Book Review: Field Hospital: The Church's Engagement with a Wounded World

Abstract

Field Hospital: Church's Engagement with a Wounded World. By William T. Cavanaugh. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 2016. 276 pp. $24.00 (paper).For discerning readers, Field Hospital's appellation immediately signals its focus. Cavanaughs use of Pope Francis's earthly metaphor locates this work in contemporary Catholic debates about ends of humans. Contra charges that Cavanaugh's earlier works fail to appreciate goodness of nature and so turn their backs on participation in world's given structures (p. 4), this account is founded upon Henri de Lubac's sacramental ontology, which contests secular/religious binaries, along with what Cavanaugh sees Ernst Kantorowicz's reinforcement of the fiction/reality dichotomy (p. 100), where remains realm of religion' and mystical, while basis of state, ?political' and ?secular,' remains reason (p. 103). Cavanaugh's resulting incamational politics (p. 117) is instituted by transcendent and mobilizes participation in earthly democratic practices. Further, such charges frequently uphold that which they deride: a nature encompassing a type of sufficiency as is. Rather than indiscriminately graced, society needs careful analysis-a task Cavanaugh undertakes while also upholding nature's goodness in, for instance, Caritas in Vertiate'1.s dispersed political authority (p. 121).Field Hospital also answers critiques that Cavanaugh merely deconstructs, rather than constructs, theology. Thus it seeks to expound Cavanaugh's dream of church a mobile organism that does not remain confined to ambit of?religion' (p. 2) but goes out into world, tending all wounds: economic (chapters 1-4), political (chapters 5-8), or inflicted through violence (chapters 9-13). A visible body yet not a bordered protectorate, this church is performative rather than sequestered in fixed, hierarchal religion.This dynamism is reflected in Field Hospital's form: it collates thirteen essays, fou modern r of which are new, and its lack of formal conclusion intimates that work of ecclesiology is ongoing. Personal anecdotes situate most topics, granting a welcome sense of acquaintance with author and a work better reflecting Cavanaugh's narrativa! and genealogical methodology (notwithstanding his gentle departure from Thomism of many of its proponents: there is no support for state natural political unit, p. 140). Some may be surprised to discover fuller biblical exegesis than in previous works, such of scriptural proscriptions against idolatry in order to dispute both secularization and comeback-of-religion theses. That worship is ubiquitous refutes neat sacred/secular categories (since all are worshippers), and concomitant thesis that religious is uniquely violent. However, universal nature of worship also means that religion never went away: The holy merely migrated in modern era from church to state and market (p. 223). Hence Cavanaugh again censures church/world dualisms, also evinced in his four distinct denotations for world in social Catholicism, contra Charles Curran in his Social Mission of U. …