Book Reviews

About the author: The influential comics artist Robert Crumb is best known for such outre works as Keep on Truckin’ and Fritz the Cat. Crumb was born in Philadelphia in 1943 to “a Marine father and Catholic mother.” His family moved frequently during his childhood, and ended up in Delaware in 1956 when his father retired after 20 years in the U.S. Marine Corps. Robert’s mother often behaved erratically and was probably manic depressive. Robert was a faithful Catholic until he was 16. His biggest influence during his youth was his older brother, Charles, who loved comics and co-wrote many of the comics they produced as children. Learn more at his website – http://rcrumb.com 

Notes on the book: One day 15 years ago, for no reason he can remember, Crumb decided he wanted to read the myths of ancient Sumer. Eventually he found a scholarly work that said some of the myths were similar to stories in Genesis. He read Genesis closely, and the idea of illustrating it clicked. He told a literary agent friend that if he would fetch a big enough advance, he’d do it. W.W. Norton & Company came through with $200,000, which seemed enough; Crumb thought he could bang out the project in a year or two. It took four. The 200-page book comes with a warning label: “Adult supervision recommended for minors.”

Crumb was fascinated by the raw power of the imagery in Genesis. He started with the idea of doing a satire, and instead decided to present it straight, verse by verse. “I was intrigued by the challenge of exposing everything in there by illustrating it. The text is so significant in our culture, to bring everything out was a significant enough purpose for doing it.”

In an interview with TIME magazine Crumb briefly discussed the challenges of drawing the character of God: “He has a white beard but he actually ended up looking more like my father. He has a very masculine face like my father. My problem was, how am I going to draw God? Should I just draw him as a light in the sky that has dialogue balloons coming out from it? Then I had this dream. God came to me in this dream, only for a split second, but I saw very clearlywhat he looked like. And I thought, ok, there it is, I’ve got God.”

“I don’t think Genesis is a good place to look for spiritual guidance or moral guidance,” he said. “I don’t believe it’s the word of God.” “At the same time,” he continues, “I think the stories are very powerful. I’m not out to ridicule them or belittle them.”

Not an atheist like his father, Crumb describes himself as a Gnostic, a member of that ancient movement searching for spiritual enlightenment. “I’ve spent a lot of time studying different religious traditions and I meditate,” he says. “I think that all humans have that need for some spiritual meaning.”"But,” he adds with a hearty laugh, “I don’t think you’re going to find it in Genesis.”

About the author: Peter  Manseau is the author of the memoir Vows; the novel Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter; and most recently Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead.

He has won the National Jewish Book Award and the Sophie Brody Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Jewish Literature, and was shortlisted for the Mecantile Library First Novel Award.

A founding editor of the religion blog, KillingtheBuddha.com, and coauthor of Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, he is currently the editor of Search magazine. In his spare time, he is both a doctoral candidate in religion and a lecturer in journalism at Georgetown University.  He lives in Washington, DC with his wife and two daughters.

Visit his website:  www.petermanseau.com

Notes on the book: Peter Manseau embarks on a global odyssey in search of the “dismembered toes, splinters of shinbone, stolen bits of hair, burned remnants of an anonymous rib cage, and other odds and ends” belonging to saints and other sacred figures. The result is an entertaining, sometimes affecting inquiry into man’s yearning for spiritual transcendence through the worship of holy relics, real or otherwise–from the Shroud of Turin to more obscure bits of clothing and body parts.

Manseau meets a cast of fellow enthusiasts–including a French paleopathologist who spends his spare time rummaging through the supposed bone fragments of Joan of Arc.

The veneration of relics is certainly not a thing of the past. The book relates that when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, he sequestered himself in his apartment with the heart of Saint Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, patron saint of priests.

“Relics seem to me to admit that, yes, while we do have a spiritual dimension to our lives, we are also flesh under the looking glass of all those around us. Our lives and our deaths are witnessed by others, and what our lives might mean to them is mostly beyond our control. We are simultaneously people who need symbols to survive, and we are symbols ourselves. Our bodies – our toes and shins, our foreskins and ribs, our hands and whiskers, our teeth and hair – have the capacity to tell stories we cannot imagine. And the facts of our lives can be as mysterious and in need of explanation as anything that lies beyond.”

About the author: David Plotz is the editor of Slate.   Before becoming Slate’s editor in 2008, Plotz worked as a staff writer, political columnist, media columnist, and as the Washington editor for the magazine. He has also freelanced for many magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, New Republic, Washington Post and GQ.

Notes on the book: In Good Book, David Plotz, a self-described “pork-loving Jew,” takes notes on a year-old experiment: “What happens when an ignorant person actually reads the book on which his religion is based?” As he plodded through an English translation of the Hebrew Bible–unaided by teachers or commentaries–Mr. Plotz recorded his responses in “Blogging the Bible.”

The project began a few years ago, when Plotz, bored at a bat mitzvah, picked up the Torah in front of him and, opening at random, fell upon the story of Dinah. Its rape, forced circumcision and mass murder shocked him. He discovered in the Bible a book far less bland than the he had been led to expect.

At times he admires the Bible’s grand notions of justice or finds its laws–e.g.,injunctions in Leviticus 19 to render justice blindly, to love the stranger and to feed the poor–”monumental and beautiful.” He senses the experiment in close reading has joined him in new ways to Jewish life.

But more often, Plotz finds the Bible a big, contradictory, and stunningly violent opera. “We’ve been sold a Bible that’s blander and kinder than the real thing,” he writes. “Instead, let’s revel in its messiness, humor and cruelty.”

Read “Blogging the Bible” here.

See Plotz discuss the book here.

About the authors: Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler are professors at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. They have both written extensively  on sexual ethics and have a thorough knowledge of current theological debates. They stand firmly within the Catholic tradition even as they argue for significant change.

Notes on the book: Two principles capture the essense of the official Catholic position on the morality of sexuality: first, that any human genital act must occur within the framework of marriage; second, each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life.

In this comprehensive overview of Catholicism and sexuality, theologians Salzman and Lawler examine and challenge these principles.

The authors, both theologians, compare the Catholic hierarchy’s willingness to adjust and adapt its teachings on social issues with its refusal to do the same with its teachings on sexual ethics.

The main contribution of the book is its clear articulation of a person-centered natural-law ethic that offers Catholics an authentic way to think about sex in relation to their faith.

Although the authors embrace reasoning from natural law, they argue it is impossible to gain knowledge of nature. We can only reflect on our limited human experience of nature, aknowledging that it is always partial, evolving and in need of application. Thus, traditional assertions about the unnaturalness of certain sexual acts are flawed.

The authors posit that making good sexual decisions means discerning whether or not actions contribute to human flourishing. Sexual acts that are “truly human” must be loving, just and able to meet the test of “holistic complementarity.” Complementarity is defined in relation to sexual orientation. For persons with a homosexual orientation, sexual relationships with a person of the same sex are complementary and can be loving, just and moral.

The book points the way to a thorough revision of Church teaching on birth control, premarital sex and homosexuality.

About the author:
John O’Donohue was an Irish poet, author, and Catholic scholar who lived in the solitude of a cottage in the west of Ireland and spoke Gaelic as his daily language. His acclaimed writings reveal an original thinker rooted in a blend of Irish heritage, German philosophy, western theology, and an intimate relationship with the wild, luminous landscape of his home.

For 19 years he served as a parish priest in the west of Ireland, but always felt the urge to write, as well as a mounting tension between Irish Catholicism’s traditional stance and his own liberal position. In a radio interview long after leaving the priesthood, he spoke of ministering to people in the parish: “I was trying to refine their fingers…so that they could undo so much of the false netting crippling their own spirits.”

O’Donohue is the author of several books, including the international bestsellers Anan Cara and Eternal Echoes, as well as two collections of poetry, Echoes of Memory and Conamara Blues.

http://johnodonohue.com
John’s Obituary at the Times

Notes on the book:
What does it mean to bless others and ourselves? O’Donohue focuses on bringing God’s blessings into the liminal spaces in our lives: times of transition, grieving, change or preparation for the unknown. In our overly busy culture, Donohue writes, he frequently race over the “crucial thresholds in life” without pausing to take note of their significance. A blessing is one of those protecting, encouraging and guiding rituals “as we cross over into the unknown.” The book closes with O’Donohue’s personal-and often profound-musings on the act of blessing, drawing on Celtic spirituality and practice.