A World Waiting to be Born.

Whereas in his first book Peck stood outside of religion while singing its praises, in his more recent works (A World Waiting to Be Born, Bantam Books, 1993; Further Along the Road Less Traveled, Simon and Schuster. 1993) he speaks as a Christian. He testifies to his own experience of reading the Gospels and of falling in love with Jesus. He is not afraid to say that he became a Christian because he "came to believe that, on the whole, Christian doctrine approaches the reality of God and reality in general more closely than the other great religions." Peck himself advises us always to examine things critically by asking, what is missing? From a Catholic standpoint, missing in Peck is any acknowledgment that for at least two decades the churches have already been engaged in serious community-building, as for example base communities, faith-sharing groups, lay ministries, and the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults. Missing is respect for a few clear rules: one does not have to be an avid fan of John Paul II's Veritatis splendor to be rattled when Peck says sweepingly that "it is possible for premarital or extramarital sex to be quite chaste." Most of all, missing from Peck is any sense of sacramental appreciation. Beyond discussing his own baptism, he says little else of rituals other than to warm us not to confuse them with reality. His own nondenominationalism reveals an abstract, generic version of Christianity.

Peck's work in community-building fits well with the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which demands that social problems be addressed through the most local of solutions. The activity most proper to social justice is forming groups, such as labor unions and base communities, to work for change. But missing from Peck is the Catholic insistence on engaging also in a deeper social analysis, one that critiques the larger political and economic structures on a national and global level. For example, though he claims to be launching the cure for society and the whole world, Peck offers no critique of the excesses of such phenomena as class exploitation or the consumerist mentality. This is a considerable lacuna for someone with such utopian ambitions, since at least some people are in part the victims of social forces that lie outside their control. I believe that what Peck is doing is of enormous value, but I recommend Thomas Merton's Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Doubleday, 1966), as a work that illustrates how spiritual reflection can be brought to a still deeper level of social awareness.