The Catholic University as Promise and Project: Reflections in a Jesuit Idiom by Michael J. Buckley, S.J. (review)

476 BOOK REVIEWS All this recalls the Pauline definition of spiritual worship, literally "rational" worship (logikos), in the Letter to the Romans: "Present your bodies [vos corps] as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is a spiritual worship" (Rom 12:1). It is significant that the two most widely used French translations should avoid using the word corps to translate siima. TheJerusalem Bible translates it as "vos personnes" and the Ecumenical Bible as "vousmemes ." The studies of Alasdair Madntyre can help us to avoid modern categories and prejudices that create an obstacle to an exact and enriching reading of the Bible. (Translated by Sr. Mary Thomas Noble, 0.P.) SERVAIS PINCKAERS, 0.P. Albertinum Fribourg, Switzerland The Catholic University as Promise and Project: Reflections in aJesuit Idiom. By MICHAEL J. BUCKLEY, S.J. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1998. Pp. 224. $55.00 (doth), $22.95 (paper). ISBN 0-87840711 -1(doth),0-87840-710-3 (paper). As Buckley (a chaired professor of theology and director of the Jesuit Institute at Boston College) explains in the preface, "this book is more a collection of essays, each bearing upon a cognate question, than a steady and single argument. Its unity is thematic rather than systematic" (xx). The central theme is captured in the first essay with an evocative image: hundreds of faculty and administrators at Boston College gathered on the steps of the library to celebrate a Mass to mark the start of the 1992-93 academic year while students make their way indifferently through the congregation and into the library. Buckley notes that the majority of thirteen thousand people of the university community apparently had something else to do that day, which during the liturgy spurred him to wonder, "What is this upon which we invoke the unspeakable mystery of God? What is this 'we' who are at prayer?" (4). These questions go to the issue of identity, and in Buckley's opinion, many Catholic colleges and universities, induding the Jesuit ones with which he is most familiar, are not facing this issue squarely. He offers several explanations-for example, a refusal to return to precondliar parochial narrowness, pluralism among faculty, and concern over the conditions attached to receiving state and federal money-but the one he focuses on is the assumption that religious and academic life pertain to two spheres of reality that relate to each other only extrinsically rather than intrinsically. Thus the BOOK REVIEWS 477 first essay advances the argument that "the academic and the religious are intrinsically related, that they form an inherent unity, that one is incomplete without the other"; "each term of this dyad and the realities to which they refer . . . do not simply exist juxtaposed to each other in influential contiguity"; rather, "one dynamically involves the other" (15). The intrinsic relation of religion and academia is a leading emphasis in the other essays as well. In chapter 2, Buckley maintains that the Church must foster scientific inquiry for two reasons: because scientific inquiry raises questions of ultimate meaning and mystery which bear on the selfunderstanding and mission of the Church, and because it instills an unswerving commitment to the truth which can only benefit the Christian faith. In chapter 3, he defends the position advanced in chapter 1 against the criticisms of David J. O'Brien, by pointing out, among other things, that the distinctively religious character of Catholic universities does not remove them from the wider pluralistic culture, as O'Brien implies, but actually enables them to contribute to it. Chapters 4 and 5 provide expositions on the Jesuit vision of the Catholic university: chapter 4, on Ignatius of Loyola's understanding of higher education, whichintegrated humanistic, philosophical, and theological studies; and chapter 5, on the early Jesuit humanistic vision, which ascribes to created things the capacity to serve as instruments of divine purpose. In chapter 6, Buckley explains howthe newJesuit humanism entails a concern for justice and thus obligesJesuit schools to produce students who are not only humanistic but humane. In chapter 7, he affirms the move ofCatholic colleges and universities from a custodial understanding of forming students to an understanding that challenges students to deal with...