In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

BOOK REVIEWS 161 promote the attainment of that goal. What these natural goal-directed tasks are and how are they transformed and elevated by grace are questions that Christian personalism cannot skirt. Otherwise, appeals to the "language of the body" risk becoming as unintelligible to our contemporaries as neo-Scholastic natural-law arguments are. In other words, unless John Paul's personalism is rooted in a renewed philosophy of nature, appeals to it risk becoming attempts to teach a language outside of the nature context in which that language is lived. The language can be learned by rote, but it will always remain a foreign language and not a natural idiom. This is what makes Grabowski's reserve toward Aquinas unfortunate. Aquinas's treatment of nature--even his conception of the sins against nature, which Grabowski sharply criticizes-ffer more resources for the renewal of Catholic sexual ethics than Grabowski recognizes. Even with these limitations, however, Grabowski's study offers a fine introduction to Catholicsexualteaching from a Christian personalistperspective. It can serve as a useful resource for helping couples discover the liberating beauty of Catholic sexual teaching. University ofFribourg Fribourg, Switzerland MICHAEL SHERWIN, 0.P. Ethics andTheological Disclosures: The Thought ofRobert Sokolowski. Edited by GUY MANSINI, 0.S.B. and JAMES G. HART. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003. Pp. xviii + 198. $69.95 (cloth) ISBN 0-8132-1351-7. Anyone who knows Husserlian phenomenology knows about Robert Sokolowski. Anyone who knows Sokolowski will know of his seminal studies in phenomenology. The list is impressive-The Formation ofHusserl's Concept of Constitution (1964), Husserlian Meditations: HowWords Present Things (1974), Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being (1978), Moral Action: A Phenomenological Study (1985), Introduction to Phenomenology (2000)-and the list goes on. But Msgr. Sokolowski is not only a phenomenologist; he is also a Catholic theologian-a theologian who brings his phenomenological perspective to bear on his theology. Representative works include The GodofFaith andReason: Foundations ofChristian Theology (1982, 1995) and Eucharistic Presence: A Study in The Theology ofDisclosure (1994). As Sokolowski's phenomenological philosophical perspective informs his theological reflections, so his classically rooted Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective informs his phenomenological work. In both respects his gifts have proved invaluable and his contributions illuminating. 162 BOOK REVIEWS The present volume is a Festshrift yielded by a conference organized by Fr. Guy Mansini at the St. Meinrad School ofTheology honoring Sokolowski on the occasion ofhis sixty-fifth birthday. James Hart tells us in his preface that because an earlier "Sokofest" was devoted primarily to Sokolowski's philosophical writings (see The Truthful and the Good: Essays in Honor ofRobert Sokolowski, ed. John J. Drummond and James G. Hart, 1996), it was decided that this one would aim primarily at his ethical writings and theology. The contributions to this volume, following a helpful introduction by Guy Mansini, are organized around several key themes in Sokolowski's work. The first clusters of essays (by John Drummond, Richard Cobb-Stevens, and Guy Mansini) deal with ethics generally, and with justice and friendship in particular. The second group of essays (by Owen Sadlier, Gerard Jacobitz, James G. Hart, John McCarthy, and John Brough) deals with various aspects of Sokolowski's theology of disclosure. Francis Slade introduces the theme of politics in a subsequent essay that pushes the ethical concerns of the volume into the sphere of questions of sovereignty. Finally, Sokolowski himself provides a capstone essay on the disclosure of the Trinity in the use of personal pronouns by Jesus and others in the New Testament. A list of Sokolowski's publications from 1959-2003, prepared by John Drummond, is appended to the contributed essays. The first group of essays on justice and friendship are led off by John Drummond's essay, "Judging One's Own Case," which concerns cases of judgment where one's impartiality may be called into question because of a conflict of (self-)interest. Drummond says that his purpose is not so much to challenge Sokolowski's account ofthe issue (in "Friendship and Moral Action in Aristotle") as to "complicate" it-an undertaking he executes with remarkable success by means of illustrations involving an imaginary "Dr. Peebrane...

pdf

Share