THE STRUGGLE OF THE UNBELIEVER

One often is led to suspect that an author, after a first successful book, drags out of forgotten corners all of the unpublished, because unpublishable, manuscripts of earlier years and sends them off to his publisher with a demand for instant publication. Such, certainly, must have been the case with Kavanaugh's second book in the wake of the phenomenal success of A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church. The Struggle of the Unbeliever is, despite its promising title, Kavanaugh's doctoral dissertation, and it holds about the same interest for the general, or even for the scholarly, reader as the usual dissertation; i.e., none at all. The book deals with the problem of the establishment of intellectual communication between Christianity and non-believers, and confines itself almost exclusively to the historical aspects of the problem: the ways and means devised by Max Scheler, Maurice Blondel, and John Henry Newman. The book's style is pedantic, its coverage spotty, and its originality questionable. Its publication does no credit to the author, and it is regrettable that no one had the wisdom to leave the manuscript where it belonged: among its fellows, in the dusty archives of Catholic University.