Sacred Identity: Exploring a Theology of the Person.

Paulist, $11.95, 217 pp.

Jane Kopas has written an engaging book with an arresting angle: that a deep sense of what it means to be linked to a divine creator provides some thick metaphors concerning personal identity. Using a species of the theology of correlation, Kopas thinks through the anthropological and spiritual implications of such terms as the "hidden/revealing God" and "creatureliness" and "made in the image of God" and "kinship in creation." Her strategy is to juxtapose the biblical doctrine of creation, the person of Jesus Christ, and human stories drawn from her own personal experiences and those gleaned from a wide variety of written sources.

Such an exercise is pregnant with possibility as anyone who has ever really thought (as, for example, a Saint Augustine and a Jean Paul Sartre--to cite contrary instances--have done) about what it means to be dependent on and linked to a Creator well understands. Kopas provides her reflections in well-written prose with a quite specific audience in mind: an educated lay audience and or a college class who may well believe in God but are not quite sure what kind of God it is that they believe in.

From the brief synopsis given above it should not be thought that Kopas reflects on a narrowly vertical axis (that is, "myself and God"). Like John Paul II, Kopas understands that the full context of the Genesis creation account(s) demands that human beings be seen in the context of place and in the context of community. That allows her to link her human metaphors not only vertically to the Creator but horizontally to both human and natural ecologies of dependence and limits. She sees our interdependence with others, creation, and God not by appealing to the faddish tropes of "creation spirituality" but to the more sober realism (she has some good pages on " finitude" and "sin"--no Pollyanna she) of the biblical/theological tradition holistically conceived. The result is a lively and readable book which shows how a serious college teacher and theologically reflective writer can bring forth from the ancient pages of Genesis both old things and new.