Religion booknotes.

American Catholics and Civic Engagement is the product of a three-year study co-sponsored by the Commonweal Foundation and the Faith and Reason Institute, and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Edited by Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, former editor of Commonweal, this is the first of two volumes intended to explore the role of Catholics in the public square. This volume is divided into four sections: Catholic social thought in the American context; Catholic institutions in the American public square; autobiographical essays by a range of Catholic professionals; and an analysis of Catholic voting patterns.

It is a sign of how deeply Catholic social teaching has shaped my life that I was stunned to learn that (a) not all Americans are dedicated to the notion of the common good, and (b) few know how to define it. My assumption was that, apart from those feverish minds who read too much Ayn Rand, everyone agrees that there is a common obligation to make sure that all people have a roof over their head, access to health care, and education for their children. John Coleman's essay showed me that my assumptions are naive; many people dispute the notion of the common good and many more are divided over how to achieve it.

This book illustrates how difficult it can be for a religious institution to make its way in a secular society. What happens, for example, when Catholic agencies that receive public money are expected to provide services that are morally odious to Catholics? That question is addressed in an excellent essay by Clark Cochrane on Catholic health care. In another essay the late (and much admired) Philip Murnion writes about the parish and the public square, and explores the entanglements that may arise from government-inspired "faith-based initiatives."

The autobiographical essays are particularly compelling. Mary Jo Bane, a committed Democratic who is "Pro-Life, Pro-Family, and Pro-Poor," describes how difficult it has been for her to remain in the party. Similar tensions are expressed by other activists, journalists, and trade unionists. In the end, what struck me most was how these many "Commonweal Catholics" find themselves a minority in Democratic circles (and, not infrequently, a vilified minority), but still resist the siren call of the Reagan Democrats who now live comfortably in Republican circles.

In the final section of the book there are interesting essays on Catholic voting patterns, especially David Leege and Paul Mueller's capacious overview of the "Catholic Vote." Almost as a response, E. J. Dionne Jr. argues both that there is no Catholic vote and that the Catholic vote is important. He unpacks that paradox with a number of shrewd observations, including the fact that as Catholics become wealthier, they bring more votes to the Republicans. Any Republican who basks in that datum should read Kate O'Beirne's essay in which she points out some traps for complacent leaders of the GOP. She ends with this intriguing judgment: if the GOP were not prolife many in the party would go right back to the Democrats.

This fine set of essays is very good reading as we head into the presidential elections. It is far richer and more instructive than anything you're likely to read on the op-ed page or see on cable talk shows.

Since Stephen Prothero is interested in Jesus as a cultural icon in the United States, one would think that his book would include a sizable section on contemporary Evangelical Christians. One would be wrong. Evangelicals are virtually ignored in this book. So are Roman Catholics, Native Americans, Christian Scientists, and Hispanics.

The book begins, predictably enough, with Thomas Jefferson excising passages about miracles, exorcisms, and other superstitions from his Bible in order to provide a portrait of an Enlightenment wisdom figure whose ethics are worthy of admiration and consonant with the spirit of the age. Cunningly, Prothero finishes this chapter by juxtaposing it with the 1990s Jesus Seminar, which also refashioned Jesus according to contemporary measurements.

With Jefferson as his starting point, Prothero is off to the races: He moves quickly through the "feminized" Jesus of the nineteenth century to the muscular Jesus of the early twentieth preached by people like Billy Sunday. Here we encounter Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows, a book that attempted to portray Jesus as a go-getting business-man. Visual images of Jesus are also examined, including Werner Sallman's Head of Christ (Catholics were spared its popularity) and the biblical epics of Cecil B. DeMille. Part I concludes with a discussion of the Jesus-as-superstar image made popular by the so-called "Jesus Freaks" and plays like Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell.

Part II examines "reincarnations" of Jesus; it includes a long chapter on the Mormons and their complex (and rather odd) Christological development. Subsequent chapters repeat the refrain first articulated by Jefferson--namely, that a distinction must be made between Jesus and Christianity. Hence, the Black Jesus has nothing to do with oppressive Christianity; Jesus the rabbi is a Reformed Jew; and various Asian pictures of Jesus are simply images of a divinity who emerges into the world now and again: Jesus as yogi or avatar or sage.

Prothero's book is full of tidbits of information, but many of the groups he describes are either minor blips on the religious radar screen or already consigned to the dustbin of history. The fact that he ignores the religious hotbed that is the South is inexplicable. Flannery O'Connor saw the American South not as "Christ loving" but "Christ haunted"; but in Prothero's telling, the South is simply geography between the West Coast and the East Coast. In the end, this book is rather like a chocolate Easter bunny: rich and tasty but hollow in the center.

I am keenly interested in the subject of reading (it was officially stipulated in the Middle Ages that the first task of the theologian was to read) and over the decades I have collected a number of books on the act of reading. Nancy Malone's book will make a nice addition to my collection.

Malone's thesis is that reading is not much different from prayer and meditation: they are all solitary acts done in silence which engage the whole being. As she points out in the prologue, however, we never bring a finished self to the act of reading. What engaged us as adolescents may seem thin beer at fifty.

In Walking a Literary Labyrinth, Malone uses books to trace her own spiritual development. Her life is almost a textbook study of a certain kind of Catholic. Encouraged by a sympathetic nun as a teenager to love books, in college she became enamored of the writers of the Catholic renaissance (Peguy, Bloy, Greene, et al.). She entered the Congregation of the Ursulines, where her life as a religious was marked by the books she read: bad books in the novitiate; better ones during graduate study in Latin and later at Harvard Divinity School; life-saving books in times of crisis; and the books she now savors as a solitary, following a life of intellectual activity.

The writer Ida Goerres once talked of the "books of Providence" in her diary. Those works that come at just the right time in a person's life--books that, to use Kafka's haunting phrase, are an "axe to break the frozen sea within us." Such are the books that Malone writes about, and everyone of a certain intelligence could add to her list. I think, for instance, of Edith Stein casually picking up Teresa of Avila's autobiography one evening, reading it through, and saying to herself, "This is the truth!" Or, in a classic case, Augustine picking up the codex of Romans and reading it in the garden of Alypius.

Reading Malone's book made me want to speak with her and make my own recommendations. One of my suggestions would be Guigo's classic work on lectio. What Malone says about reading and prayer is exactly what Guigo, a medieval Carthusian, noted eight centuries ago.

Finally, Malone makes a point which is worth repeating. Perhaps it is more difficult to see books in a spiritual way today because they are such a cheap commodity. Fine leather missals have been replaced by cheesy missalettes. My students return their study Bibles for cash when the semester is over. Who in his or her right mind would handle with care a John Grisham paperback after a quick read on a flight? As with food and clothing and other cheap commodities, it is hard to infuse books with the aura of the sacred. Nonetheless, the act of reading can be sacred if we realize how close it is in spirit to the search for the contemplative. Reading, Malone argues, is a sacramental act. Exactly. That is why the Catholic tradition has always argued that we are fed in the liturgy from two tables: that of the Word and that of the Bread.

The ferocious struggle between Israelis and Palestinians often appears in our media in predictable images: a blown-up bus, rock-throwing youth, a bull-dozed house, frenetic funeral corteges through the streets of Hebron, and so on. The merit of Joshua Hammer's book is to narrow the focus to a precise place (Bethlehem and its environs) and a precise moment (the occupation and siege of the Church of the Nativity). It is a sad and disheartening story.

Hammer gives faces and names to those anonymous rock throwers--youth who end up in Israeli jails only to become more radicalized. He provides a brilliant description of how suicide cells are formed, develop, and carry out their plans; and he has a sympathetic account of how Palestinian Christians are caught in a vise between Israeli and Muslim militants. Hammer is quite aware of the ironies of the conflict. He notes how figures in the Israeli underworld profit from the Palestinian demand for guns just as some members of the Palestinian Authority profit from lucrative construction contracts for Israeli settlements.

The heart of his story is a long description of the thirty-nine-day siege of the Church of the Nativity. Hammer personalizes the story by contrasting the activities of an Israeli military officer outside the basilica and a Palestinian terrorist inside. He also tells the story of a Greek Orthodox monk who manages to keep relative calm in the basilica while monitoring the activities of the Franciscan friars, whose rights in the church are limited by a document hammered out by the Ottomans in the eighteenth century. The religious tension is fierce: memories still linger of the physical fight between the friars and the Orthodox monks over the right to wash windows in 1928!

Perhaps one of the saddest stories is the takeover of parts of the Christian village of Beit Jala by Palestinian militants, who fire on the nearby Jewish settlement of Gilo. When Israeli gunners return fire, the Christians of Beit Jala are forced to flee their home. Behind all of this horror and warfare is the duplicitous figure of Yasir Arafat who, from his besieged offices, permits enough carnage by Palestinian militants in the hope that international forces, fearing a Kosovo-like situation, will intervene.

I have visited Bethlehem many times over the years. I have often walked up the road, past Rachel's tomb, now an armed fortress, to the city of Christ's birth. Perhaps it is my familiarity with the area that made reading this book so touching for me. As I write, the Israeli government is erecting a huge wall between Israel and the Palestinian territories. Both sides are to be blamed for the dire situation, but it is truly troubling to read about a barrier that, when finished, will turn the land of the Palestinians into one vast ghetto.

RELATED ARTICLE

American Catholics and Civic Engagement: A Distinctive Voice

Edited by Margaret O'Brien Steinfels

Rowan & Littlefield (A Sheed & Ward Book), $29.95, 293 pp.

American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon

Stephen Prothero

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 364 pp.

Walking a Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of Reading

Nancy M. Malone

Riverhead Books, $19.95, 208 pp.

A Season in Bethlehem: Unholy War in a Sacred Place

Joshua Hammer

Free Press, $24, 286 pp.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.