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Recent Books 115
often in a situation where we can only preserve the tradition by changing
it. To ask the hot questions too directly merely cuts a brutta figura.
Spadaro’s allusions, by contrast, open them up through a kind of moodmusic
that might presage some future change or development.
Spadaro’s Italian academic style, rich in abstractions, well suits this
human reality. Unfortunately, a translator into English has an impossible
task in reproducing such thought forms for a different intellectual culture.
Maria Way’s option in handling Spadaro’s prose remains close to the
original style, with results that are often obscure. A bolder approach, and
also some competent editing, might have yielded something more intelligible.
Carolyn Reinhart’s A Fruit-Bearing Spirituality resembles Spadaro’s work
in its conviction that new cultural developments necessitate drastic reform
in Christianity’s self-understanding. The book comes across as a passionate
plea for a spiritual understanding rooted in human embodiment, in
ecological thinking, in quantum physics and in the overcoming of patterns
of mutual oppression. The narrowness of denominational Christianity is to
be overcome by a shared praxis, with inclusivity a watchword.
Readers of Reinhart’s book trained in conventional theology and in
churchy ways of doing things will probably find it exasperating in its
frequent oversimplifications of the tradition, and its uncritical use of buzz
words. But that is probably an unworthy response. The fact that there are
intelligent and committed people who write in this way, and that they can
find publishers who think the book will sell, says something important
about how conventional Christianity is failing to communicate to at least
some people of palpable good will. Though neither of these books is a
wholly satisfactory piece of work, both raise questions worth pondering.
Philip Endean SJ
Oxford Textbook of Spirituality in Healthcare, edited by Mark Cobb,
Christina M. Puchalski and Bruce Rumbold (Oxford: OUP, 2012).
97 8 0199 5713 90, pp.512, £125.00.
This astonishing book provides a comprehensive introduction to so many
issues concerning spirituality and healthcare that any attempt at listing
them all would be counterproductive. Basic concepts of health and of
spirituality, the relationships between spirituality and religion, the ways in
which different religious and non-religious traditions respond to those
needing healthcare: this list does not begin to span the range of topics
dealt with in the seven sections of the book.