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Religious Studies Review

VOLUME 41

Ethics

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AT THE LIMITS OF THE SECULAR: REFLECTIONS

ON FAITH AND PUBLIC LIFE. Edited by William A.

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Barbieri Jr. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014. Pp. x + 375. $35.00.
This collection of essays is the product of The Secularity
Project under the auspices of the Catholic University of
America. It is a distinctly Catholic look at the prospective
role of religion in our post-secular time, and includes chapters from luminaries like P. Casarella, W. Cavanaugh, P.
Rossi, S.J., and D. Tracy. The book is organized by twelve
heuristic keywords, such as agency, community, imagination, and tradition, with an essay devoted to each. It
starts with C. Taylors The Secular Age (2007), and proceeds
to identify breaches or openings in the immanent
frame: the conditions of belief as conceived by the modern
social imaginary. These openings exist as emergent possibilities within the present triangulation of faith, secularity,
and public life. The primary argument is that if we want to
understand how religion should function at the limit of the
secular, that is, to enrich and contribute to public life, we
must question both secularity and religion. Post-secularity
affords us the chance to rethink and reshape faith in public
life to make both more open to each other: to make belief
more believable. The essays are broad, diverse, well edited,
and clear. They are not always novel, but add to the growing
body of interdisciplinary work on the seismic shifts in religion and secularity. This book will be instrumental in clarifying the role of faith in this post-secular world and is an
indispensable guide to what is at stake, both theologically
and politically, in that risky endeavor.
Silas Morgan
Loyola University, Chicago

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POWER, SERVICE, HUMILITY: A NEW TESTAMENT ETHIC. By Reinhard Feldmeier. Waco: Baylor Uni-

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versity Press, 2014. Pp. vii + 155. Paper, $19.95.

In this book, NT Scholar Reinhard Feldmeier reects
upon the exercise and purpose of power in the NT, which he
situates within the ancient perception that being divine
essentially means having power to do as one pleases.
Feldmeier holds that the NT, in line with the OT, counters
this view, and he contends that two conicting forms of
power are at play in the NT: 1) the tempting power of the
devil, which violently subjects [others] to ones own will;
and 2) the power of God, which understands existence as
coexistence and hence acts not against the other but for him
and with him. The latter form of power manifests itself in
humility and service before God and others, and Feldmeier
argues that service and humility are not renunciations of
power but rather a received form of power via union with
God that is key to the Christian way of life. Though the
broader world sees power as a means of status and often
oppression, Jesus and his followers view power as a means of

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service and endurance in the face of oppression. This book

offers many generative thoughts, including in response to
the ways humility as a virtue has been abused, but the text
moves swiftly and provides more of an insightful commentary on the topic than a fully eshed out ethic. It would be
well suited to a collegiate or graduate level scriptural study
of power or biblical ethics.
Nelson M.E.B. Reveley
University of Virginia

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THE ETHICAL VISION OF THE BIBLE: LEARNING

GOOD FROM KNOWING GOD. By Peter W. Gosnell.

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Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014. Pp. 410. Paperback,

$30.00.
Gosnell examines selected sections of the Bible as they
relate to ethics, as opposed to morality. For Gosnell, morality
is the basic ability to know the difference between right and
wrong, whereas ethics involves knowing why something
may be good or bad. While noting that the Bible does not
focus on ethics, he stresses that ethics stems from its writings. Given the Bibles size, Gosnell wisely chooses only a
portion to analyze, concentrating on Torah, Proverbs, and
Prophets from the OT, and Matthew, Luke, and Paul from the
NT. He extracts manageable segments of the different books
which he meticulously scrutinizes illustrating how they ultimately impact Christian ethics, as well as how they relate to
each other. The focus naturally remains with ethics, but
Gosnell does a very good job of summarizing the key points
as they apply to his theme, showing the highlights and their
messages for the ethical Christian. The result gives the
reader a taste of biblical ethics, which places it well for the
intended use. Gosnell has written this book as an introductory college textbook, including numerous biblical citations
as well as questions at the end of each chapter. His level of
writing suits the audience, bringing concepts into a nicely
framed, college textbook format.
Paul Mueller
Duquesne University

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FEMINIST CATHOLIC THEOLOGICAL ETHICS:

CONVERSATIONS IN THE WORLD CHURCH. Edited

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by Linda Hogan and Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orabator. Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church. Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 2014. Pp. xi + 300. $42.00.
The second of six planned edited volumes of the Catholic
Theological Ethics in the World Church (CTEWC) networks
eponymous series, this collection of twenty-three essays is
an outgrowth of CTEWCs mission to appreciate the challenge of pluralism; to dialogue from and with local culture;
and to interconnect with a world church not dominated
by a northern paradigm. The book succeeds in its aim to
demonstrate when approached as a discourse, process,
methodology, or movement, feminism is globally variegated,
contextually multilayered, and methodologically polyglot.

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VOLUME 41

Expressly avoiding gender reductionism, this volume is a

conversation that highlights diverse feminist theological
contributions that address globalized, universal concerns
through local, contextualized perspectives. Female and male
scholars from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, India,
Latin America, and North America draw from their own
wells to highlight the uid and dialectical nature of feminist
discourse using real cases and concrete issues. Such treatment includes analysis of sustainability of the churchs
support of antiretroviral treatment in South Africa, examination of gender-based violence and dowry and socialstructural sin in India, critique of the all-male enclave of
church hierarchys notication of Catholic feminist theologians, and the argument for an ethics of church participation where spirituality is adequately challenged by justice.
This excellent resource is of clear interest to ethicists,
ecclesiologists, and feminist scholars and is suitable for use
in graduate and advanced undergraduate classrooms.
Christine E. McCarthy
Fordham University

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FLOURISHING: HEALTH, DISEASE, AND BIOETHICS IN THEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE. By Neil

Messer. Grand Rapids, MI: William. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Company, 2013. Pp. vii + 238. $35.00.
Neil Messer surveys theological perspectives on health,
disease, and disability in this text, giving prominence to
twentieth-century Protestant theologian K. Barth and to the
teleological vision of Aquinas, highlighting the Dominicans
view that human life is a proximate good, not a nal one.
Messer uses an interpretive framework called Barthian
Thomism to parse common terms in bioethics and healthcare discourse, words like health and ourishing that
sound noble, but nevertheless call for critical appraisal and
intentional use. Notably, he disputes the concept of wellbeing as it is used by the World Health Organization, and he
takes issue with the Hebrew term shalom or wholeness,
fearing that such denitions of health restrict the concept to
creaturely human existence, rather than expanding the
concept to include the divine. Instead, Messer prefers Barths
muscular denition of health as strength for human life and
draws on Barths ethics of creation to promote a theological
interpretation of health as freedom within limits. His
approach to Barth borders on hagiographic, and it remains
unclear how Barths focus on freedom offers a model of health
that supersedes the global relevance of the capabilities model
developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum or the
WHOs multivalent understanding of health as having social,
political, economic, and personal dimensions. Overall, Messers framework contributes to bioethics literature through his
recognition of an aspect of human life that secular models
curiously ignore: humans are religious creatures and often
use religious categories to interpret the meaning of disease,
disability, healing, and health.
Tara Flanagan
Loyola University Chicago

NUMBER 2

JUNE 2015

DEATH BEFORE THE FALL: BIBLICAL LITERALISM AND THE PROBLEM OF ANIMAL SUFFERING.

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By Ronald E. Osborn. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic,

2014. Pp. 195. Paper, $25.00.
Ronald Osborn focuses in this volume on the issue of
theodicy from the perspective of animal predation. He
addresses the issue of how we can interpret the biblical
creation story that still permits us to have a benevolent God.
A bit polemical at times, he is primarily speaking to biblical
literalists whose literal interpretation of the Bible leaves us
with a malevolent God who punishes the animal kingdom for
the sin of humans. His Christian religious perspective takes
seriously the primacy of Scripture, the theory of evolution,
as well as philosophical and theological insights in light of
which Scripture needs to be interpreted. He does not provide
possible solutions to the problem of animal suffering and
death, but he does state at the outset that this is not his
purpose. Rather, he has provided a scholarly, wellresearched text which offers a compelling case for a different
understanding of theodicy with regard to animals, and which
still maintains the primacy of Scripture but without problematic theological conclusions. This text would be of particular interest to conservative Christians (including a in a
classroom setting) concerned about animal suffering and
death who are willing to move beyond literal interpretations
of the creation story.
Donna Yarri
Alvernia University

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FAITH IN THE FACE OF EMPIRE: THE BIBLE

THROUGH PALESTINIAN EYES. By Mitri Raheb.

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Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2014. Pp. vii + 149. $24.00.

Palestinian Christian and Evangelical Lutheran Raheb
offers a striking and personal perspective on the tenuous
situation in present-day Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West
Bank. Introducing Israel as an occupying force similar to the
ancient powers of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, and
Romans and the latter Byzantines, Crusaders, Ayyubides,
Ottomans, and British, Raheb identies the struggles generations of Palestinians have endured. In the rst six chapters,
the author establishes the geo-political situation of Israel: the
military development since 1967, the dispute over natural
resources and control, the absence of freedom for a large
majority of the Palestinian population, etc. Portraying the
Israeli government as an occupying force over that of the
(native) Palestinians permits Raheb to then explore the scriptural similarities associated with both sides of the dispute.
For example, the 1967 war of outsiders claiming the land as
their own has been portrayed as David (Israel) versus Goliath
(the native inhabitants), a myth that would follow the 1948
establishment of Israel as a state. Likewise, Raheb portrays
the suffering Palestinians to the peasants and the marginalized with which Jesus worked throughout his ministry. Both
portrayals offer the reader an insight into the tenuous situation in which the Palestinians nd themselves, with little

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Religion in Culture

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THE DEVIL LIKES TO SING: A NOVEL. Fiction. By

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Thomas J. Davis. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014. Pp. 138.

Paper, $18.00.
Dramatic deals with the devil are not uncommon in the
history of the arts. Consider the Faust legend or R. Johnsons
crossroad myth. Yet they are seldom as uproariously funny
as Daviss novella, which focuses on Chicagoan T. McFarland, an unsuccessful theologian turned chart-topping giftbook writer. T. McFarlands work has sold millions, but he
aches to be more than a two-bit scribbler; for him, the task of
publishing platitudinous books like 101 Good Things about
Christmas has become grindingly depressing. Then Lucifer
appears, whistling Wagner and sounding like he has swallowed an urban dictionary, and in due course he tempts
McFarland to examine and then write about life as though he
possessed a splinter of ice in his heart. He guarantees T.
McFarland writerly prestige. And Lucifer makes good on his
endish promise. Top-tier magazines rush to publish McFarlands compellingly taciturn stories. Candid conversation
concerning his serious writing appears in laudable literary
reviews. The adulation comes at a cost, though, because T.
McFarland eventually wonders if the cool detachment of the
devils kind of writer compromises his sense of real human
decency. There are some shrewd discussions about theology and vocation within this rewarding story, which comes
from the pen of the Associate Dean for Academic Programs
and Professor of Religious Studies at the Indiana School of
Liberal Arts at Indiana UniversityPurdue University Indianapolis. The Devil Likes to Sing: A Novel is warmly recommended for all readers, especially those in Adult Religious
Education groups, book clubs, and folk in seminary or divinity school.
Darren J. N. Middleton
Texas Christian University

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GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE. Film. Directed by Jean-

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Luc Godard. Wild Bunch S.A., 2014.

AH DIEUX. These words, at once cry and sigh, momentarily ll the screen of Godards Goodbye to Language, where
God and godsuncertain signiers of a questionable
realityare evoked and denied, called upon and rebuked,
afrmed, and questioned. In fact, the movie suggests a relation between divinity and language that moves between the

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ANNABELLE. Film. Directed by John R. Leonetti. New

Line Cinema, 2014.
Annabelle is the prequel to the 2013 horror hit The Conjuring, which was based on the case les of Ed and Lorraine
Warren, a real-life pair of Catholic lay exorcists and
demonologists active in America in the 1970s and 1980s.
The title refers to a demon-possessed doll that the Warrens
kept on display in their private occult museum and which
plays a small role in the earlier lm. Set in 1969 against the
backdrop of the Manson murders, the lm begins with a
young pregnant woman named Mia and her husband John
being attacked by three Manson-like Satanic cultists who
somehow summon a demonic force into one of the young
womans dolls before the police arrive and kill them. For the

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analogical and the ontological, as indicated in the original

French title, Adieu au Langage ( dieu au langage). One
nds here Godards hallmark editing style, unconventional
camera shots and mise-en-scnes, jarringly juxtaposed
images (war machines, forests, naked breasts, splashing
blood, a shitting man), and voice overs consisting of textual
fragments from multiple, often conicting, sources (Freud,
Artaud, Cocteau. . .). One also nds Godard pushing forward
with innovative methods of image making. Most notably, he
exploits the possibilities afforded by the two cameras used to
lm in 3D, mixing color palettes and creating overlapping
images that separate and resolve. The results are at once
alluring and challenging, both visually and conceptually.
Scholars of religion operating within the third wave of lm
studies will thus want to attend to the interplay of the
sensual and the cerebral aspects of the movie. Ethicists,
philosophers of religion, and students of religion and lm
will nd that enduring concerns about sex and death, eternity and nothingness, dream and reality, and nature and
technology underlie Godards wider engagements with
ethics, politics, philosophy, religion, and art. Godards
use of philosophical and other texts invites but nally
rebuffs attempts to translate the movie into propositional
statementsattempts to articulate a stance or to make the
movie mean. Goodbye to Language is therefore a difcult,
agitating movie, one that will try the patience of those who
value orderly narratives, and that will be written off as
pretentious tripe by those not willing to dwell with its ultimately unresolvable ethical, religious, and aesthetic ambiguities. But surely the cacophonous images and sounds add
up to more than the sum of their fragmented partsan
extra-linguistic surplus of poetic meaning emerging from a
lm dramatizing a crisis of meaning. Whether a cogent, or
even coherent, ethics or politics lies behind, or can be
derived from, the lm is, in this sense, beside the point. Like
some of its ingenious 3D shots, meaning fragments and
resolves, only to fragment again, painfully and poetically.
This is a movie with which one shall not come to terms.
Jeremy Biles
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

room to identify publicly as other than terrorist, a term Raheb

suggests is used incorrectly. Though missed by many media
outlets and politicians, Raheb explores the Palestinian situation through the lens of their own suffering by recovering
Scripture in the context in which it originated: among the
suffering people in an empire for which they did not ask for.
Michael J. McGravey
Duquesne University

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Remarks