DOI:10.1111/nbfr.12146 Reviews SACRIFICE AND MODERN THOUGHT edited by Julia Meszaros & Johannes Zachhuber, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013, pp. viii + 279, £65.00, hbk Like almost all collections of essays, this volume is of uneven quality and usefulness, but taken as a whole it provides a valuable and often extremely helpful overview of the approaches to what Philip McCosker describes as a ‘riotously polyvalent term’ (p. 133). Principally the concerns expressed are theological: whether ‘sacrifice’ is a helpful term for understanding the death of Christ; in what sense(s) is the Eucharist a sacrifice; and so on. Later chapters, however, direct our minds to wider cultural considerations, including a fascinating if somewhat tangential essay by Jon Pahl on ‘Apocalypse and Sacrifice in Modern Film’. Over the book, especially the first nine of the fifteen essays, inevitably looms the figure of René Girard. Those not familiar with his vital but controversial approach to sacrifice and its relationship to Christianity would be well-advised to begin with the essays by Zachhuber and then Paul Fiddes – in fact, in one paragraph beginning on p. 53 the latter manages to encapsulate with exemplary clarity Girard’s critique of sacrifice, which underpins the whole of his approach to theology. He then goes on to demonstrate the importance of the partial reversal of his position that followed Girard’s dialogue with the Jesuit theologian Raymund Schwager in the 1990s, explored more fully in a superb contribution by Wolfgang Palaver. Under the guise of a critique of John Lennon’s religion-free idyll of Imagine, seen as of a piece with the anti-religionism of Dawkins et al., Palaver uses the later Girard, sensitively complemented by the thought of Simone Weil, to mount a powerful defence of sacrifice – the paradoxical Christian form of which is self-sacrifice – as the key to the transformation of individuals and society. Not all are convinced, however: for Pamela Sue Anderson the sacrificial conception of religion is often imposed by the male upon the female, such that it is ‘often a problem for women in religious institutions that a destructive form of love has been enforced by practices of self-sacrifice without ‘principled autonomy’ (p. 34). Yet Fiddes is able to find surprising points of contact between Balthasar’s embrace of sacrifice as central to the ‘theodrama’ and the feminist approaches of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray; he does this by opposing Girard’s continued equation of sacrifice with scapegoating. Even the later Girard understands the violent and substitutionary death of the victim as of the very nature of sacrifice, albeit latterly a death that can be willingly undergone in a paradoxical subversion of the human violence that undergirds sacrificial religiosity. Yet this understanding stands at one end of a spectrum to which McCosker and others draw our attention, a spectrum stretching between immolationist and oblationist definitions of sacrifice. In the former, it is indeed the death or destruction of the victim that is emphasised; in the latter, the focus is rather on the offering, whether by the priest within the ritual or by the ‘owner’ of the victim, be it a nomadic pastoralist offering of his flock as in the Old Testament, or a victorious general offering his prisoners of war in pre-colonial Mexico – or even the widow’s mite. As Fiddes shows, this oblationist approach largely overlooked by Girard, and by some of the other contributors in this volume, in fact predominates both in the Old Testament and in the application of sacrificial imagery to the death of  C 2015 The Dominican Council. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 2015, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA Reviews 629 Christ in the New. He notes rightly, for example, that the Letter to the Hebrews (which Girard saw as a piece of dangerous backsliding on the part of the Christian scriptures, vis-à-vis Paul and the Gospels), though it portrays Christ’s death-andexaltation as the fulfilment of the Day of Atonement ritual, completely overlooks that day’s scapegoat ritual which is paradigmatic for Girard. Old Testament sacrifice, indeed, is not, or at least not only and not straightforwardly, about death and the shedding of blood: it is about gift, communion and/or expiation. Moreover, this expiation is not a penalty imposed by an angry God upon his sinful people, but rather an act of God in which he permits his holy people to participate symbolically in his real work of atonement. McCosker’s article builds helpfully on these insights to explore the ways in which twentieth-century Catholic theologians – concentrating on Vonier, Chauvet and Ratzinger – have interpreted the Eucharist as sacrifice. I have concentrated thus far on the essays by Fiddes and McCosker simply because for me as a Catholic biblical theologian they offer easily the most helpful insights. Perhaps not coincidentally they are also the least burdened by what seems in some of the other contributions like an excessively polysyllabic obscurantism. Nevertheless there is plenty of other material that will reward the reader: Jessica Frazier’s ‘From Slaughtered Lambs to Dedicated Lives’ opposes Girard, in all his phases, with what seems to me to be a more plausible and profound take on the nature of human desire, while Nick Allen offers an intriguing and refreshingly straightforward apologia for the Durkheimian-anthropological study of sacrifice by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, published in 1899. The final third of the book is perhaps of less immediate relevance to the theologian, including as it does a learned exposition of Dr Strangelove and two chapters on Aztec and other Mesoamerican human sacrificial practices. Yet these chapters are fascinating: in the second of them, David Brown asks whether such practices might pose some helpful if probing questions to Christian theology (rather than simply being subject to critique by Christianity) and in the course of the essay makes important contributions to the debate about the interpretation of difficult passages such as Deuteronomy 7, demanding total destruction of the Canaanites, and the near-sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. In Laura Rival’s preceding essay, a plausible, if unprovable, analysis is offered of the anthropology and cosmology that lay at the heart of the Aztec ‘sacrificial complex’. There are, in fact, fascinating parallels between this analysis and the relationship between cosmology and sacrificial cult discernible in later pre-Christian Jewish writings such as the Book of Jubilees and some of the Dead Sea Scrolls; if there is anything missing from this volume, it is an examination of whether the complex thought-world of late Second-Temple Judaism, centred as it was upon one of human history’s most remarkable places of sacrifice, might have any light to shed upon the meaning of sacrifice for modern Christian theology. RICHARD JOSEPH OUNSWORTH OP RENAISSANCE TRUTHS: HUMANISM, SCHOLASTICISM AND THE SEARCH FOR THE PERFECT LANGUAGE by Alan R. Perreiah, Ashgate, Farnham, 2014, pp. x + 209, £65.00, hbk This is a book which is difficult for an intellectual historian to review fairly. It is full of interest, but in the end it lacks a satisfactory coordination of its ideas. The reader is left in some uncertainty as to whether it is primarily about the late medieval or the modern scholarly debates about its main subject or subjects. And those subjects sometimes seem to be shaken into new patterns with the randomness of a kaleidoscope.  C 2015 The Dominican Council 630 Reviews The author says at the outset that he has tried to give the whole debate a ‘fresh perspective’ by locating humanism and scholasticism ‘within a new frame of reference suggested by’ Umberto Eco’s The Search for the perfect language. The introduction then goes on to consider the status quaestionis mainly in terms of the debates of a number of other modern writers. The first chapter sets out a (but as it emerges not the only) central question. Was there once, before the Fall and before the fragmentation of human language in the episode of the Tower of Babel, an original ‘perfect’ language? If so, can it be recovered? Dante in the De vulgari eloquentia, Raymond Llull and Leibnitz are considered. The chapter ends by proposing to take Lorenzo Valla’s Elegantiae linguae latinae as representing the late medieval ‘humanist’ approach to this question and Paul of Venice’s Logica Parva to speak for the scholastics, though other protagonists enter the fray as the book progresses. Much of what follows is concerned not only with Valla (Dialectical Disputations) but also with Vives (Adversus Pseudodialecticos), and rather less with Paul of Venice, whose views on truth get a final chapter. In the body of the book the author engages with a complex of emerging questions, a number of which he might seem to a medieval author to beg. This tendency is perhaps encouraged by his continuing reliance on the views of key figures in the modern scholarly debate rather than the original texts in identifying the points and concepts to be discussed. A sentence may give the flavour: ‘Although linguistic determinism is a modern hypothesis about language, several scholars have adopted it for study of the Renaissance’. This approach seems to presume that there were two profoundly distinct approaches, the scholastic and the humanist. There were certainly ‘camps’ and active hostilities between them. Yet is not always obvious where the reader is being led in relation to the assumption that two ways of thinking and schools of thought were at war and humanism and scholasticism fought it out at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. It is hard to be sure that if this book had been put into the hands of any of these medieval and early Renaissance authors he would have found his place in it with ease or recognised himself. This reader longed for more Latin, closer engagement with the problems as the late medieval world put them, and wanted to spend more time with the views of the medieval thinkers themselves. It was startling to find neither ‘nominalism’ nor ‘realism’ in the index. This is an ambitious book, but perhaps too much so, and too loath to leave the meta-level of modern scholarship for the solid ground of the sources in their original language. G.R. EVANS VATICAN II: CATHOLIC DOCTRINES ON JEWS AND MUSLIMS by Gavin D’Costa, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014, pp. xii + 252, £55.00, hbk The fiftieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council has highlighted the contested nature of accounts of the Council’s teaching and there is perhaps no more contentious area than that of the Church’s relations with other religions. Did the Council intend a radical break with the doctrines and attitudes of the past, as many have claimed either in praise or dismay? In his address to the Roman Curia in 2005 Pope Benedict XVI brought clarity and focus to such debates by identifying two competing and conflicting approaches at work: a hermeneutic of ‘discontinuity and rupture’ and a hermeneutic of ‘reform and renewal.’ The Pope  C 2015 The Dominican Council Reviews 631 pointed to the latter as the authentic interpretation of the Council’s texts. But can the documents dealing with other religions really be understood within this second hermeneutic? Over the course of decades Professor Gavin D’Costa has articulated a Catholic theology of religions that is firmly anchored in fidelity to magisterial teaching. His welcome and timely study of the teaching of the Vatican Council about other religions, especially about Judaism and Islam, must become standard reading for anyone who wants to consider what the texts of the Council say and how this relates to the debate over discontinuity and continuity. With a wealth of background information and with great clarity and rigour, he enables us to get a close reading of the texts themselves and to move beyond the confusion and rhetoric that have so often surrounded them. The first chapter focuses on the general types of modern interpreters and shows that an adequate hermeneutic of the texts has to combine both historical and theological readings. D’Costa argues that any reading has to recognize that there are different ‘theological notes’ or authoritative grades of doctrinal teaching, which affect both the status of the teaching and the scope for legitimate development or discontinuity. These levels are often confused in the debates over the Council. Those modern interpreters of Vatican II who have taken only a historical approach have tended to emphasise and praise radical discontinuity, seeing doctrines as historically contingent and hence subject to revision. Yet this ignores the fact that it is fundamental to the Church’s theological self-understanding that there is doctrinal continuity, which is rooted in God’s self-revelation of Himself to human beings. On the other hand, those modern interpreters who appraise the documents according to a view of theological continuity in which any form of change is excluded have lamented what they also see as discontinuity, with the result that they either label the Council as non-doctrinal and purely pastoral in character, or deem the Council heretical. D’Costa argues that instead we should recognise the necessity of the theological without neglecting the historical. Looking back to Newman and Congar, he identifies a legitimate place for development within continuity, as deeper understandings, as well as changed expressions, of doctrine are sought to meet the needs of new questions that arise over time. There can, of course, also be non-doctrinal discontinuity even of a radical kind. Chapter two moves on to consider conciliar teaching about other religions in general. Contrary to the views of many, the Council does not give up on the doctrine of the necessity of the Church as the means of salvation, which is de fide, the highest level of teaching, while also affirming the longstanding concept of invincible ignorance as open to all. Likewise, the Church continues to teach universal mission and the reality of sin and Satan in other religions. The Council is not teaching that other religions are per se ways of salvation apart from the Church. Where newness is present is rather insofar as the Council picks up on suggestions already made in earlier Catholic tradition, though now for the first time locating them within magisterial teaching. Thus, it takes up Aquinas’s distinction between those who are actually members of the Church and those who are potentially members, who are ‘ordered’ (ordinantur) to the Church, as applicable to non-Christians, while the idea of praeparatio evangelica, applied by Eusebius to Israel, is extended to whatever might be deemed good, true and holy in other religions. Chapter three deals with Judaism. A number of interpreters have claimed that the Council does mark a radical discontinuity, a ‘dramatic change,’ in doctrine (O’Collins). Here we come to what will be the most controversial part of the book, especially for those who argue that the Council teaches that the Judaism constitutes a separate way of salvation for the Jews and that mission to the Jews is now deemed illegitimate. Again what is new is somewhat less dramatic. The Council does reject the charge that the Jews are guilty of deicide, but the  C 2015 The Dominican Council 632 Reviews magisterium previously never taught that the gospels should be read as affirming otherwise. The Council also affirms Romans as teaching that God remains faithful to the covenants and promises made to the ancestors of Israel and hence that God has not rejected the Jewish people who are their descendants, while also affirming that the members of the Church, having received the New Covenant, are likewise their descendants. Yet, the Council remains silent about whether the Jews are themselves faithful to the covenant and about whether the covenant is abrogated, superseded or fulfilled, though the relatio on this passage suggests that fulfillment is meant to be the way the text is read. It cannot be argued that the Council itself teaches Judaism is per se a way of salvation. Moreover, the documents implicitly teach that mission to the Jews is still legitimate, since it explicitly teaches mission to all non-Christians. Thus, there is a continuity of the deposit of faith, but what is new is that a certain interpretation of the gospels and a new emphasis on Romans is raised to level of doctrinal teaching in magisterial teaching. Chapter four then deals with Islam. Again, some labelled the teaching as revolutionary, as a ‘radical change in the Copernican sense’ (Caspar). D’Costa focuses on two important aspects: the affirmation that Muslims worship with Catholics the one God and the linking of Islam to Abraham. Looking back to earlier Catholic teaching, D’Costa points out that, though Islam was severely criticised and deemed a heretical form of Christianity, it was never denied that Muslims were monotheists or said that they worshipped a false god. D’Costa argues that it would also be reasonable as a probable theological opinion (the fifth and lowest level of doctrinal teaching) to infer from the link with Abraham that Islam has an ‘in-between’ status between having access to general revelation and the particular supernatural revelation of the religion of Israel and the Church, since Islam does have access and does affirm in its own way elements of the supernatural religion found in the latter. Again, there is a history going back to the sixteenth century of identifying a link between the religion of Islam and the faith of Abraham. However, Islam is not said to be a supernatural religion in its own right on a level with that of Israel. There is no basis within these documents for asserting that Islam is per se an Abrahamic faith like the religion of Israel. No radical break in doctrine is present in the documents, only the novelty of including the mention of worshipping the same God and the link with Abraham in an official document. D’Costa’s account is measured and convincing. He does recognise the immensely important changes that were brought about by the Council. It is just that this is not the manifestation of radical discontinuity with earlier doctrinal teaching, but rather of legitimate development and newness within continuity, along with a genuine break with earlier non-magisterial theological traditions and attitudes, where change was necessary and legitimate. He concludes with these pertinent words: ‘from these building blocks and others at the Council, Catholic theology of religion must advance, both cautiously with an eye to scripture, tradition, and the magisterium; and adventurously and imaginatively, with an eye to God’s actions in the world’ (p.217). MARTIN GANERI OP BALTHASAR ON THE SPIRITUAL SENSES. PERCEIVING SPLENDOUR by Mark McInroy, (Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014, pp. xii + 217, £ 50,00, hbk If one were looking for a clear and rigorous book dealing with the topic of the ‘spiritual senses’, this accurate volume by Mark McInroy is the appropriate  C 2015 The Dominican Council Reviews 633 choice. Well-written and well-structured, the book offers a reliable synthesis of the doctrine of the spiritual senses as elaborated by Hans Urs von Balthasar. Far from circumscribing the spiritual senses within the realm of mystical experience, the Swiss theologian interprets the traditional topic so as to explain ordinary Christian life as the place where human being can perceive the splendour of the form of God’s revelation. In so doing, his operation of ressourcement succeeds in offering an important theological ‘tool’ to constitute a real phenomenology of believing experience. As the author points out: Balthasar ‘draws from the spirit (if not the letter) of the tradition in order to advance the audaciously creative version of the doctrine that is required to meet the challenges of his age’(p. 190). From the point of view of Balthasar’s work itself, the book shows the usefulness of this theological effort to sustain the realism of Christian experience and its credibility, but also the originality of this theoretical contribution in the field of anthropological theology. From the viewpoint of studies on Balthasar’s thought, McInroy’s volume shows the diffusion of the spiritual senses throughout almost the entire corpus of Balthasar’s writings. In this way, one can consider this theme as a synthetic perspective in understanding the anthropological vision of the Swiss theologian: his distinctive personalism, his overcoming of Greek hierarchic dualism (material / spiritual) as well as of the Neo-Scholastic dualism regarding nature and grace, and the anthropological profile of his theological aesthetic. The book is articulated in six chapters. The first is devoted to the patristic influence on Balthasar’s view of the spiritual senses, with particular attention to the role of Origen of Alexandria, dealing with Evagrius of Pontus, Diadochus of Photice, Pseudo-Macarius, Augustine of Hippo, Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa, and Pseudo-Dionysius. In this context, it is very interesting to see how McInroy interprets the influence of Karl Rahner’s reading of Origen on Balthasar, and the effort of the former to gain an original viewpoint connected with the overcoming of dualistic conceptions in the anthropological realm. The second chapter considers Balthasar’s interpretation of Bonaventure, as the main medieval theorist of the spiritual senses, and of Ignatius of Loyola. In the context of the emerging anthropology of ‘unity-in-duality’, here is underlined the practical dimension and the continuity between the corporeal and the spiritual senses as they emerge in the tradition originating from Ignatius. Contemporary sources are the main topic of the third chapter. Here the author analyses the influence on Balthasar by Karl Barth, Romano Guardini, Gustav Siewerth and Paul Claudel, regarding particularly the unity of corporeal and spiritual perception. The ‘unity-in-duality’ of the Balthasarian anthropology finds its roots in different aspects, elaborated by these important Christian thinkers, such as the following elements. From the two theologians, Balthasar holds, on the one hand, the human capacity to perceive God through the world within history (Barth) and, on the other hand, the notion of Gestalt as object of a kind of perception which lies beyond the separation between corporeal and spiritual (Guardini). The personalism under which the human being can be conceived as ‘being-in-encounter’ (p. 116) within the radical unity of body and soul (Siewerth), and the Eucharistic correlation between the spiritual senses and the real in a strong Christocentric context (Claudel) are instead the ‘precipitate’ of the hermeneutical encounter between his exigencies and the speculation of the German philosopher as well as of the French poet. The fourth chapter tries to interpret the doctrine of the spiritual senses, sketched by Balthasar, within the context of his theological aesthetics. This field is based on a peculiar conception of fundamental theology, characterized by the centrality of ‘relation’: ‘if human beings are fundamentally constituted in an interpersonal act, and if they are able to experience God, then the experience of God must also occur as an encounter with the other human being’ (p. 124). Thus the theological aesthetics becomes the intellectual place in which Balthasar can conceive how the ‘spiritual emerges from the ‘corporeal’. In this way, we can perceive – with the simple gift of grace  C 2015 The Dominican Council 634 Reviews proper to ordinary Christian life – the Christocentric character of the experience described. In fact, for Balthasar, ‘the object of spiritual-corporeal perception is the Incarnate Word’ (p. 126) and ‘Christ is present in the world, the Church, liturgy, and the neighbour’ (p. 127). This conception is deepened in the fifth chapter, where – as McInroy himself claims – the study proposes its central assertion: ‘Balthasar’s theological aesthetic calls for perception of the ‘form’ (Gestalt), and that form consists of both sensory and ‘supersensory’ aspects’ (p. 12). Just as in the forma we can perceive the splendour, so in Jesus Christ we can perceive the Father (cf. Jo 14:9). The sixth and last chapter, which is one of the most interesting, describes the role of Swiss theologian within the context of the main theological issues of his time. Considering Balthasar in dialogue with the Neo-Scholastic approach, with Karl Rahner, and Karl Barth, McInroy shows how his intellectual strategy relating to the spiritual senses matters in dealing with issues such as ‘the nature of faith, natural theology, apologetics, aesthetic experience, and the relationship between nature and grace’ (p. 13). Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses is a very instructive thought-provoking and fully documented book. It makes a solid contribution to studies devoted to the Swiss theologian’s work, underlining – beyond the use of the word itself – the phenomenological character of his theological project. In this sense, it can be useful in order to safeguard the realism of Christian experience. However, even the most complete research can have some deficiencies. In this case, I might point out the lack of discussion of an important thinker in the genesis of Balthasar’s work as Pierre Rousselot (cf. the article ‘Les yeux de la foi’, in Recherches de Sciences Religieuses I (1910), 241–259; 444–475). Moreover, the rich bibliography does not mention the important collection on the topic of the spiritual senses edited by the Theological Faculty of Northern Italy (Milan) (A. Montanari (ed.), I sensi spirituali. Tra corpo e spirito, Milan, 2012). MARCO SALVIOLI OP FAITH AND WISDOM IN SCIENCE by Tom McLeish, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014, pp. x + 284, £18.99, hbk Theology is too important a subject to be just left to theologians, so it is to be commended when an expert from another discipline has the confidence to venture into the theological arena and do some serious reflection. Tom McLeish is a professor of physics who does just that. As the title might suggest, this is not the typical confrontational book where faith and science are pitted against each other, but rather, McLeish takes faith in God as a given and he uses this perspective to reflect on how science might be viewed in the light of faith and how faith might be viewed in the light of science. McLeish begins by considering the way science is perceived among the general public and from his own experience he feels that many people view science with suspicion. He finds that whilst people are hopeful with regards to the many benefits science might deliver, e.g. cures for cancer, this is mingled with a great fear of the power that science can unleash in the world, e.g. nuclear weapons. But more than this, McLeish finds that there is a general perception that science undermines our own humanity, that it explains away all that is most precious to us. This sets the scene for McLeish’s contention that there is something wrong with humanity’s place in the universe, a broken contract with nature that makes us feel strangers in the presence of ‘the sheer inhuman otherness of matter.’ This  C 2015 The Dominican Council Reviews 635 phrase, ‘the sheer inhuman otherness of matter’ is one that McLeish borrows from George Steiner’s book Real Presences and it is a phrase McLeish keeps coming back to, a genuine challenge that needs to be faced up to. Is it possible to bridge the great chasm between ‘the sheer inhuman otherness of matter’ and our own humanity? Still, one has to question whether viewing matter in terms of sheer inhuman otherness is really anything more than a view. Whenever we see another person, are we not seeing matter which is very definitely human rather than nonhuman? If one believes that a thing is what it is in virtue of its substantial form, then there could be many different types of matter, both human and nonhuman, depending on the substantial form of which the matter was the subject. But it is clear that McLeish is not talking about matter in any Aristotelian sense. Rather he is talking about atomic particles. According to the Nobel laureate, Richard Feynman, whom McLeish quotes, the greatest scientific discovery of all time is that ‘all things are made of atoms – little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another’. McLeish goes on to recount how this atomic hypothesis allowed him to solve a scientific mystery a young chemist presented to him – why should a weak solution of peptides set into a jelly? After much head scratching McLeish came up with a convincing answer – the peptides are able to self-assemble to form a jelly, not because of any new principle acting as a guiding force, but because the peptides are randomly moving about, and so if given time, there is a high probability they will eventually bump into each other enough times and in the right way so as to stick together and form a jelly. But the atomic hypothesis, although it has great explanatory power, does have its cost. If the atomic hypothesis is true, then there are not lots of different types of matter after all, but only the relatively few types of matter, the fundamental particles which are known to physicists, and these particles certainly are not human. This then is rather disconcerting, because it looks like the same random and purposeless motion that accounts for peptide solutions forming into jelly is at the heart of all biological processes including our own. There is, therefore, this huge chasm between what we think we are and what the atomic hypothesis says we actually are. In the light of faith, though, McLeish believes that this chasm can be bridged, and he finds in the bible a divine mandate for people to investigate the natural world so that humanity can be reconciled with it. This is McLeish’s ‘theology of science’, of how humankind’s scientific endeavours are meant to fit within God’s divine plan. Whilst McLeish draws on many scriptural passages, he pays particular attention to the book of Job. For McLeish, the book of Job is not primarily about the problem of suffering, but rather it is about the disconnect between humanity and the chaotic disorderliness of the rest of creation. Furthermore, McLeish understands the Lord’s answer to Job as saying that ‘chaos is part of the fruitfulness of nature – we cannot hope to control it any more than we can bridle Leviathan, but by understanding we might channel it’. The role of reconciling humanity with the rest of nature that McLeish sees as science’s primary purpose is a far more honourable goal than merely improving a country’s competitiveness and quality of life. But it seems possible to share in McLeish’s vision of science without necessarily conceding that humanity’s uneasy relationship with the natural world is because of the ‘sheer inhuman otherness of matter’, though to see beyond the problem of matter might require a more critical evaluation of the atomic hypothesis than McLeish is willing to give. But given that elementary particles can be in two places at once, can interfere with each other as though they were waves and cannot be separated as distinct entities from each other without destroying their quantum state, is this really just a fine tuning of the atomic hypothesis? Or might not this be an invitation to seek a new and  C 2015 The Dominican Council 636 Reviews richer hypothesis, perhaps one in which we could genuinely recognise the matter in which we are formed as being truly human. ROBERT VERRILL OP HOPE: PROMISE, POSSIBILITY, AND FULFILLMENT edited by Richard Lennan and Nancy Pineda-Madrid, Paulist Press, Mahwah NJ, 2013, pp. xvi + 261, £19.99, pbk This book, an exploration of the theological virtue of hope for the 21st century, has considerable coherence and unity of vision. It is striking and unusual for a book comprised of 17 short essays by as many different authors to exhibit such internal resonance and cross-referencing between them – kudos to the editors for accomplishing this, which is a strength. The drawback of this unity, though, is that the weaknesses in the collection also tend to be evident throughout. The essays are grouped into four sections or ‘movements’ (p.239). The first is called ‘grounding hope’ which offers a scriptural and theological foundation for Christian hope. Much is made of the Pauline triad of faith, hope, and charity, and how the three theological virtues, as they came to be called, are interlinked and even inseparable (cf p.37). So Doyle, in an otherwise cogent and helpful article, says that ‘because these three virtues are so integrated, they cannot be separated’ (p.20). However, although the theological virtues are infused altogether with the gift of sanctifying grace, this is not to say that they ‘cannot be separated’. On the contrary, as the Council of Trent taught definitively, ‘by every mortal sin, grace is lost, but not faith’; nor is hope necessarily lost. This is not just Catholic doctrine, of course. Hence John Henry Newman said in one of his (Anglican) parochial sermons: ‘Balaam had faith and hope, but not love. “May I die the death of the righteous!” is an act of hope. “The word that the Lord putteth into my mouth, that will I speak,” is an act of faith; but his conduct showed that neither his faith nor his hope was loving’. So, the teaching of the Church is that charity may be lost, even though hope and faith are not; these three are thus separable. That this does not appear to be kept in view is a weakness in this volume. Lennan, for example, wonders if ‘the grim truth of clerical sexual abuse might lead us to abandon any attempt to connect the church and hope’(p.45), and then in the next paragraph he argues that because there is ‘trust in God as the object of our faith, which is foundation of our hope, can enable us to retain hope’ (p.45f). But this is because the grievous sins of the institutional Church have principally harmed charity, and only impaired hope and faith; the loss of charity has important ramifications for her mission and what we should do in response. So, it seems to me the question that should be posed is not whether a sinful Church is an obstacle to hope (p.42) but whether she is an obstacle to charity. If so, then Lennan can go on to argue as he does for us to ‘acknowledge our failings’ in a ‘grace-formed surrender to God in hope’ (p.51) for charity is restored by repentance. That one can do so is because one still has hope in God’s mercy and forgiveness, ‘even within our flawed church’ (p.42), as Lennan says, and this is precisely because faith and hope may yet remain even if charity is lost through unrepented mortal sin. My conclusion here matches Lennan’s, but the approach takes into account the dynamic of the three theological virtues and how mortal sin affects them. Within the Body of the Christ, such sins are clerical but they do affect us all as a Church, thus each of us individually needs to turn to God in repentance over this serious issue so that charity may be restored to the entire Body. As St Catherine of Siena has said, each of us is in need of conversion, of taking on what Lennan calls ‘an aspirational attitude to the church [that] prompts  C 2015 The Dominican Council Reviews 637 us to be more faithful disciples of Christ, to living more authentically the faith we profess’ (p.49). This attitude of turning towards Christ is at the centre of Groome’s essay, which is in the second section of the book, entitled ‘Nurturing Hope’. I found Groome’s reflection on effective catechesis for our times to be the most helpful in this section. As he says, this is catechesis that ‘puts Christ Jesus at the center and reflects his own pedagogy’ (p.96). Also touching and interesting was Ospino’s essay on Latin American migrants which resonated with my own experiences with Filipino migrant workers. Their quest for justice and a better life speaks of how ‘hope in eternal life through Jesus Christ is first experienced in the present in our immediate historical existence’ (p.101). The present as the locus of hope is explored in greater detail in section 4, entitled ‘Living Hope’. Drawing on St John’s gospel, liberation theology and Gaudium et spes, the essays in this final section make an appeal for us to transform this world through renewed ways of living, and so to live out our hope. While our own stories may thus be drawn up into the Christian experience of hope, I felt that the chapter that most required stories of the practical experience of hope offered very little. Pineda-Madrid’s essay on ‘Hope and Salvation in the Shadow of Tragedy’ is the first of a section called ‘Sustaining Hope’. At a time when so much tragedy fills our newsfeeds, I had hoped for some stories of the triumph of hope over despair and disaster; stories to sustain our hope in difficult times. I was disappointed to find none. Nevertheless, the author delivers a rousing call to ‘thwart evil so as to realize the greater good’ (p.122) which would have made more impact if examples, say from the life of Mandela or the saints, were included. Such examples are happily forthcoming in the rest of this section, particularly in Vicini’s fine reflection on hope motivating the moral life. Baldovin’s contribution on the liturgy is excellent but one is left wanting more. Both he and Lennan point to the need for architecture that ‘can engender [eschatological] hope by opening our hearts and minds to the God who exceeds our grasp’ (p.44) but, again, I think examples would have helped. As Benedict XVI suggested, ‘the Gothic cathedral intended to express in its architectural lines the soul’s longing for God’. Speaking of the Pope Emeritus brings me to a final point. I was surprised at how little reference was made to Benedict XVI’s Spe Salvi, which was the last major exposition at such an authoritative level on the virtue of hope. Occasionally a cursory mention was made of this papal text, but surely it deserves a more thorough engagement in a book devoted to hope? One consequence of hoping is that when one’s expectations are not met one experiences disappointment. So, although there is merit in this book, I could not help being left with this feeling. As a ‘theology of hope for the twenty-first century’, then, if I may cite Cardman whose essay closes the collection: ‘the fullness of day is yet to come’ (p. 236). LAWRENCE LEW OP HIMMELWÄRTS UND WELTGEWANDT – HEAVENWARD AND WORLDLY: CHURCH AND RELIGIOUS ORDERS IN (POST) SECULAR SOCIETY edited by Thomas Dienberg, Thomas Eggensperger and Ulrich Engel, Aschendorff Verlag, Münster, 2014, pp. 388, €42.00, hbk This volume collects papers given at a symposium which concluded a two year research project on the subject of ‘passing on faith in social and religious processes of transformation’. Each paper is in German and in English, hence the bilingual title. As with many symposia, the papers come at this topic from a number of  C 2015 The Dominican Council 638 Reviews perspectives, but there are some important themes that are common to them all. Principal among these is the approach to the process of secularisation – all the authors start from the basis that this process is not merely something inevitable, but rather something to be welcomed. The agenda of the secular world is seen as setting the agenda to which the Church must respond. Nowhere is this more clear than in Francesca Restifo’s short contribution on ‘Extreme Poverty and Human Rights’, which welcomes the guiding principles on extreme poverty and human rights and urges upon states their legal obligation to take steps to eliminate extreme poverty. The author subtitles her reflection ‘Moving from Charity towards a Human Rights-based approach’: this is a curious position for a theologian to take, as it suggests that the traditional priority of love over law should be reversed. Although the paper is a short one (and thus this may be an unfair criticism of a wider process of thought) it is striking that neither explicitly Christian principles nor explicitly theological authors are cited. In this context the reflections on Pope Benedict XVI on the relationship between justice and charity (in Deus Caritas Est 26–29) would surely have been relevant to an attempt to establish whether there was any space for the handing on of faith in the context of this development in human rights legislation. Moreover, the fact that Dr Restifo acts as International Advocacy director for Franciscans International might have led one to expect some insight on the subject of poverty from St Francis, who is not even mentioned, let alone analysed. This is not to say that secularisation is viewed in a simple way. One of the merits of the collection is that the picture of secularisation is drawn out to show that it is not a simple and uniform phenomenon, but varies in different regions of the world and in different ecclesial contexts. José Casanova has a paper in the collection addressing this situation in a way which draws attention to the manysided phenomenon that has come to be described as secularism, and others expand on this by looking at different regions and ecclesial contexts. András Máthé-Tóth’s tantalisingly brief paper on central and eastern European perspectives raised a number of important questions, of which the most fundamental was that whether religion has become an ‘empty signifier’ in the public square (p. 113): if all are to define religion for themselves, then the idea of passing on faith must go through a radical re-appraisal. Reflections on this elsewhere in the collection draw on the experience both of parish life and of the situation of ecclesial media communications; it might at first seem paradoxical that in the parish situation focus on the core activity of the Sunday Eucharist was identified as the way forward – but a careful reading even of this description reveals that this strategy fits into the characteristic shift from ‘we’ to ‘I’ identified by Michael Plattig in another contribution. Joseph Nuzzi’s description of parish apostolate reads like a working out in practice of Plattig’s perception that the ‘readiness to be transformed and become a spiritual community grows out of the spirituality of sisters and brothers in their individual response to God’s call’ (p. 305). Theoretical attempts to respond to this come largely from the Franciscan tradition, seeking to draw inspiration from Bonaventure’s theology as well as the example of Francis himself. The one contribution from the Dominican tradition (Bernhard Kohl on ‘The vulnerability of the person within Dominican spirituality’) exemplifies the radical turn away from the transcendent which is typical of the papers in this collection. Others will be better placed than I to decide whether ‘helping people in pluralism to be able to take part in discussion’, as they live in ‘a pluralist society on the way to realising their freedom, on the way to greater realisation of their dignity’, to ‘the development of an autonomous human identity reflected in self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem’ (pp. 279–280) are central to Dominican life and identity; at the very least, a deeper examination of Dominican history might have raised questions about the simple equation of ‘contemplari’ with ‘study’. One of the weaknesses of the methodological  C 2015 The Dominican Council Reviews 639 decision to start with the positions of the secular world (in this case, the theoretical tradition of Habermas) is that references to the tradition can end up looking like citations of proof texts, rather than genuine attempts to engage with the tradition in such a way as to enable it to speak to the present. One striking feature of this collection is something else that is absent. Not merely is the Christian tradition largely absent, but so is another dialogue partner whom the title might have led one to expect to be present. The dichotomy between heavenly and worldly that is such a feature of Marx’s thought on religion, and its importance for his theory of the secular state, might have been thought to make him (and by extension the Marxist tradition) an obvious dialogue partner. While it is clear from the various contributions to this collection (in the unlikely event that anyone might have thought otherwise) that there are no simple answers for either the Church as a whole, or religious orders more specifically, to the challenges posed by society, whether secular or post-secular, one may reasonably think that a two-year research project could have looked somewhat beyond the categories of the flourishing field of secularism studies. For those interested in that field, this will be a thought-provoking contribution to discussion, but for those outside it I suspect that more bridges will need to be built if the analysis that has gone on is to be fruitful in everyday Church life. LUKE BECKETT OSB READING THE LITURGY: AN EXPLORATION OF TEXTS IN CHRISTIAN WORSHIP by Juliette Day, Bloomsbury, T&T Clark, London, 2014, pp. x + 179, £16.99, pbk The first word of this book’s title is deliberately ambiguous. The author is concerned with the role that written or printed texts and their proclamation play in public worship; she also seeks to ‘read’ worship from this perspective, to see what such texts and their use can reveal about the worship-event as a whole. As for ‘the liturgy’, the definite article indicates a focus on a particular pattern of worship, in this case that of the Anglican Communion. The birth of Anglicanism followed hard on the invention of printing, and the two phenomena are intertwined. When it became possible to create many identical copies of a single text easily and cheaply, successive monarchs were able to insist on public reading without deviation of the Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised Version of the Scriptures. Although those books are now outdated, the attitudes that produced them and sustained their use remain powerful. The author is regularly exposed to them from her ‘participation in national liturgy committees’ advertised on the cover of the book. Dr Juliette Day brings to her study the insights of Barthes, Derrida, Ricoeur and others on the nature of text and the act of reading. A chapter on ‘Genre’ shows the usefulness of their approach. When a reader decides that a text belongs to a certain genre, certain expectations follow. We would not rely on a novel for factual information, or expect fiction in a biography. Similarly, we have certain expectations of a Collect. This was illustrated when second-person relative clauses (‘O God, who . . .’) were introduced into the recent English re-translation of the Missal, and greeted in some quarters with fury. The critics whose work Day uses were themselves born in the age of print: their primary focus is on the lone reader silently perusing a printed book. Such readers, when they attend church services, bring with them their experience of texts other than those put into their hands as they enter the building. Day’s chapter on ‘Intertextuality’ offers interesting insights into this situation, particularly  C 2015 The Dominican Council 640 Reviews when the worshipper involved is a ‘scripturally competent reader’, who will be constantly challenged to interpret or reinterpret familiar biblical texts that have been incorporated into the liturgical one. The Sanctus is an example. But anybody who enters the church in which I myself celebrate will find other helps for understanding the Sanctus. I have never managed to count the number of angels depicted in glass and stone around our altar, some strumming harps, some waving thuribles, many gazing silently, all inviting us to imitate them as the Eucharistic Prayer begins. Many Anglican churches also are similarly decorated, having deserted the plainness enjoined by Cranmer. This iconographical tradition dates back to long before printing, to a time when few could read, and owed their knowledge of the scriptural narrative more to such aids than to the perusal of texts. Moreover, for many centuries, worship was conducted in a language not understood by most of those present. Vernacular services are now ubiquitous in the West, but recent experience in the anglophone Catholic community has shown that concern for intelligibility is less that might have been predicted. When inaccuracies or infelicities in the new texts are pointed out, many people – and many prelates – merely shrug their shoulders. There is a widespread feeling, usually unspoken, that the sacred text need not be intelligible, and that if any text promulgated by competent authority is uttered, religious obligations have been satisfied and all is well. This in fact robs texts of their authority, for they cease to be a channel for the transmission of Church teaching. An example is the conclusion to the Collects in the new Missal, which seems to call the Second Person of the Trinity ‘one God’. In the centuries before printing, liturgical texts were less uniform. I used to attend Mass in a Carthusian house, where I was tickled by the phrase ‘gloriam tuam magnam’ in the Gloria, contrasting with the ‘magnam gloriam tuam’ of the Roman books. I assumed that this came from Grenoble, whence the Carthusians derived their liturgical customs. When I came to study the Orations of the Roman Rite, I found much greater variation among the manuscripts. This led me to question whether printing had had an entirely benign influence on the Roman Rite. A single book universally imposed does not offer the most fertile soil for liturgical growth. It is like a field treated with chemical weedkiller and then again with artificial fertiliser. This was true in 1570 and again in 1970. To thumb through the Veronese or Gelasian sacramentary, by contrast, is like wandering through a meadow where weeds and flowers grow, some demanding to be collected and others better left. Such was the soil that nurtured the prayers for the printed missals and many of those incorporated after translation into the Book of Common Prayer. When the Catholic community began to develop vernacular liturgy, it adopted a much more laissez-faire policy than Anglicanism. Clergy, even of high rank, felt themselves at liberty to change the texts, which themselves were often only loosely translated. This seems to be an interesting return to the looser discipline of the earlier centuries. It is assisted by authority, both Roman and local, which has tolerated the coexistence of several versions translated from Latin. Electronic means make it easy to circulate these versions. It would be good if the blogosphere acted as a forum for discussion and criticism of them, leading to a rise in standards of improvisation. Liturgists know that the books only tell part of the story, just as the text of a play gives little clue about how it might be produced. There is more to be said about the role of texts in worship than we find in this book. But it is valuable as a study of a particular liturgical corpus from a particular angle. BRUCE HARBERT  C 2015 The Dominican Council