Printed to Last
Twelve books out of 15,000
Over the past ten years an estimated 15,000 new religious books have been published. The liberal Protestant weekly Christian Century asked 89 of its scholarly reviewers which titles from the 1970s "most deserve to survive." Last week it offered their top-of-the-decade choices in order of votes received:
A Religious History of the American People by Sydney E. Ahlstrom (Yale, 1972). From the Puritans to the present, this book is a Lutheran historian's lucid, thorough survey of the progress of faith in a religiously complex nation.
On Being a Christian by Hans Kueng (Doubleday, 1976). A work of fairly serious theology that became a big seller, this book by Kueng, liberal Swiss priest and thorn in the side of the Vatican, offers a revisionist review of such Christian dogmas as the Resurrection.
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker (Free Press, 1973). Anxiety over death, not over sex, Anthropologist Becker decided, is the prime trouble of mankind. An unconventionally religious book that won a Pulitzer Prize shortly after the author died of cancer.
The Crucified God by Juergen Moltmann (Harper & Row, 1974). A leading German Protestant theologian probes the central Christian paradox, God's identification with man through Christ's suffering on the Cross.
The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine by Jaroslav Pelikan (Univ. of Chicago, 3 vols.). Another Lutheran's modern classic in an old-fashioned field; heavily documented, remarkably readable.
A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez (Orbis, 1973). A Peruvian priest's synthesis of Christ and Marx, this book is a bible for a generation of Third World theorists.
The Habit of Being by Flannery O'Connor (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1979). Letters of one of America's finest writers, who died in 1964, at age 39; the text is firm about Roman Catholicism, refreshingly short on self-pity about the disease that crippled her--and characteristically precise of mind and heart.
The Birth of the Messiah by Raymond E. Brown (Doubleday, 1977). A top Catholic New Testament expert's close analysis of the story of Jesus' birth in Matthew and Luke, with some surprises, e.g., he doubts Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts by Eberhard Busch (Fortress, 1976). A colleague's intimate biography of the courageous polymath who was this century's leading Protestant theologian.
Brother to a Dragonfly by Will D. Campbell (Seabury, 1977). "We're all bastards but God loves us anyway," Campbell says, and his memoir is a beguiling personal sermon on the same topic.
Profiles in Belief by Arthur C. Piepkorn (Harper & Row, 4 vols.). When all seven volumes are out, the late Lutheran theologian will have described exactly and elegantly the tenets of 735 different U.S. faiths.
Jesus: An Experiment in Christology by Edward Schillebeeckx (Seabury, 1979). A study of Jesus by a leader in Dutch Catholic theology whose doubts and questions about the nature of Christ's divinity and Resurrection have stirred the Vatican's disapproval.
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