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  • Spirituality and Mysticism: A Global View
  • Michael E. Lee (bio)
Spirituality and Mysticism: A Global View. By James A. Wiseman. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2006. 242pp. $20.00

The instructor of Christianity faces daunting tasks in the typical university classroom. In a period of specialization, how does one provide students a broad sense of a two thousand year old tradition? How does one offer a history of Christianity that moves beyond the great texts and considers art, liturgy, and modes of discipleship? Moreover, how does one achieve this while giving due attention to those marginalized voices being retrieved by contemporary scholarship, the voices of women and of Christians in Africa, Asia, and Latin America? In his short but ambitious book, James Wiseman provides a very useful resource to those who would take on the aforementioned tasks and examine the Christian tradition with an eye to the great contributions being made by the development of spirituality as an academic discipline.

Though the book might be of interest to the general reader because of its clear prose and readability, its brief, almost encyclopedic, treatment of figures and the questions for reflection that conclude each chapter seem to make it best suited for a classroom. In the hands of a knowledgeable instructor, this book can be used as a serviceable map, providing students a big picture that can be filled out as the instructor chooses. It has ten chapters divided into three sections: chapters one and two focus on spirituality and biblical spirituality, respectively; chapters three through seven conduct a chronological sweep of Christian spirituality from early Christianity to the Reformation; and finally, the last three chapters focus on modern Christian spirituality in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Appearing as part of Orbis Books's "Theology in Global Perspective" series, the book can be likened to an atlas in the scope of its coverage of Christian history and the wide-ranging impact of spirituality upon this history.

Wiseman opens the book with a helpful exploration of how current authors are using the terms "spirituality" and "mysticism." Supported by good footnotes, the reader is introduced to the work of important figures such as Sandra Schneiders, Walter Principe, and Bernard McGinn. Wiseman concludes this chapter by drawing on Lonergan's notion of "functional specialties" to stress the variety of tasks required by the study of spirituality. All in all, this offers a fine primer for the student with no previous knowledge of the area. [End Page 233]

The second chapter of the text is entitled, "Biblical Spirituality," a title whose ambiguity is utilized by the author. Wiseman presents both a sketch of the spirituality of the biblical authors and the different forms of exegesis that have guided spiritualities. If that represents an enormous amount of material to cover in one chapter, then it signals both a strength and weakness of Wiseman's global task throughout the book. Sketching the spirituality of the First Testament in four pages is simply too difficult a task to execute justly. Here is a case where the global view flattens out too much of the interesting topography. The text functions better when Wiseman utilizes the biblical tale of Abraham as a lens through which to examine the history of biblical interpretation.

Some might quibble with the manner that Wiseman divides biblical interpretation into pre-modern, modern, and post-modern paradigms—a schema he adopts from David Tracy. The problem lies not so much with this categorization itself, but rather how it omits one of the significant aspects of Tracy's nomenclature. For Tracy, working out of a Gadamerian viewpoint, postmodern readings of scriptures are not only characterized by the way they spot systemic distortions in the text, but by a fundamental shift in position in relation to the text itself. While modern historical-critical methods looked "in" and "behind" the text, postmodern methods ask about that meaning "in front" of the text; that is, they pay attention to the interpretive horizon of the reader as an essential component of the elucidation of meaning. So, while Wiseman correctly identifies the work of feminist biblical scholars, such as Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Phyllis Tribble, as postmodern, he focuses on their...

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