A must-read book for Catholics and devotees of religious history.
A fascinating look at the Catholic Church’s encounter with modernity.
Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Weigel (The Fragility of Order: Catholic Reflections on Turbulent Times, 2018, etc.) dives into the past two centuries of Catholic history to explore how the church has rejected, explored, and finally embraced modernity. In a work that will appeal to anyone with a genuine interest in church history, the author reintroduces readers to the embattled, and sometimes embittered, pre–Vatican II popes before exploring the more familiar church of today. Weigel uses a five-act format to explain the history of Catholicism in modernity, with each act covering a specific era in the church: against, exploring, embracing, critiquing, and, finally, converting modernity. The author fully examines the irony that the modernism feared and rejected by 19th-century popes and clerics would eventually come to shape, and even be shaped by, Catholicism. After some background, Weigel’s history begins in earnest with Pope Pius IX, whose anti-modern stance is best remembered via the Syllabus of Errors, which flatly rejects “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” The author then moves on to Leo XIII, “the man who would set the Church on the road to a sometimes skeptical, sometimes intrigued exploration of modernity, which would lead to developments in this drama that could not have been foreseen in Leo’s time.” This Leonine revolution would impact the papacy and the church throughout the 20th century, culminating in the years of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Harkening back to his 2013 book Evangelical Catholicism, Weigel concludes with the church’s “converting” modernism in the 21st century, embodied by “the challenging, puzzling, and, to some minds, deconstructive pontificate of Pope Francis.” Weigel is at once highly intellectual and thoroughly accessible as a writer as well as balanced and opinionated.
A must-read book for Catholics and devotees of religious history.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-465-09433-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
The director of the Florilogia Institute in Sonoma, Calif., uses literature, current events, and the Bible to argue that the efficacy of ritual violence in human affairs has been undermined by the Judaeo-Christian concern for the victim. Bailie proceeds from a traditional anthropological understanding of how cultures are held together by sacred violence: Periods of social chaos are often resolved by acts of definitive violence that, because they establish order, become sacred to a community's memory; and such definitive acts need to be reenacted from time to time by the ritual death of one or more scapegoats. The author argues that the effectiveness of this social mechanism has been gradually eroded, over the course of history, by an awakening empathy for the victim. In the first half of his book, he traces history from Aeschylus, who glosses over the sacrificial death of Iphigenia prior to the Trojan War, to US intervention in Somalia and the beating of Rodney King, observing that the status of victim has now become the seal of moral rectitude. The result, he claims, is a crisis of culture that has led to the increase, not the decrease, of violence—part of which, he asserts, is due to the evaporation of the Cold War's useful conventions. In the book's second half, Bailie shows how the Bible itself struggles with the concept of scapegoat, especially when Abraham's God rescinds the traditional demand for human sacrifice and when the Crucifixion becomes the vindication par excellence of the victim. Throughout, the author displays an awareness of the Western literary and philosophical tradition, and if his prose is at times obscure, it is brightened by exciting insights. Demanding but stimulating fare for those who believe that human events are ultimately responses to ideas and attitudes.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8245-1464-5
Page Count: 326
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
Controversial biblical scholar Crossan restates his thesis that the Gospel accounts of the death of Jesus tell us more about the polemics of the early Christians than about what really happened. For Crossan (Biblical Studies/DePaul Univ.; Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, 1994, etc.) Jesus was the leader of a liberation movement that contrasted itself with Rome by seeking to empower rather than dominate people. He argues that the accounts of Jesus' trial, death, and especially resurrection are fiction, a patchwork of themes drawn from the prophets and written down as history. Moreover, he sees the role attributed to the Jews in Jesus' condemnation as reflecting a much later historical situation, when the vast majority of Jews had rejected the Christians' claims that Jesus was their messiah. This book is essentially a polemical reply to Raymond Brown's acclaimed Death of the Messiah and a popularization of Crossan's earlier study The Cross that Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative. Crossan takes fierce issue with Brown, who holds that the various agendas at work in the passion narratives do not mean that they lack a strong historical basis. Crossan's pages are marred by his frequent sardonic references to Brown, and although he argues his case well, it stands or falls according to whether the reader accepts his highly reductionist position that the supernatural, or even the unusual, could not have happened. Inevitably, Crossan's reasoning comes across as circular, and even arrogant, when he pronounces on events that are presupposed to be unique by an appeal to his own reading of what is ``more likely'' to have happened. Thus he holds that a nobody like Jesus could never have had a trial before Roman governor Pilate and that his crucified body was probably eaten by dogs from a shallow grave. Brilliant writing in the service of a disappointingly dogmatic positivism.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-061479-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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