34 / Religious Studies Review Volume 32 Number 1 / January 2006

WAGING NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE:20TH CENTURY PRACTICE AND 21STCENTURY POTENTIAL. By Gene Sharp.Boston, MA: Extending Horizons Books, 2005.Pp. viii + 598. Cloth, $24.95, ISBN 0-87558-161-7; paper, $14.95, ISBN 0-87558-162-5.

For more than three decades Sharp’s workhas been indispensable reading for scholars ofand activists for nonviolent social change. Hisbooks and pamphlets have been translated intodozens of languages, and have served as “howto” manuals in many recent nonviolent strug-gles. This book summarizes his long path-breaking career. Twenty-seven case studies oftwentieth-century nonviolent movements, withall degrees of success and failure, illustrate thebreadth of the use of nonviolent tactics: theIndian independence movement; resistance toNazi rule; opposition to dictatorships in LatinAmerica, Europe, Asia, and Africa; the Ameri-can civil rights movement; and the breakup ofCommunist rule in Eastern Europe. In mostcases the use of nonviolent means was almostaccidental. Sharp argues for the potential ofnonviolent strategies and tactics to change dra-matically how people struggle for justice, andthereby change social and political relation-ships and structures, if they are studied andanalyzed at the same depth military strategistssuch as Sun Tzu, Clausewitz and L. Hart havestudied how to wage violent war. Although hementions it only in passing toward the end ofthis masterful book, key to Sharp’s argument isthat he discusses nonviolent struggle, not themoral or religious justifications for nonvio-lence. One need not have an ideological ortheological commitment to “nonviolence” inthe abstract to use nonviolent tactics in one’swork for social change. Thus this book will bea useful addition to courses that do have sucha philosophical or theological focus, as well asserving as a practical bible for the next gener-ation of nonviolent activists.

John E. CortDenison University

Arts, Literature, Culture, and

ReligionMARKS OF THE BEAST: THE LEFTBEHIND NOVELS AND THE STRUGGLEFOR EVANGELICAL IDENTITY. ByGlenn W. Shuck. New York: New York Univer-sity Press, 2005. Pp. x111 + 271. $20.00, ISBN0-8147-4005-7.

Shuck’s discussion of the Left Behind sto-ries is neither primarily theological nor pri-marily literary, but sociological. He wants toexplain the enormous appeal of the serieswithin American evangelicalism. Beginning

with a survey of recent apocalyptic fiction (bothbooks and cinema), he searches for the differ-ence between Left Behind and earlier works. Hediscovers a key dissimilarity in the activism ofthe Left Behind characters. Earlier versions ofapocalyptic fiction depicted characters whopassively faced a determined outcome. Shucknotes that the ultimate outcome is no less deter-mined in Left Behind, but the characters engageit actively as if they think they can makea difference. For Shuck, the attitude of thesefictional characters mirrors the increasinglyaggressive posture of the evangelical right.While many evangelicals are still committed toa premillennial theology that implies socialpessimism, they have nevertheless begun to actas if they think they can make a difference insociety. In a sense, the success of the LeftBehind books parallels the emergence of thenew Christian right. This is an interesting thesisthat deserves to be explored. The book willinterest readers from college level upwards,both those who sympathize with the theologyof Left Behind and those who are interested init for other reasons.

Kevin T. BauderCentral Baptist Theological Seminary

O GOD OF PLAYERS: THE STORY OFTHE IMMACULATA MIGHTY MACS. ByJulie Byrne. New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2003. Pp. xii + 312. $22.50, ISBN 0-231-12749-9.

Byrne examines the astonishing success ofthe Immaculata College, a Catholic women’scollege whose basketball team—the MightyMacs—won, from 1972 to 1974, the first threenational championship basketball tournamentsfor women. Byrne reveals that the tiny college’sbasketball prowess grew from decades of inter-est in women’s basketball among Philadel-phia’s working-class Catholic neighborhoods.Clad in quaint blue skirts, the Immaculatateams seemed dainty and prudish, but theiraggressive play revolutionized the way womenplayed the game. Byrne reads this story topi-cally, not chronologically, and does so throughthe lens of feminist theory. Therefore, sheattends primarily to how Immaculata’s womenunderstood themselves as Catholics, women,and athletes. Byrne repeatedly insists that bas-ketball enabled Immaculata players to subvertstereotypes of demure Catholic femininity.Byrne likewise shows how the religious orderstaffing Immaculata—the Immaculate Heart ofMary sisters—created a women’s community atthe college that nurtured the team despite sev-eral obstacles. She ably handles the all-too-slippery intersection of sports and religionin American life. This ingenious study shouldfind a place in both survey and seminar courses.

Jeffrey MarlettThe College of Saint Rose

UNDERSTANDING THEOLOGY ANDPOPULAR CULTURE. By Gordon Lynch.

Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Company,2005. Pp. xv + 236. Cloth, $62.95, ISBN 1-4051-1747-8; paper, $27.95, ISBN 1-4051-1748-6.

Lynch has written an excellent introductionfor dialogue between theology and popular cul-ture. He begins with an understanding of theol-ogy as normative, contextual, and dynamic, andthen proceeds to construct an open definition ofpopular culture grounded in the environment,practices, and resources of everyday life. Build-ing from these definitions, Lynch reviews thedialogue between popular culture and theologyto date. He offers methods for moving the dia-logue forward through author-focused, text-based, and ethnographic approaches for theo-logical dialogue with popular culture. In the lastchapter Lynch begins a theological aestheticsfor popular culture. Building from the work ofDewey, his aesthetics begins in judgmentsabout the effects of popular culture in humanexperience and relationships. Throughout thiswork, he constructs an argument for theologicaland cultural criticism in conjunction withimaginative and constructive interventions incontemporary culture. This book is useful inundergraduate or graduate courses in religionand popular culture, media studies or individu-als interested in critical reflection on theologyand popular culture.

Tim Van MeterLancaster Theological Seminary

FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S SACRAMEN-TAL ART. By Susan Srigley. Notre Dame, IN:Notre Dame University Press, 2004. Pp. 208.Cloth, $42.00, ISBN 0-268-01779-4; paper,$20.00, ISBN 0-268-01780-8.

Srigley’s concern is “to demonstrate howO’Connor’s ethics are inextricably linked to herrole as a storyteller and how her moral visionis played out in the drama of her fiction.” Whatmakes O’Connor’s art “sacramental” is notonly that it reveals the invisible (spiritual) in thevisible (material) but also that it embodies thetheology in the fiction incarnationally. This is afamiliar territory, and Srigley’s close readingsof O’Connor offer no surprises. In the end, Sri-gley turns to brief but provocative speculationon the direction O’Connor’s work was takingat the end of her short life–away from the gro-tesque “toward the contemplation of the soul’sascent into the purifying love of God.” Thatwould be a surprising turn, and the fact thatSrigley suggests it in the end reiterates atendency present from the beginning to equatethe spiritual with “distance,” the physical withproximity. That tendency weakens O’Connor’sradically incarnational stance, but the sacra-mentality of O’Connor’s work is undeniable,and Srigley presents the evidence clearly. Toher credit, she reminds readers of O’Connor’sown advice on interpreting literature: “Whenanybody asks what a story is about, the onlyproper thing is to tell him to read the story.” For

Volume 32 Number 1 / January 2006 Religious Studies Review / 35

what it is about, read O’Connor. Read Srigleyfor her thoughts on how to do ethics.

Steven SchroederChicago, IL

PICTURING FAITH: PHOTOGRAPHYAND THE GREAT DEPRESSION. ByColleen McDannell. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-versity Press, 2004. Pp. 319; 128 b/w illus.$45.00, ISBN 0-300-10430-8.

With this book and the traveling exhibit thatpreceded it, McDannell makes available a pre-viously unknown cache of materials for thestudy of religion in the United States and pre-sents a compelling examination of its contribu-tion and significance. The hereto-unexploredmaterials are dozens of photographs depictingreligious life in America during the GreatDepression, which were taken by such note-worthy photographers as Dorothea Lange,Gordon Parks, and Walker Evans, under theauspices of the US Farm Security Administra-tion. In her insightful, interdisciplinary analysisof these photos, McDannell warns against see-ing them as simple records of the religious livesof their subjects, arguing that they tell us muchmore about how these artists understoodreligious life and meaning than about reli-gion itself. Guided by auteur studies, the bookprobes the biographies of the featured photo-graphers to shed light on how they constructedreligion as a photographic subject.

The photographers from Farm SecurityAdministration (FSA) generally did notembrace the faith of their subjects. Althoughmost had been raised within a religioustradition—Jewish, Catholic, or Protestant—most did not consider themselves religious. Asthey roamed the country seeking ways to depictAmerican life, their choices were guided bytheir early experiences with religion and subse-quent understandings of what constituted reli-gion as well as artistic and political motivations.McDannell offers an intelligent hermeneutic foruntangling the meanings of the images. Whilereaders may quibble with some of her specificinterpretations, they will come away with aprofound understanding of the complexities ofdepicting religion photographically.

Jeanne Halgren KildeCarleton College

TO OUR BODIES TURN WE THEN:BODY AS WORD AND SACRAMENT INTHE WORKS OF JOHN DONNE. ByFelecia Wright McDuffie. New York: Contin-uum International Publishing Group, 2005. Pp.xvi + 176. Cloth, $100.00, ISBN 0-8264-1676-4; paper, $23.95, ISBN 0-8264-1677-2.

Though she claims to perform a primarilytheological reading, McDuffie’s investigation ofthe body in Donne’s poetry and prose should beof interest to both religious and literary scholarsof the seventeenth century. The book traces thetrajectory of Donne’s thinking about the bodyfrom his early years as a poet to his last years

as Dean of St. Paul’s, finding a continuitythroughout, and suggesting, quite convincingly,that Donne’s interest in the physical body andthe death of that body was neither merelyperverse nor macabre. Instead, in his seeminglyexcessive emphasis on the physical, McDuffiefinds a theological viewpoint that places thebody at a point of central importance in salvationhistory and in God’s system of symbolic com-munication. She maintains that while Donne’ssacramental view of the body is not unorthodox,it does represent a unique, nuanced perspectiveof church doctrine. While the main portion ofthe text is geared primarily toward those spe-cifically interested in Donne, McDuffie includesseveral excellent appendices that explain histheology in the context of late Renaissance cul-ture, making the text useful to a wider audience,especially students of the period.

Heather G. S. JohnsonIndiana University

CONSUMING VISIONS: MASS CULTUREAND THE LOURDES SHRINE. By SuzanneK. Kaufman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress, 2005. Pp. viii + 255; map. $34.95, ISBN0-8014-4248-6.

Kaufman’s book places the shrine at Lour-des at the center of a battle between science andreligion for authority in the public sphere.Through a critique of the narrative of secular-ization that characterizes French history, Kauf-man situates the development of Lourdes as acollaboration between the Catholic Church anda developing commercial sphere. In this view,the development of a shrine in the midst ofFrench modernization does not detract from theprocess or present itself as an anomaly, butinstead the shrine offered the Catholic Churchan opportunity to promote itself throughembracing modernism. Kaufman’s detailed dis-cussion of the material culture and commercerelated to Lourdes is reminiscent of work by C.McDannell and R. Moore and makes a strikingcontribution that challenges the dichotomiza-tion of sacred and profane spheres.

Hillary WarrenOtterbein College

DIE GESCHICHTEN VOM BA’ALSCHEM TOV SCHIVCHE HA-BESCHT.Edited, translated and with a commentary byKarl E. Grozinger. Juedischer Kultur 2.Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1997. VolumeI lxiv + 229 + 283; Volume II xii + 172 + 198.€99.00, ISBN 3-447-03867-5.

The Tales of the Baal Shem Tov is the mostimportant literary source on the life and viewsof the founder of the Hassidic movement. It wasoriginally published in Hebrew and Yiddishversions. However, there is no “user-friendly”version of the Yiddish version and the Hebrewfirst edition is difficult to read. The editor ofthese volumes carefully transcribed the firsteditions of both versions and printed them inclear Hebrew type along with a translation into

German as well as notes on variant texts and onthe meaning of the texts. The legible Hebrewand Yiddish texts alone make this an essentialvolume for any library of basic Hassidic texts.While there is a translation into English of theHebrew version, there is no translation ofthe Yiddish and German translation that canbe quite useful. There are more notes on theHebrew version than on the Yiddish version. Inboth volumes, the notes do not concentrate onthe Slavic or the folkloristic context but rather,to a large degree, on relevant secondary litera-ture. This should make them useful to studentsand researchers alike. There is an index of per-sons and places but not of topics or themes.

Shaul StampferHebrew University

Ancient Near EastTHE BOOK OF LEVITICUS: COMPOSI-TION & RECEPTION. Edited by RolfRendtorff and Robert A. Kugler with the assis-tance of Sarah Smith Bartel. Supplements toVetus Testamentum, Volume XCIII. Boston,MA: Brill, 2003. Pp. xviii + 475. $175.00,ISBN 90-04-12634-1.

This volume contains twenty-two essays ondiverse issues pertinent to the book of Leviticus,in addition to Rendtorff’s brief introduction.Part 1 deals with the question of dating Leviti-cus (Levine, Milgrom) and its relation to therest of the books of the Pentateuch (Auld,Ruwe, Watts). Part 2 consists of essays on thetheology of sacrifice (Marx) and fresh under-standings of the scapegoat (Douglas), thedietary laws (Houston), and the incest prohibi-tions (Schenker). Part 3 discusses definitions ofthe priest (Péter-Contesse, Grabble) and thepriestly responsibilities (Carmichael). Part 4includes discussions on the early translations ofthe book (the Old Greek Version [Metso andUlrich], the Targums [McNamara], the Peshitta[Lane]), its significance in the Dead Sea Scrolls(Flint, Kugler), its receptions in Christiancommunities (Chilton) and Jewish circles(Harrington, Bodendorfer), and feministinterpretations (Schearing, Wegner). The rangeof topics and approaches that this volumeexhibits certainly reflect the vibrant state of thestudy related to Leviticus and indicate a newdirection in treating the book as an individualunit within the Pentateuch.

Won W. LeeCalvin College

LEVITICUS: A BOOK OF RITUAL ANDETHICS. By Jacob Milgrom. A ContinentalCommentary. Minneapolis, MN: FortressPress, 2004. Pp. xx + 388. $30.00, ISBN 0-8006-9514-3.

In this concise examination of Leviticus,Milgrom seeks to reconstruct an intricate webof values underlying the rituals that constitute