Religion booknotes.

Rise, Let Us Be on Our Way is John Paul II's memoir of his long episcopal career. It begins with his appointment as auxiliary bishop of Cracow at the age of thirty-eight, continues through his years as archbishop of that diocese, and ends with his return to Poland as pope. Rise is a homage to the Polish church that John Paul knew and unremittingly loved. Unfortunately, unless one has a keen interest in the Polish ecclesiastical scene, it can make for rather pedestrian reading as the late pope's colleagues are given their moment on the page.

Rise, Let Us Be on Our Way

Pope John Paul II 

Warner Books, $22.95, 230 pp.

Interspersed with this narrative are John Paul's reflections on the bishop's office and the spirituality of the episcopacy. Unfortunately, these reflections are pallid echoes of the late pope's more eloquent writings. While bishops may find this book instructive, it will be of little interest to those of us who do not enjoy that role. In fairness, John Paul does articulate well the teachings of the Second Vatican Council on collegiality and the role of the bishop. Yet given the interventions of the Vatican in the affairs of local churches, one wonders whether these teachings are fully understood by the Roman curia.

Rise, Let Us Be on Our Way is a follow-up to Gift and Mystery, John Paul II's reflections on the priesthood, published in 1996. With the memory of John Paul II's papacy still strong among the Catholic faithful, Rise will probably find a welcome audience. In general, though, it does not have the intellectual weight of John Paul's encyclicals or the other serious documents that came from the pen of this prodigious writer.

Biblical Foundations of Spirituality

Barbara Bowe

Rowan & Littlefield, $24.95, 219 pp.

Barbara Bowe is a New Testament scholar who for many years taught a class called "Biblical Foundations of Spirituality." Bowe's goal is to use scholarship to break open Scripture, which she believes is the resource for those engaged in Christian ministry. This book is a work of biblical scholarship put to the service of ministry.

Generally, Bowe goes through the biblical books in order, though she does jump around a little. (She does not, for example, begin with the creation accounts in Genesis, though she does address them at various points.) Her survey is quite rapid--she spends only seventeen pages on all of wisdom literature. But her goal is not to be comprehensive: she wants to focus on the themes found in the various books. In Mark, for example, she focuses on discipleship. In John, she considers Jesus as the "Wisdom of God." Each chapter ends with a series of questions, so that the reader can pursue these issues in more depth.

Since Bowe's book is the product of a class, it is not targeted to the scholarly community. Nonetheless, it is an excellent resource. Last semester, while teaching an introductory course in theology, I often read it aloud in class. It would serve as an excellent companion text for a Bible study group or a continuing-education class.

In Silence Why We Pray

Donald Spoto 

Viking Compass, $24.95, 238 pp.

Donald Spoto has a doctorate in theology from Fordham University, but has spent most of his career as a biographer of film stars and celebrities. He has also written on Jesus and, more recently, Francis of Assisi. This book addresses the question of prayer. Though writing from a Catholic perspective, Spoto is also mindful of other religions. He begins with the idea that prayer is the articulation of one's deepest interiority, then maps the modes of that articulation. Most of the book deals with private prayer, with only brief mention of communal expressions of prayer such as the liturgy.

This is an excellent book for a number of reasons. First, the author writes in clean, jargon-free language, eschewing the purple prose that sometimes mars works on this subject. Second, he expands the traditional categories of prayer--adoration, petition, thanksgiving, and repentance--to include suffering, abandonment, transformation, and silence. (There is a chapter on each of these topics.) Third, Spoto is a well-read author with more than a glancing knowledge of the literature of prayer. He is theologically sophisticated enough to answer the objections of those who worry that prayer is self-delusion or some form of magic. For example, he disabuses the reader of the notion that one prays to get God to listen. Citing a wonderfully sharp line from Kierkegaard (always a good bet in these matters), Spoto observes that true prayer happens "when the person praying hears what God wills. The true man of prayer only attends."

Spoto also provides brief descriptions of classic works of prayer by the biblical authors, medievals thinkers, and modern writers like John Chapman and Thomas Merton. He also contrasts these writers with thinkers from other religious traditions. The end result is a well-written book that not only informs, but edifies. If Spoto's book has a flaw it is the maddening way he cites sources. Spoto's writing aims to be user-friendly, but his notes are a mess. For a curious person like me, that's a shame.

God's Beloved

A Spiritual Biography of Henri Nouwen

Michael O'Laughlin

Orbis, $16, 197 pp.

Henri Nouwen (1932-96) is still one of the most widely read spiritual writers of our day. Born in the Netherlands, where he was ordained a priest, he spent most of his peripatetic career in the United States. After training in psychology at the Menninger Clinic in Minnesota, he taught at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard Divinity School. He also taught in Latin America and went on an extended retreat with the Trappists. In his final years, he worked with handicapped people at a L'Arche community in Canada. A prolific writer, he was working on five different projects when died of a heart attack.

Nouwen was a talented reader of Scripture who wrote profoundly about the Eucharist. He had a gift for expressing the longings and anxieties of his contemporary audiences. Nouwen was the essence of the restless wanderer, driven by his own searchings. Generous to a fault (and also needful to an extreme), Nouwen never quite found a place to call home except in his final years with the disabled.

Michael Ford's biography The Wounded Healer (1999) is, in my estimation, still the best introduction to Nouwen's life. But we should be grateful when others help fill out the picture of a complex personality. Michael O'Loughlin is a spiritual counselor who knew Nouwen well; he edited one of his works. This book is less a biography and more an interpretation of Nouwen's life and spirituality. The last three chapters address three major themes in Nouwen's writing: the Eucharist; the significance of Jesus; and the life of prayer. These chapters contain a sensitive reading of Nouwen's texts and are the best parts of the book.

If this volume has a weakness, it is the author's fondness for the Myers Briggs Typology Inventory (MBTI), a personality assessment tool that is popular among some religious communities. Early in the book, O'Loughlin uses the MBTI to study Nouwen's personality. If, like me, you find this process reductive, simply skip pages 57 through 85.

The Modern Catholic Encyclopedia (Revised Edition)

Edited by Michael Glazier

Liturgical Press/Glazier, $39.95, 898 pp.

The new edition of Glazier's The Modern Catholic Encyclopedia features many new entries and many that have been rewritten. It is a serviceable work, not as comprehensive as Harper's Encyclopedia of Catholicism (1995) or, obviously, as voluminous as the revised New Catholic Encyclopedia. But it's reliable and informative.

To keep this book to a manageable size, certain editorial decisions had to be made. There is not, for example, a separate entry on each book in the New Testament; one must be satisfied with the abbreviated "Bible, New Testament" entry, written by the indefatigable and always reliable Daniel Harrington, SJ. Similarly, the roster of popes is limited to the more conspicuous ones. These entries are of varying quality. The one on Pius XII goes on at considerable length about the pope's efforts to help the Jews, without any indication that such a judgment has been contested. The entries on theological topics are more reliable. Some of them, such as John Ford's essay on doctrinal development, are models of succinctness and clarity. The biographical entries are also quite good, especially those on twentieth-century figures. Bernard Lonergan, Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Henri de Lubac, Jean Danielou, and other luminous figures of the Catholic revival all receive their due. (Although I was surprised that there is no entry on Louis Bouyer.)

In my pretty thorough browsing of this volume, I found only a few mistakes. The Feast of Mary, Mother of God is January 1, not February 2, as reported in the entry on "immovable feasts." The entry on the rosary links its spread to Dominicans when, in fact, the medieval Carthusians were largely responsible for its popularity. These minor blemishes, though, do not detract from the reliability of this encyclopedia, which features many fine illustrations and can be purchased at a reasonable price.

Peter Maurin

Apostle to the World

Dorothy Day (and Francis J. Sicius)

Orbis, $20, 187 pp.

A year before his death, William D. Miller, Dorothy Day's biographer, gave Francis Sicius cartons of documents about the Catholic Worker. They were Miller's papers and were to be deposited in the archives at St. Thomas University (Miami), where Sicius teaches. Among the papers, Sicius found an unpublished biography of Peter Maurin written by Day. The manuscript was never finished, so Sicius decided to edit it and fill in the gaps. Here we have what Day wrote, along with Sicius's contribution; Day's portion is in italics.

This book serves as a good complement to earlier books on Maurin written by Arthur Sheehan and Marc Ellis. It also features a generous collection of Maurin's "Easy Essays" and some vintage photographs, including a wonderful 1934 picture of Ade Bethune, Dorothy Weston, Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, and Jacques Maritain. There is also a striking photograph of the thirty-year-old Maurin, taken in Chicago in 1917. The photograph is so formal (it was obviously done in a photographer's shop), one wonders why Maurin had it taken.

Sicius does an excellent job chronicling Maurin's career before he met Day. He describes Maurin's life in France and his laboring days in Canada, to which he emigrated after the collapse of the French lay movement Le Sillon, following its condemnation by Pius X in 1910. Sicius uses other people's memoirs to paint the harsh life on the Canadian prairies. He also visited France to explore Maurin's hometown and to speak with Maurin family descendants.

It is only when Day meets Maurin in 1932 that we begin to hear her voice. She tells a familiar story: Maurin's embrace of Franciscan poverty, his autodidact education, his passion for combining a profound drive for social justice with an equally profound faith in the gospel. Day's contribution to this book is in no way systematic or chronological; Sicius provides the thread of continuity. But Day gives reflections and, more importantly, her recollections of the sayings that poured forth from this fascinating man. As Day notes, these sayings sometimes seemed like twentieth-century versions of the "Sayings of the Desert Fathers": "Not enough charity has been practiced to make the poor curious about the things of the Spirit."

Maurin was an educator sui generis. He talked to any group that would listen; he wrote his short meditations, which Day titled "Easy Essays," so that they could be easily memorized. In short, he spoke, to paraphrase St. Paul, "in season and out." Maurin was somewhat monomaniacal about getting his ideas out. Luckily, among other things, Dorothy Day nixed the idea of recording his essays and broadcasting them over a loud speaker at the Worker house: too much like Brave New World, she judged.

Several books have now been written about the Catholic Workers. Some are too hagiographical; others simply rehash stories found in earlier books. What makes this book readable and worthy of inclusion on the Worker bookshelf is that, along with the good work of Professor Sicius, we get the voice of the inimitable Dorothy Day, speaking honestly and lovingly of one of the undeclared saints of our age, Peter Maurin.

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