason) or cord as it is referred to here. Anglican theology pays homage to Richard Hooker, and every Anglican Bible class will study his contributions and learn of this unique approach . . .

Greer spends many pages on Hooker as well as F.D. Maurice, Benjamin Jowett, William Sanday, and William Gladstone who were prominent in the nineteenth century . . .

Greer includes excellent discussion questions for each chapter plus a comprehensive bibliography. Scholarly in approach, this text is best suited for seminary and college classes rather than the casual reader . . .”

“The work is large, substantial, well edited, [and] rich in its panoply of texts.”

Hudson, publisher of Crisis magazine, tells a story that beautifully reflects the subtitle, but not the title. As a Southern Baptist, and minister of the same, the author chafed under the divorce of piety from aesthetics and the life of the mind. Bit by bit, with a hesitance interspersed by leaps of grace he does not presume to explain, he came to embrace another way of being Christian. Thomas Aquinas, George Herbert, Jacques Maritain, Louis Bouyer, and other masters were decisive in his being wooed by the Catholicism to which he finally succumbed. Elegantly written and a pleasure to read, this is the tale of an American who was converted and is, as he knows, still on the way of being converted. But one might argue that, in his preoccupation with beauty and truth, Hudson’s experience is in sharp contrast to what, in our confused religious culture of feel-good spiritualities, would be a typical “American” conversion.

“Wolfteich examines lay-led movements and publications through which U.S. Catholics in the pre-Vatican II era sought to infuse the social order with gospel values: Commonweal, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, the Grail Movement, the Christian Family Movement, Opus Dei, and Integrity, a magazine published for a decade after Catholic Action advocate Carol Jackson and former Catholic Worker Ed Willock co-founded it in 1946. Even more extensive treatment is given to developments after Vatican II, with particular attention to figures like John F. Kennedy, John Courtney Murray, César Chávez, Daniel Callahan, Mario Cuomo, and Geraldine Ferraro, as well as the issues that shaped U.S. Catholics’ sense of lay vocation and Catholic identity such as Civil Rights, ecumenism, Humanae Vitae and the birth control debate, and abortion.”