The God of Life.

I read The God of Life each morning before the school day began and found myself going back to my Bible to annotate texts I had previously overlooked or undervalued in earlier readings. Gutierrez has read the pertinent scholarship, is very sensitive to the original languages and how words get translated, and what the tradition makes of those words. Above all, he encounters the text with an openness to the reality of a specific time and place living among the Peruvian poor as he does. He reads and thinks with great faith and no sentimentality.

The best way to understand the method of Gutierrez (if there be a method) is to take seriously his conviction that finding the God of life demands the "silence of contemplation and commitment." What Gutierrez requires, in short, is that we first listen and then act. He is a sure guide for the doing of bOth. Over the years his writings have taken on more and more of a spiritual and contemplative character. My suspicion is that time will judge Gustavo Gutierrez not only as one of the parents of liberation theology (his claim to that honor is rock solid) but as one of the premier spiritual writers of this generation who also happens to be a first-rate theologian.

Marty and Appleby co-direct a complex research project which, over the next few years, hopes .to complete a worldwide survey and analysis of religious fundamentalism(s). The project, sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, envisions a multivolumed report ending with some policy recommendations derived from the study itself. The present hefty book reports the .first fruit of this research. A number of scholars have devoted lengthy essays simply to describing the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism in the various religious traditions of the world. What ,we have in this volume is, as it were, a phenomenology of contemporary fundamentalism(s). Subsequent volumes will consider the impact of fundamentalism on social structures, political movements, etc.

Only the most dedicated soul will read these essays cover to cover. I contented myself with an ad libitum look at things that most interested me. Catholic fundamentalism was first on my list since that is familiar territory. The essay on fundamentalist movements in Latin America was exceedingly interesting and very well done. There were fine scholarly discussions about many of the troubled hotspots of the world in the appropriate essays: Sikhs versus Hindus or Hindus versus Muslims; resurgent nationalistic sects in Japan; the Jewish Heredim and their shaping of Israeli culture; the Shia' resurgence in the Islamic world as well as other Muslim movements like that of the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt.

It is not clear to me if this volume was to be the definitive tour of the fundamentalist world; if so, a few places were passed by. There is nothing in the book on syncretist sects in Black Africa (in fact, Africa is terra incognita except for Muslim North Africa); very little on Catholic fundamentalism in Europe outside the circles of the Lefebvre movement; omissions in the American scene ranging from the relatively benign Mormon polygamists of the West and the decidedly nonbenign purveyors of a hybrid Protestant fundamentalism, cum racist ideology. Finally, I take it from the omissions that syncretist cults in general (e.g., Santeria or Macumba or Voodoo or Rastafarianism) do not fall under the purview of what the editors consider fundamentalism, but why this should be is not plainly spelled out.