Each essay is interesting enough, but taken as a whole they do not live up to the title.
Greeley, the controversial Catholic sociologist who moonlights as a popular novelist (see Irish Eyes, above), offers a slender
investigation of the Catholic imagination. We are soon presented with a dichotomy between what Greeley claims to be demonstrating about the Catholic imagination and what he actually accomplishes. He would have us believe he has set out to illuminate the deep religious sensibility that votive candles, stained-glass windows, vestments, and incense only hint at—a sensibility Greeley calls "sacramental" (because Catholics see all "created reality" as revealing "the presence of God"). What Greeley in fact provides is not nearly so grand: in a handful of essays on loosely related themes, he examines various Catholic subjects, such as sacred time and salvation. In one chapter, Greeley explores the idea of how the Virgin Mary embodies the maternal aspects of God and suggests that American Catholics tend to have a very positive view of her. (An added tidbit: married couples who are gung-ho about the Virgin Mary also tend to say they are very sexually fulfilled.) In later chapters Greeley considers the role of hierarchy and community in the Catholic imagination. Catholicism, he states, is an intensely communal religion—but it is one where communities are organized hierarchically (although Greeley prefers the less threatening word structure to hierarchy). Nevertheless, Catholics are not simply taking their marching orders from Rome—according to Greeley, the local parish priest is the authority figure to whom most Catholics look. The second chapter features a refreshing discussion of the erotic aspects of religious art. Drawing on the Song of Songs, the writings of Saint John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, and the Book of Tobit, Greeley urges Catholics—and Protestants—to consider erotic art as "quite necessary to a Christian worldview." Other findings, however—like Greeley’s musings on the relationship between church attendance and fine-arts consumption—should be viewed with suspicion. In the end, the book fails to hang together.
Each essay is interesting enough, but taken as a whole they do not live up to the title.Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-520-22085-4
Page Count: 231
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
The ever-popular and highly readable C.S. Lewis has "done it again." This time with a book beginning with the premise "God is Love" and analyzing the four loves man knows well, but often understands little, Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity, exploring along the way the threads of Need-Love and Gift-Love that run through all. It is written with a deep perception of human beings and a background of excellent scholarship. Lewis proposes that all loves are a search for, perhaps a conflict with, and sometimes a denial of, love of God. "Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?" To relate the human activities called loves to the Love which is God, Lewis cites three graces as parts of Charity: Divine Gift-Love, a supernatural Need-love of Himself and a supernatural Need-love of one another, to which God gives a third, "He can awake in man, towards Himself a supernatural Appreciative love. This of all gifts is the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true center of all human and angelic life. With this all things are possible." From a reading of this book laymen and clergy alike will reap great rewards: a deeper knowledge of an insight into human loves, and, indeed, humans, offered with beauty and humor and a soaring description of man's search for God through Love.
Pub Date: July 27, 1960
ISBN: 0156329301
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
The name of C.S. Lewis will no doubt attract many readers to this volume, for he has won a splendid reputation by his brilliant writing. These sermons, however, are so abstruse, so involved and so dull that few of those who pick up the volume will finish it. There is none of the satire of the Screw Tape Letters, none of the practicality of some of his later radio addresses, none of the directness of some of his earlier theological books.
Pub Date: June 15, 1949
ISBN: 0060653205
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1949
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