Short notices

Bengt G. M. Sundkler, Nathan Söderblom: His Life and Work (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2023); 438 pp.: 9780227178638, £27.50 (pbk)

This book is a straightforward reprint of a seminal book first published by Lutterworth just ahead of the 1968 meeting of the General Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Uppsala, when the Assembly was at its greatest influence. Söderblom (1866–1931) was appointed as Archbishop of Uppsala in 1914 and was a peace activist and ecumenist throughout the war and beyond, being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1930. A friend of Bishop George Bell, he was a founding member of Faith and Order, which led, after his early death, to the founding of the WCC. Bishop Jonas Jonson’s excellent study of Söderblom, Nathan Söderblom: called to serve (Eerdmans, 2016), was reviewed in my January 2017 editorial. Jonson used Sundkler’s book but provided a more critical overview of the strengths and weaknesses of Söderblom’s work, both in his book and in an article in the same issue of Theology (Vol. 120, no. 1, pp. 11–17). It is, nevertheless, good to have Sundkler’s original book readily available, even if its English is somewhat laboured.

Willem Jacobus Cardinal Eijk with Andrea Galli, God Is Alive in Holland (Leominster: Gracewing, 2022); 127 pp.: 9780852449974, £12.99 (pbk)

Despite its positive title, it is difficult to see this book as anything but deeply depressing – it consists of one moan after another. Originally published in Italian, a conservative Catholic journalist interviews the ultra-conservative Archbishop of Utrecht. In a question-and-answer interview, they bemoan the radical decline of Catholic churchgoing in the fervently liberal Netherlands (an inclusive term they tend to avoid), seeing it as more the result of revisionist Catholic teaching and wider moral relativism than of clerical sexual abuse, while defending Cardinal Eijk’s episcopal policy of extensive church closures and redundancies among Catholic lay workers. Eijk was an elector of Pope Francis, but was soon critical of his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia and similar statements (especially on gays and divorcees). He also relates at length, and with evident pride, his own cultural battles over contraception, IVF, genetic research, abortion and euthanasia with fellow medical doctors in his country (he trained as a doctor himself but, unsurprisingly, practised for just two years before opting for ordination). He also dismisses a woman’s objection to clerical celibacy with a strange triple negative: ‘one cannot disagree if one is not familiar with the faith, the Gospels, the Word of Jesus’ (p. 71). There is sufficient evidence in this book to antagonize both liberals and conservatives. As ever, I prefer Edward Schillebeeckx.

Jennie Weiss Block, M. Therese Lysaught and Alexandre A. Martins (eds), A Prophet to the Peoples: Paul Farmer’s Witness and Theological Ethics (Eugene OR: Pickwick, 2023); 340 pp.: 9781666765045, $71 (hbk); 9781666765038, $51 (pbk)

In sharp contrast to Cardinal Eijk, Dr Paul Farmer (1959–2022) was a lay Catholic social activist profoundly shaped by Latin American liberation theology. With degrees in medicine and social anthropology, he was University Professor in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is depicted in this affectionate tribute to him (following his sudden death in Rwanda from a heart attack) as offering ‘a compelling model for a post-clerical church’, in contrast to those in the Catholic Church whose purpose is ‘restoring the dignity and station of the ordained to an elevated state’ (p. 240). In 1987, he co-founded Partners in Health, a non-profit organization with a commitment to a preferential option for the poor in relation to healthcare. He was driven by the conviction that ‘[w]hen people die of preventable and easily treatable diseases, we are facing social pathologies, not only unfortunate infirmities’ (p. 79). In Haiti, for example, where he went following the devastating hurricanes in 2005 and then the earthquake in 2010, he was challenged by outbreaks of treatable, but untreated, TB and cholera there, and he concluded: ‘The poor are sicker than the non-poor. They are at heightened risk of dying prematurely, whether from increased exposure to pathogens … or from decreased access to services or, as is most often the case, from both of these “risk factors”’ (p. 115). His passionate book Pathologies of Power (with the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen contributing its foreword) was published in 2004 and ten years later he collaborated with the father of liberation theology, Gustavo Gutiérrez, to produce In the Company of the Poor. There is a considerable amount of repetition within this eulogistic collection and it takes some effort to discern the exact shape of Farmer’s remarkable (indeed, praiseworthy) life and work, but a picture finally emerges of a person of faith deeply committed throughout his working life to compassionate and effective action with the poor within impoverished communities around the world. Inspiring.

Jon Sobrino, Theology without Deception: God, the Poor, and Reality in El Salvador: Conversations with Charo Mármol (Maryknoll NY: Orbis, 2023); 240 pp.: 9781626985216, $28 (pbk)

The Spanish Jesuit Jon Sobrino, who has spent his working life teaching at the University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador, in the deeply troubled country of El Salvador, came to Western attention with his radical, liberationist book Christology at the Crossroads: a Latin American approach (Orbis, 1978). By then, the military and police in El Salvador were murdering those priests, nuns and their parishioners who challenged the oppression of the poor by the rich. In these deeply moving interviews, Sobrino, now in his eighties, reflects at length about Jesuits at UCA, with their commitment to ‘the liberation of the oppressed with the help of an adequate theology’ (p. 75), despite much opposition at a time when ‘persecution became the norm … [and] liberation theology was considered highly subversive’ (p. 71). For Sobrino and Archbishop Óscar Romero, the assassination of Fr Rutilio, a priest working among the poor, in 1977 was a crucial turning point, leading to Romero’s assassination in 1980 and to the assassination of six Jesuits on the campus of UCA in 1989 (with Sobrino narrowly missing assassination because he was lecturing in Thailand at the time). Sobrino recalls one of the poor saying simply: ‘Monseñor Romero told the truth. He defended us, the poor. And that’s why they killed him’ (p. 175). Until Francis became Pope, both men were much criticized by the Vatican, with Sobrino concluding: ‘I’m not too worried about what the Vatican says about me. I am more concerned that the cook in my house thinks of me as a good person’ (p. 136). It is not difficult to see why Dr Paul Farmer was so attracted to Latin American liberation theology in the context of oppressed Third World countries. A moving book, indeed, that is well worth buying.

Mary Clark Moschella, Ethnography as a Pastoral Practice: An Introduction , 2nd edition (London: SCM Press, 2023); 352 pp.: 9780334059967, £19.99 (pbk)

The first edition of this Introduction (2008) received high praise from the doyen of congregational studies, Nancy Ammerman, as well as from the pastoral theologians Elaine Graham, Pete Ward and Todd Whitmore. Mary Clark Moschella is the Professor of Pastoral Care and Counselling at Yale University School of Divinity and writes very accessibly with students in mind, encouraging them to engage in ‘ethnography’ when seeking to understand local congregations. Such ethnography has affinities with the qualitative research of, say, social anthropologists, albeit with less theory and jargon and with a clear intention of facilitating the local groups studied (just as Paul Farmer did). There is much to recommend this approach, not least when congregations face internal conflict. In this second edition, Moschella has brought the further reading up to date and has reframed half of the original chapters. Conscientious rather than inspiring.

Michael Lamb, A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought (Princeton NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022); 431 pp.: 9780691226330, $39.95/£35 (hbk)

I have already reviewed this interesting and well-researched book for Church Times (on 18 August) and will not repeat my review here. However, it makes a very useful contribution, parallel to, but not part of, the Bloomsbury series Reading Augustine, already reviewed in Theology (Vol. 121, no. 5, p. 397; Vol. 123, no. 3, pp. 225–7; Vol. 124, no. 6, p. 465) and as a companion to Rowan Williams’ On Augustine (2016), praised in Theology (Vol. 120, no. 4, p. 300) by the formidable classicist historian and religious sceptic Robin Lane Fox as a ‘stratospherically intelligent and heartfelt appreciation of Augustine’s similar strengths’. Lamb argues that many commentators – including Kaufman, with his pessimistic reading of Augustine’s attitude to society at large in his two offerings to the Reading Augustine series – are mistaken and too often focused negatively on Chapter 19 of The City of God. Making extensive use of Augustine’s letters and sermons, Lamb offers a more optimistic take that views this chapter as rhetoric. On this reading, Augustine remains an inspiration to Christians today who are engaged, as he was, in public life within a pluralistic society.