Simone Weil: Portrait of a Self-Exiled Jew.

Simone Weil had little love for the Old Testament and a distaste for Judaism, which was deep and visceral despite the fact that she was Jewish. Nevin, nonetheless, sees her under the rubric of the Jewish "Just Person" who did not talk about the oppressed and poor but gave of her money, her food, her energy, and, in the final analysis, her life. It was that passion for the experience of justice that drove her to factory work and to the civil conflict in Spain in the 1930s and to London with the Free French at the end of her life.

In creating his portrait of Weil, Nevin feels compelled to resist any claims Christians may make on her. He will not countenance Weil as a hidden believer or a Christian mystic. His vigor in reacting against those who read her life in this fashion leads him to a kind of supercilious way of dismissing Christianity which is irritating and unhelpful. There is in this book a kind of know-it-all tone that grated on me especially when his comments on religion were often more critical than learned. The Bhagavad Gita is described as an evangel of "knowledge as worship" (the whole point of the Gita is to love God; it preaches the yoga of bhakti--devotion); he kisses off a millennium of patristic biblical commentators as those who impose a Christian anagogy on "innocuous and resistant Jewish scriptures"; Christians are lambasted for telling Jews that forgiveness is "owed" to the Nazis. (Which Christians tell which Jews that?)

Asides like that run through the text with such regularity that I would put this book down in exasperation only to pick it up again because of the value of his analysis of a particular work (he is exceptionally good, for instance, on Weils's The Need for Roots). Readers interested in Weil will need to work through this book. I only hope they will not find it as nettlesome a chore as I did.

John Bowden's little book has an ambitious aim: to provide a dictionary of crucial figures in the history of Christian theology from the first century to the present. Bowden understands "theology" in the broadest of contexts as the work of anyone who has seriously thought about the Christian datum. This allows him to include a figure like Gerard Manley Hopkins who was not technically a theologian but who wrote "theologically," and Jacques Derrida whose connections to theology are indirect and--let me express a prejudice here--malign. Each person gets a modest paragraph or two with an encapsulated biography; a mention of important works; a synopsis of his/her views. The book ends with a list of popes that draws heavily on J.N.D. Kelly's admirable The Oxford Dictionary of Popes.

In his introduction Bowden admits that he probably missed much and invites readers to supply what is lacking. His choice of persons is so idiosyncratic that one hesitates to begin. If Georges Bernanos, why not Graham Greene? If Bernadette Soubirous, why not the Little Flower, Therese of Liseux? If Harvey Cox, why not Joseph Fitzmyer or Richard McCormick (to name two North Americans of great scholarly stature)? More strange is the omission of a string of authentic giants who set the stage for much of the spirit of Vatican II: De Lubac,