The Continuum Dictionary of Religion.

Edited by Michael Pye, Continuum, $34.95, 319 pp.

As readers of these notes should know, I have a soft spot for reference books. Pye's is a one-volume dictionary of terms from the various religions of the world. Anyone contemplating such a lexicon recognizes immediately that the editors need to be ruthlessly selective in what to omit and equally rigorous in holding writers to word limits. This dictionary omits proper names, but is not evenhanded on personal titles. For instance, Pye gives us a definition of "Buddha" (which is a title) but not "Christ" (which is also a title). Likewise, there is an attempt to provide entries that cut across religious traditions (e.g., "mysticism" and "myth") but in an uneven fashion (there is no entry on "monasticism" or "asceticism"--terms amenable to transreligious treatment). In a few places, brevity does not enhance understanding. The entry "dying-and-rising-god" describes vegetative gods whose death/rising mirrored the seasonal cycles. The entry then ends on this enigmatic note: "In no case is this proven." What the "this" refers to defeats me.

One could go on and on. This is an adequate dictionary and the entries refer to a bibliography at the end where more information might be gleaned. On a scale from one to ten, ten being the top, I would judge this dictionary to be about a seven.

The study of spirituality is part of any serious theological curriculum. What has been needed, especially for those who use classic texts from the spiritual tradition, is a brief history of the Christian spiritual tradition in order to orient students and contextualize their reading. For that reason I welcomed Holt's little book as one that I might put in the hands of my students as background reading. It is not a perfect text, but it is quite "user friendly." Each chapter ending has a modest list of further readings, as well as some practical hints on how to put into practice what one has learned.

Holt takes a straightforward historical approach, even though it is clear that spirituality is not simply history. In very brief chapters he moves from the world of the Bible through the patristic, medieval, Reformation, modern, and contemporary periods, with an eye on the varieties of Christian traditions, Orthodox, Catholic, Reformed, and Evangelical. In a panorama this broad it would be natural enough if some elements of the tradition get skewed and some judgments could be questioned: The Jesuits are not monastics, Trappists do not have a "vow" of silence, etc. Some readers might also want to "correct" his rather linear approach to the history of spirituality by reading Philip Sheldrake's estimable Spirituality and History (Crossroad, 1992) which was not available to Holt as he wrote.

These minor irritants, however, should not detract from the value of the book. In an easy and readable fashion, it provides a quick survey of the history of spirituality. I may pay it the compliment of requiring it for background reading for my course on spirituality. It is, however, a book for the beginner; a more thorough historical survey is as yet a desideratum.

Macquarrie, now emeritus from Oxford University, is a profoundly satisfying theologian. This little bookon spirituality, first published in 1972, has recently been reissued with some additional essays. The text still smacks of the 1 970s with its references to "religionless Christianity," but is well worth reading. Macquarrie is an extremely accomplished theologian, a true person of the church, and unafraid of swimming against the tide. He sees the Christian life as founded on three pillars: doctrine, worship, and deed. Keeping those three in some kind of healthy tension is absolutely necessary if one is not to fly off into spiritual quagmires: deeds without worship end up as pious social work while worship without grounding in doctrine runs the risk of sentimentality.

At the heart of Christian spirituality (Macquarrie is in reaction against those who too exclusively root themselves in the Word) is the Eucharist, and Macquarrie has some fine words not only on the liturgy but also in defense of such "extensions" of the liturgy as Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. His chapter on prayer is one of the finest in the book. For Macquarrie, prayer is a kind of "thinking"--a thinking which is passionate, compassionate, responsible, and thankful. The working out of those motifs is worth the price of the book.

At a time when there is so much psychobabble and Jungian sludge passing for spirituality it is comforting to see a genuine theologian turning his attention to the nexus between doctrine and praxis. Some of this book shows its age as well as its preoccupation with the life of Anglicanism (although Macquarrie is an authentically ecumenical thinker) but it contains much wisdom and well repays a close reading.

Given the mountains of books published on the New Testament, the person who merely wishes to "keep up" or even frame some coherent answer to the biblical question "Who do they say the Son of Man is?" might find Cook's little catechetical work helpful. Cook is a theologian with at least one foot in pastoral ministry. He has a sense of what people ask about Jesus and the New Testament. Did those miracles happen? Why did Christ die on the cross? I Jesus meaningful for the big world we live in today? Without patronizing, Cook answers these and similar questions by re-presenting the best of biblical scholarship combined with a genuine sensitivity to the pastoral needs and concerns of people.

Who might find this book useful? I,m not sure that it would make a coherent textbook in Christology, but both individuals and religious educators might find it helpful as a resource book and as a model for presenting the faith. Its most conspicuous merits are a blend of biblical scholarship, fidelity to the tradition of the church's teaching, and an ear for the kinds of questions people ask. As the introduction says, there is a need to "recontextualize" the long theological tradition of Christology (which runs from the Johannine literature through the councils down to our own day) in terms of what the earliest witnesses tell us about Jesus the Christ. Cook does that at a level which the alert layperson will find useful and the religious educator more than useful. The book concludes with a very brief glossary, a short bibliography but, alas, no index either of scriptural quotations or topics.

My colleague, Catherine LaCugna, has had the happy idea of soliciting a number of prominent American Catholic theologians to write essays on the traditional theological tracts from the perspective of a feminist hermeneutic. In other words, what these theologians have done is reflect on some classical theological themes (Trinity, church, sacraments, etc.) from the perspective of their own experience as Catholic women and "marked by the Catholic concern to be in continuity with the Christian tradition as much as possible, indeed, to search to the fullest extent for liberating elements within the Christian tradition." The "as much as possible" signals that there is operative in these essays both a hermeneutics of trust and one of suspicion.

LaCugna, quite explicitly, organized her book in such a way that it could be used in university/seminary courses. Each chapter combines both systematic and historical elements and ends with an annotated bibliography for further study.

This work is another of those markers which tell us that the theological enterprise is undergoing a sea change. The very questions raised by these theologians not only are new questions but they undercut the previously impermeable walls of the traditional theological tracts. LaCugna herself reads Trinitarian theology in such a manner as to make applications to everything from ethics to anthropology, while Anne Carr's exemplary essay on method raises fascinating questions about everything from ecclesiology to theological authority.

Most compelling for me is the way in which (spiritual) experience is called into play to restate theological issues. Thus Mary Catherine Hilkert appeals to apophatic spirituality to assure us that not everything is (or can) be said of the mystery of Christ, just as Elizabeth Johnson evokes the sophia strain of Christology to set before us Jesus the Christ who is the Wisdom of God. Again, Susan Ross invites us to think of sacramentality in terms of embodiment, as does Lisa Sowle Cahill from the perspective of ethics.

What struck me over and over again reading these essays was the fresh biblical perspectives they provided, beginning with Sandra Schneiders's excellent reflection on biblical theology: a topic which has been the subject of her thinking for some years now. One of the lasting contributions of liberation theology is the insight that biblical texts look quite different depending on where they are read or who reads them. That is surely borne out by a close engagement with this book. Let me just cite one example. Mary Aquin O'Neill notes that the subservience of women to men in marriage ("Your desire shall be for your husband/and he shall rule over you"--Gen. 3:16) comes as a result of the Fall. If we believe that in Christ we are a "new creation," then the mending of the Fall would seem to be also a falling away of subservience. To think through the implications of that sheds new light (at least it does for me) on a whole range of issues.

I think that theologians who teach the standard curriculum in Catholic theology (as well as their students) would benefit from a reading of these essays. Indeed, it would strike me as a dereliction not to be conversant with what these theologians add to the theological enterprise as they teach us how to bring forth "old things and new." The clarity of the prose might also entice those who are not theologians to use this work to see what some of the newer voices in Catholic theology are doing.