The Dialog

By Mitch Finley

Catholic News Service

“The God Problem: Expressing Faith and Being Reasonable” by Robert Wuthnow. University of California Press (Berkeley, Calif., 2012), 304 pp., $34.95.

Studies of religion in the United States have for many decades tried to understand faith by looking at everything except what people say about it, declares Robert Wuthnow in “The God Problem.”

This is the cover of “The God Problem: Expressing Faith and Being Reasonable” by Robert Wuthnow. The book is reviewed by Mitch Finley. (CNS)

Poll-takers ask questions and base their conclusions on the responses of the 15 percent or so who respond. Other studies focus on religion in particular groups. “But,” Wuthnow observes, “it is hard to know what people practice unless we also talk to them about the meaning of their faith.”

A professor of sociology at Princeton University and director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion, Wuthnow’s book is a sociological response to works of various more-or-less high-profile atheist authors such as Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Such authors “tell a common story,” Wuthnow remarks: “Religion’s intellectual foundations are flimsy enough and its social effects are sufficiently dubious that thinking people should be cautious about its claims.”

But wait just a minute, Wuthnow continues. If religion’s foundations are so weak, why do so many Americans say that they believe in God? Does the U.S. not have one of the highest levels of education in the world?

“My contention,” Wuthnow explains, “is that well-educated, thoughtful Americans have found a way of having their cake and eating it too: of affirming their faith while also maintaining their belief in reason.” To this end, Wuthnow examines
“the highly supple ways in which language about religion actually works.”

After a first chapter on the uses and abuses of dogma, “The God Problem” looks at what Wuthnow calls “the language devices that enable thoughtful responses to questions about prayer and other aspects of how we talk about human relationships with God.”

These “language devices,” or common phrases, Wuthnow explains, give people ways to express both uncertainties about God that “any reasonable person” is inclined to have; yet at the same time these words and phrases provide ways to express positive convictions that religious people embrace.

Wuthnow’s topics include prayer, God’s place in a world where catastrophes happen, heaven, freedom, and connecting science and faith.

While Wuthnow is an academic, he writes not for other scholars only but for the average reasonably well-educated person. This is an ideal book for the thoughtful reader who is willing to look up the definition of an occasional word and who wants to become better informed and more articulate about how religion works in America.

Finley is the author of more than 30 books on Catholic themes, including “What Faith is Not” (Sheed & Ward) and “The Rosary Handbook” (The Word Among Us Press).

By Mark Zimmermann

Catholic News Service

In the hours and days following the death of his dad, Sargent Shriver, people from all walks of life, from the vice president to the neighborhood trash collector, offered this refrain to Mark Shriver, “He was a good man.”

Those words of sympathy inspired Mark Shriver to reflect on and research why that phrase summarized the life and work of his famous father, who died in 2011. As a result he wrote “A Good Man,” published by Henry Holt and Company. It is subtitled, “Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver.” Read more »

By Catholic News Service

At the heart of defeating attacks on the country’s religious liberty is the need for faithful to rebuild a Christian culture that serves as the essence of a democracy, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput wrote recently.

In his new e-book titled “A Heart on Fire: Catholic Witness and the Next America,” the former Denver archbishop discusses the ties between religious freedom and a good society.

Read more »

By Sister Mona Castelazo

“Compassion: Living in the Spirit of St. Francis” by Ilia Delio, OSF. St. Anthony Messenger Press (Cincinnati, 2011). 142 pp., $14.99.

In “Compassion: Living in the Spirit of St. Francis,” Franciscan Sister Ilia Delio shows that in spite of the valuable contributions of technology, we may be in danger of a “globalized superficiality.” Being inundated with information of every kind precludes our living at a deeper level from which compassion flows. Read more »

By Peggy Weber

Catholic News Service

“The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City” by James R. Barrett. Penguin Press (New York, 2012). 369 pp., $29.95.

If you are looking for a sentimental book about Irish immigrants in America — “The Irish Way” is not it.

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By Regina Lordan

Catholic News Service

“Fraternity” by Diane Brady. Random House (New York, 2012). 228 pp., $25.

In 1968, 20 young black men were recruited to attend the very white and oftentimes hostile College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. Many of the young men graduated to became successful men in their communities, among them Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, author Edward Jones, Wall Street CEO Stanley Grayson and trial lawyer Theodore Wells.

In her debut book, “Fraternity,” Bloomberg Businessweek writer Diane Brady describes in great detail the struggles and successes of these young men who survived collegiate life in part because of their persistent and trailblazing advocate, Jesuit Father John Brooks. In “Fraternity,” Brady not only has provided an account of a tumultuous time in American history, she has written an enjoyable story about brave young men who inspired permanent reform on their campus and in the nation.

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By Mark Pattison

Catholic News Service

It only seems ironic that a new book that tells the story of Daniel Rudd, the black Catholic journalist of the late 19th century, has been written by someone who is not black, not Catholic and not a journalist.

But, like Rudd and his newspaper, the American Catholic Tribune, the Rev. Gary B. Agee sought answers to vexing questions about the nature of racial equality and how it can be achieved. Read more »

By Catholic News Service

“On the Threshold of the Future: The Life and Spirituality of Mother Mary Joseph Rogers, Founder of the Maryknoll Sisters” by Claudette LaVerdiere, MM. Orbis Books (Maryknoll, N.Y., 2011). 160 pp., $20.

This year the Maryknoll Sisters celebrate the 100th anniversary of their founding, making it a particularly appropriate time for the publication of this study of their foundress, Molly Rogers (1882-1955).

Maryknoll Sister Claudette LaVerdiere, a former president of the congregation who has worked in both East Africa and Myanmar, offers a concise portrait of this remarkable woman, known in religious life as Mother Mary Joseph.

This is the cover of "On the Threshold of the Future: The Life and Spirituality of Mother Mary Joseph Rogers, Founder of the Maryknoll Sisters" by Claudette LaVerdiere, MM. (CNS)

The book opens with a biographical section that illustrates the family and social environment that formed Molly Rogers. Most Catholic children were educated in parochial schools, but because Molly and her seven siblings attended Boston’s public schools, she was “relatively untouched by the Catholic culture of the time.” This would have a significant impact on her vision for Maryknoll, a congregation “shaped more by the resilience needed in foreign mission than by traditional expectations of religious.”

Molly wanted to be a nurse, but her father insisted she get a college education and during her junior year at Smith College she experienced her decisive call. “She had just witnessed the vibrant ‘mission sending’ of the Protestant Student Volunteer Movement. ‘Something — I do not know how to describe it — happened within me,’ and she proceeded directly to St. Mary’s Church. Kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament, she pledged herself to the mission of the church, having no idea how she might follow through on this commitment. She simply believed that divine providence would show the way.”

“On the Threshold of the Future,” like other stories of the founding of religious congregations, can be read as a testimony to how divine providence works in, and through, the lives of generous souls. Beginning Jan. 6, 1912, Molly Rogers and a small group of other women volunteers supported Fathers James Anthony Walsh and Thomas Frederick Price in the establishment of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America.

These laywomen began as unpaid secretaries (the “Teresians of Maryknoll”) and after a lengthy period of formation and training, received approval to become a diocesan congregation in 1920. The following year, the first Sisters were sent to China.

The book’s great strength is its careful presentation of Mother Mary Joseph’s spirituality, whose description of a Maryknoll Sister is a remarkably accurate rendering of her own spiritual genius. “I would have her distinguished,” she wrote, “by Christ-like charity, limpid simplicity of soul, heroic generosity, selflessness, unfailing loyalty, prudent zeal, gracious courtesy, an adaptable disposition, solid piety and the saving grace of a kindly humor.”

The Maryknoll Sisters were imbued with the Dominican charism of contemplation and action. “I mean that we must be so trained, have so formed our affections … our inward gaze fixed solely upon (God), and no matter what distractions, no matter what works, what trials, sickness, separation caused by death — always our first thought, our involuntary action, even, is to accept everything with our eyes fixed upon the face of Christ.”

Mother Mary Joseph had great confidence in the Sisters’ maturity, diversity of gifts, bonds of charity (“mutual love in Christ”) and religious obedience to sustain the common good. When, on Jan. 2, 1947, she left the office of mother general, Mother Mary Joseph reflected on the 35 years she led her community. “These have been lovely years in which we have worked together and my heart will always sing its hymn of gratitude, to you, for your patience, your faithfulness and your love, and to God, for having given us each other in this glorious work of the extension of God’s kingdom.”

This carefully researched, well-written and intelligent book is not, ultimately, a work of scholarship. It is, instead, a “hymn of gratitude” for Mother Mary Joseph’s spiritual vitality, “a gift not only for Maryknoll missioners in the first part of the 20th century but for our time and for the world.”

Rachel Linner, a freelance writer and reviewer in Medford, Mass., wrote this review for Catholic News Service.

By Catholic News Service

“Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor”by Jana Riess. Paraclete Press (Orleans, Mass., 2011). 179 pp., $16.99.

“Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux” by Heather King. Paraclete Press (Orleans, Mass., 2011). 160 pp., $16.99.

Read more »

By Regina Lordan

“A Dangerous Dozen: 12 Christians Who Threatened the Status Quo but Taught Us to Live Like Jesus” by the Rev. C.K. Robertson. SkyLight Paths Publishing (Woodstock, Vt., 2011). 171 pp., $16.99.

“Ten African Heroes: The Sweep of Independence in Black Africa” by Thomas Melady and Margaret Melady. Orbis Books (Maryknoll, N.Y., 2011). 205 pp., $25.

By Regina Lordan

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