This collection of essays, sketches, talks, and poems is hardly a must, even for Buber fans. It is not his best writing or his deepest thinking. However, each selection is short enough not to waste the reader's time and suggestive enough to lure him on to the next one in the hope that the real gems will be there. Buber seldom published his poems, and the reason is clear. With a few memorable exceptions the poems collected here are not strong--at (...) least not in the translations given; fortunately the German is printed alongside. Buber made these selections himself from writings between 1902 and 1964. The criterion of selection was to collect a valid and "survival-worthy expression of an experience, a feeling, a decision, yes even a dream." The ten sections of the book are not titled but some of the topics covered are: words and language, discussions of various thinkers, the idea of community, education, religion, psychology, and politics. Many of the pieces were prepared for particular occasions. Friedman explains those occasions in the back of the book and gives other bits of information that aid the translation and clear up some obscure references. Some of the themes that pervade the selections are: the togetherness of body and spirit, dialogue, the importance of existential trust, and the sacredness of the concrete world and of everyday encounters. Ruth Anshen's inspired introduction to the Credo Perspectives Series is worthy of its repetition in all the volumes.--S. O. H. (shrink)

Where is the old Marcuse? Is he too tired to be explicit, to reason, to give a rationale for what he is contending? Why has he written this?--this which is just another protest lost in the shouting and the printing scattered all over stop signs, subway walls, placards, newspapers, magazines, and in books. Perhaps the importance of the book is its perseverance at a time when we are exhausted, worn out by protest's apparent sterility on the one hand and its (...) kiss-of-death fashionability on the other. Many places in this book are obscure because they are poorly written and poorly edited. Marcuse walks the line between being original enough to be provocative and irresponsible enough to be dismissed. The book is a fascinating interplay between sense and nonsense, penetrating insight and polemical overstatement, between creative originality and banal sloganism, between brilliant interpretive social commentary and abject confusion. Marcuse does succeed in letting the reader know that there is something wrong with our society and that many of the values that we have taken for granted must be rethought, but this is not Marcuse at his best, and the net force of the book is to leave the reader bewildered with this, another indication that these are bewildering times.--S. O. H. (shrink)

This study originally appeared in German in 1963. It was revised for the English edition and the translation is smooth. It is an introduction aimed at the layman. The language is simple and, except for the most important of Teilhard's terms, technical terms are scrupulously avoided. The book is organized around what Wildiers feels are Teilhard's major motivating concerns: God and the universe, or love of God vs. love of world. Wildiers explains how Teilhard sees the universe evolving from the (...) geosphere through the biosphere and noosphere and converging toward a specific end, the omega point, which Teilhard identifies with the parousia. Man has a unique position in this scheme. He represents the noosphere and is, in a sense, evolution in charge of itself. Wildiers shows how Teilhard's original concern was scientific and how he tenaciously made use of a phenomenological scientific methodology even in his most speculative theological reflections. Teilhard's christology, philosophy of history, and concept of evil are also discussed. The book does perhaps leave the reader "introduced," but there is no substitute for discovering Teilhard for oneself.--S. O. H. (shrink)

Responsible efforts by theologians to deal with the problem of language have been too few. Perhaps frightened by growling and unyielding logical positivists, theologians, with a few notable exceptions, have been generally reluctant to do the linguistic housecleaning necessary to keep up with the philosophical Joneses. However, the tempest of logical positivism has pretty well past, and theologians are beginning to poke their heads out and to clear away some of the linguistic debris. Although Macquarrie is not deluded into "thinking (...) that the retreat from an iconoclastic positivism leads automatically to a situation in which analysis makes a constructive contribution to the problems of theology," he does see five findings of the methodology of analysis that make for a more hospitable environment for reflections on theological discourse: The recognition of a multiplicity of languages. The distrust of reductionism that sanctions one single kind of language. The recognition of a diversity of meaning. The recognition of the efficacious use of indirect language. Recognition of the importance of the context of the situation out of which language arises. Macquarrie's intent is to explore the characteristics, the "logic," of uniquely theological language, and to see how such a language manifests the three characteristics of a discourse-situation in any language: expression, representation, communication. The situation out of which theological language grows and the key to its logic is the human discovery of human finitude and the encounter with Being precipitated by the discovery of the possibility of nonbeing. Macquarrie's debt to Heidegger is heavy and acknowledged. He discusses at length mythology, symbolism, analogy, empirical language, and the Heideggerian language of existence and being, as modes and types of theological language. One of the strengths of the book is Macquarrie's willingness to put his analytical method to work in a hermeneutical exercise examining some ancient and modern examples of theological discourse. Macquarrie announces at the end what had been implicit throughout: that the language of existence and being is the basic logic of theology. "Heidegger's attempt to move from existential into ontological language is most important and, if one accepts it, it constitutes a kind of paradigm or prototype for the language of theology."—S. O. H. (shrink)

A book like this has been needed for some time. Gill has set up an anthology to show students the current state of the philosophy of religion without first leading them through the labyrinth of history and loosing their interest along the way. Gill sees five major areas of focus, five "perspectives," on the problems of the philosophy of religion. These five perspectives are Existentialism ; Humanist Perspective ; Process Thought ; The Analytic Perspective ; The Neo-Catholic Perspective. On the (...) whole the readings are provocative and, together with supplementary materials, can easily illuminate the contemporary scene in the philosophy of religion.--S. O. H. (shrink)

What starts out as a run-of-the-mill denunciation of mechanism and behaviorism in the physical and social sciences ends up with some exciting, if sketchy, suggestions for new conceptions of man and his world. The key words for Bertalanffy's psychology are symbolism and system. The former delimits what is uniquely human in human behavior; the latter replaces man as stimulus-response robot with man as "active personality system." After discussing the advantages and drawbacks of man's propensity for the symbolic construction of reality, (...) the author turns his attention to the systems approach to an understanding of man. He warns against the common error of identifying cybernetics with general systems theory. The cybernated system, he feels, is still basically mechanistic, distinguishing itself only by the addition of a feed-back loop to make it self-regulative. It is still closed with respect to the introduction of matter or energy from outside the system, even though it is open to the introduction of information from outside. That is, no matter how complex the cybernetic system, it "can always be resolved into feedback circuits" and thought of in terms of "linear causality." The regulative behavior of general systems, on the other hand, is determined by goal-directed, dynamic interaction between many forces and variables in an open system. Bertalanffy points out that "no comprehensive theory of systems exists today." However, as a model the approach has many advantages, such as obviating the need for the "ghost in the machine" and suggesting some solutions to the mind-body problem. The book, originally the Heinz Werner Lectures at Clark University, is a provocative introduction to systems theory, and the bibliography is especially useful in suggesting further steps in the exploration of this exciting idea.--S. O. H. (shrink)

The theme of the church's impact on culture does not ignore, but rather rounds out the Chicago school's earlier and opposite preoccupation with the cultural-environmental factors in the development of the church. Brauer sees the socio-historical method which is identified with the Chicago school as "the first serious attempt in America to make church history a responsible scientific discipline at home in the university." These essays by faculty and alumni of Chicago Divinity School are presented chronologically and cover ancient, medieval, (...) reformation, and modern church history. Specifically, the essays cover: the use of the prefix auto- in early Christian Theology; the period of Constantine; the fourth and fifth century relation between Christianity and Judaeism; some medieval reforming critiques; the importance of the church in the rise of Moscow; a new line on the problem of the sources of conciliarism in the fifteenth century; and various reformation essays including one by J. T. McNeil, one on Anabaptism, one on religion and science in the reformation, and one on reformation humanism. The final essays include studies of Oliver Cromwell, Schleiermacher, Joseph Miloslav Hurban, and one on Harnack.--S. O. H. (shrink)

This volume of the Chicago series contains exercises in Religionswissenschaft which the book is at pains to distinguish from the so-called Religionsgeschichtliche Schule. After an introductory essay by Joachim Wach, Mircea Eliade deservedly has the lead article, finding some familiar Religionswissenschaft themes in modern France's fascination with Teilhard, Levy-Straus, and the magazine Planète. Kitagawa's essay says a few things about Religionswissenschaft as a discipline, describing some things that all religions have in common and then briefly tracing three types of religious (...) experience which in some sense correspond to the historical development of man's religions. Many of the essays look into particular eastern or ancient religions. There is an essay by T. J. J. Altizer who combines his death-of-God rhetoric with a history of religions approach to talk about Christianity's internal incompatibilities. Tillich, in this his last public lecture, discusses the significance of Religionswissenschaft for the theologian. Most of the essays deal in some way with the hermeneutical problems of the discipline.--S. O. H. (shrink)

Parker obviously has a warm fondness and a deep empathetic understanding of this period of history, and they are offered to the reader in every carefully worked sentence. In a narrative style that presents the human dimension as well as the central ideas of the Presocratics, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, Parker imaginatively reconstructs the phenomenological, empirical, and the homely rationale for their theories. He depicts the Presocratics as organized around the question "What is the universe made of?" and Socrates around (...) "What is Truth, Justice, Goodness?" There is a chapter giving a profile of Athens and Sparta. The three chapters on Plato cover the theory of forms, the Republic, and the Laws. The four chapters on Aristotle, besides the biographical inclusions, cover a scheme of his works, his view of nature, The Ethics, The Politics, and his lasting impact on the rest of intellectual history. The book ends with a brief treatment of Hellenism and a conclusion that takes its cue from the awe and excitement of Keats in On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. Altogether it is a simplified yet sympathetic, thoughtful, and sensitive introduction.--S. O. H. (shrink)

These lectures, given at the University of Chicago and slated to be the Nobel lectures at Harvard before Tillich's death, are a compromise between the technical style of the Systematic Theology and the sermon style of his more popular books, although they are closer to the latter. They are eminently readable and filled with those rich insights that only the reflection of a mature mind can produce. The first chapter is a narrative, autobiographical account of Tillich's years as a young (...) man in which he acknowledges his intellectual debts and influences. The last three chapters are suggestions for absolutes found in his search--absolutes in knowledge, ethics, and religion respectively. These include the logical structure of the mind, categories, and polarities; the unconditional character of the moral imperative, agape; being-itself, and the holy. The book contains an inspired introduction to the Credo Perspectives series by Ruth Anshen as well as her short prologue to this particular volume. The twenty-six full-page drawings by Saul Steinberg are a significant bonus. They parallel and often interpret the text, and the text, in its turn, often reveals the drawings in a clearer light.--S. O. H. (shrink)

In an effort to give a "personal account of the impact of Whitehead on one reader" and to promote the enthusiasm of others who have not yet discovered Whitehead, Jordan takes off to give his readers an aerial view of the Whiteheadian panorama, flying high enough to avoid becoming entangled in the Whiteheadian word thicket below. This is not to say that Jordan ignores Whiteheadian terminology. On the contrary he has enhanced Whitehead's famous mute appeal for an imaginative leap with (...) a string of ingenious metaphors which serve well to explicate Whitehead's key technical terms and concepts. The result is actually more of a commentary and exposition than is advertised in the introduction. The final chapters come closer to the autobiographical emphasis promised in the introduction. There Jordan makes some general observations on Whitehead's language, his method, and the place of reason in his thought. He affirms the importance and modern relevance of Whitehead as a whole in spite of some misgivings about Whitehead's theism in an age of justifiable skepticism. The importance of the book is its metaphors and images. At last someone has made a responsible effort to explicate Whitehead in everyday terms. Obviously this involves distortions, but the book has no pretensions about its authority and is coupled with an invitation to read Whitehead himself and his more technical commentators. There are no footnotes.--S. O. H. (shrink)

The bulk of this work is a responsible and well documented exposition of Whitehead's major themes with emphasis on how they contribute to his theory of perception and how his developing theory of perception contributes to them. Although Schmidt divides Whitehead's development into three parts, the important part of the project, and obviously his favorite, is the elucidation of Whitehead's "mature theory of perception" and the demonstration that it provides a foundation for the cosmological system and his philosophy of science. (...) Throughout, Whitehead is presented as an empiricist, although not in the usual sense. Perception and immediate experience are his starting point, but "perception" is used in a more basic, generic sense than is customary. It includes conception as well as sense-presentation. Schmidt pays prolonged and welcome attention to presentational immediacy, causal efficacy, and symbolic reference. The book contains some useful expansions of underdeveloped Whiteheadian doctrines, elucidations of Whiteheadian obscurities, and a number of interpretive distinctions, all of which serve to make it a useful new commentary as well as a proposal of an important thesis.--S. O. H. (shrink)

This is primarily a sociological study of the impact on the viewer of television coverage of particular key events. Singled out especially are: MacArthur day in Chicago in 1951, the 1952 political conventions, and the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960. The impact of television on political opinion and the effect of nationally televised voting returns on late voters are also explored. Relying on the method of questionnaires and interviews with strategically placed eye-witnesses and television watchers, the Langs discovered: that there is (...) a difference between being there in person and "being there" via T.V., that the major networks differ, often markedly, with respect to the impression of the event conveyed, and that in spite of seeming to be a "see for yourself" news medium, T.V. can't help but introduce some "refraction," some inadvertent bias, into the actuality it conveys. Although there is occasional passing reference to McLuhan, there is little discussion of T.V. as medium. Rather, content, and content of news coverage specifically, is the primary focus. However, in the last chapter, and here and there throughout the book, there are more speculative reflections on what the authors have discovered. For example, they speculate on the way television coverage becomes an event in its own right and on the way television "manufactures" actuality, transforming the viewers' quest for truth into a quest for trust. The book is a helpful, feet-on-the-ground reference point for the exploration of the problems of media and messages.--S. O. H. (shrink)