America in Theological Perspective ed. by Thomas M. McFadden

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 605 America in Theological Perspective. Edited by THOMAS M. McFADDEN. New York: Seabury Press, 1976. 248 pp. $9.95. This collection of essays, all but two of which were delivered at the 1975 convention of the College Theology Society, ought not be ignored out of a surfeit of Bicentennial literature. Although the thirteen essays are of uneven quality, and of such a broad range that the classroom utility of the volume may be minimal, this collection does give evidence of the real ferment in American theological thought today, especially as theologians and other scholars attempt to understand and assess the impact of the American experience on American religion, and vice versa. In this sense, then, the book may provide a useful overview of some of the significant issues at play in the American theological scene today. The first section of the book deals with the American Catholic experience from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Historian James Hennesey's sketchy overview of the periods of American Catholic history may be a useful summary statement for undergraduates, but (of necessity?) is so brief that it barely satisfies anyone already familiar with the contours of the story. Hennesey does make one point which is asserted again and again throughout the volume: namely, that the classic melting-pot theory is inadequate for an understanding of the specific character of American Catholics. Daniel Maguire's essay might be described in the jargon of the sixties as a probe" towards" an American Catholic moral theology. Maguire asserts that what is needed now is an " eclectic traditionalism " which searches both the mainstream and the byways of American Catholic moral thought, in quest of theological and experiential resources which may be retrievable in the contemporary scene. Once one takes this tack, of course, the criteriological question looms as most significant: by what standards do we assess the relative valuableness of the many components of our American Catholic traditio? And further, what warrants do we bring forth to establish the validity of our criteria? I hope that Maguire addresses this question in another essay soon; his attentiveness to the particularity of the Catholic moral-theological tradition, in both its happy and unhappy manifestations , should put him in a position to make an extremely valuable contribution to this discussion. The present essay is a fine overview of the Catholic tradition with which we must deal; it could have been fleshed out more thoroughly by an "Americanizing" of some of his themes. The point, of course, is that a genuine inter-disciplinary approach is essential here. Isaac Hecker as the author of a uniquely American apologetic is the subject of Joseph Gower's piece. According to Gower, Hecker attempted to invert the terms of previous American Catholic apologists: rather than defending Catholicism against nativist charges of " twin loyalties," Hecker at- 606 BOOK REVIEWS tempted to demonstrate that the democratic polity of American society demanded Catholicism's natural theology as a support for its often-inarticulate anthropological assumptions. Much more work needs to be done on this, of course, but this intriguing perspective may provide some clues and roots for an American Catholic fundamental theology. At best, Hecker emerges from this essay as a uniquely creative proto-sociologist of religion, showing a sensitivity to the intersection of the sacred and the political which, lacking the methodological rigor of an Emile Durkheim, at least anticipates the basic thrust of his work. Again, this may be a valuable resource for American Catholic thinkers addressing the civil religion question . Elizabeth McKeown's essay on the emergence of Catholic identity in the United States takes late-19th and early-flOth century American Catholic leadership to task for its inability to articulate a specific American Catholic identity beyond the flag-waving super-patriotism of the World War I period. According to McKeown, this failure (among others) led to a loss of American Catholicism's cutting edge vis-a-vis society and government policy, a loss from which she claims we are still suffering today. The point has been made before, of course, and needs, I think, to be tested against the burgeoning research of social scientists into the real pluralism of the Catholic ethnic. The...