THE CHRISTIAN-MARXIST DIALOGUE

Rather than an active dialogue between Christian and Communist thinkers, this symposium is the preparation for such a dialogue. The sixteen essays--about half of them by such prominent Marxists as Roger Garaudy and Milan Prucha, and half by Protestant and Catholic theologians--are more concerned with establishing the possibility of dialogue and the agenda of dialogue than in actually engaging in dialogue, and the individual contributions, as though to emphasize that fact, are exactly that: individual contributions which, for the most part, were conceived and written without much thought being given to what the other contributors would have to say. There is, therefore, more than a little overlapping, and a considerable variety in the various authors' approaches to and treatment of their material. Nonetheless, most of the pieces of the collection are interesting enough in their own right, and collectively they go a good distance in dispelling the myth that the East-West confrontation is a conflict of principles rather than a good (or bad) old-fashioned power struggle. The unfortunate fact of the matter, however, is that while these men are still discussing the theory of dialogue, others are going right ahead and ""dialogueing"" (see, for instance, the recent Christian-Communist Dialogue by Professor Garaudy and Quentin Laurer)--which makes the present work something of an anticlimax, albeit an interesting one.