Religious Studies Review

VOLUME 36

THAT THEY MAY BE ONE: CATHOLIC SOCIAL

TEACHING ON RACISM, TRIBALISM, AND XENO
PHOBIA. By Dawn M. Nothwehr. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis,
2008. Pp. viii + 250. Paper, $ 35.00.
Catholic social teaching has a mixed history on racism.
Its theological sources include the early Patristic theologians
and bishops, popes who frequently differed from their pre
decessors, and some prophetic theologians who shaped the
moral imaginations of believers in search of a more truthful
ethic. Franciscan Sister Nothwehr taps into those varied
magisterial texts and recent scholarship on racism as she
elucidates the norm of mutuality in an endeavor to respond
to xenophobic attacks on Muslims, Jews, Hispanics, Native
Americans, and African Americans. Inspired by the witness
of Francis of Assisi against what is now called "Islamophobia," she integrates a Franciscan ethos into CST's founda
tional ethic of justice. Globalization sharpens the cries for
mutuality in relationships. If the popes sometimes betrayed
cultural bias when they excused slavery, exploitation, and
the divide-and-conquer practices of colonial powers, there
were some who offered a corrective vision. Nothwehr care
fully synthesizes their historical journey as she charts the
writings of popes and theologians on slavery and conquest.
Her excellent summaries of church texts from various con
tinents are accompanied by valuable focus questions and a
contextual analysis of documents. She spares no religious
community that marginalizes its indigenous population and
immigrants. Nothwehr's powerful analysis and ability to
inspire the reader makes this a fine resource for university
and seminary students.
Rosemarie E. Gorman
Fairfield University

THE PRINCIPLE OF EXCELLENCE: A FRAME

WORK FOR SOCIAL ETHICS. By Nimi Wariboko.
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. Pp. xi + 237. Hard
cover, $65.00.
Wariboko, the Katherine . Stuart Professor of Christian
Ethics at Andover Newton Theological School, was trained in
social ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary, studied eco
nomics at the University of Port Harcourt (Nigeria), and was
an entrepreneur on Wall Street. This interdisciplinary book
thus defies the usual categories. Rather than treating excel
lence as a virtue ( la Maclntyre), readers will find herein a
philosophy of excellence that brings two traditions-one
centered in ontology and the other in philosophical
anthropology-into dialogue with each other. While the
former understands excellence as a "clearing" that allows for
the emergence or retrieval of possibilities, the latter
sees excellence as the ongoing human quest for selftransformation, self-fulfillment, and self-transcendence.
Viewed in this holistic way, excellence functions not only as
a prophetic principle that interrogates, disrupts, and transgresses the boundaries, structures, and constraints of the
present, but also as a liberatory principle that realizes
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human hopes-potentialities and possibilities-for "a more

flourishing, inclusive, and creatively reconciled society." As
a dynamic reality, excellence requires improvisation to
engage with continuously emerging situations, so that ethics
in general and social ethics in particular is about the creative
pursuit of justice, love, and the good community rather than
the mere application of predetermined codes of conduct. The
final chapter applies the theory of excellence to the field of
economics, extending Nobel Prize-winner A. Sen's notion of
development as the loosing of capabilities that enable people
to freely pursue their own goals. As "there is no end to
excellence," this profound book deserves repeated
rereading.
Amos Yong
Regent University School of Divinity

Arts, Literature, Culture, and

Religion
JESUS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE,
ART, AND MOVIES. Edited by Paul C. Burns. New York:
Continuum, 2007. Pp. + 241. Paper, $29.95.
Jesus of Nazareth makes more than a few cameo appear
ances in the films, novels, paintings, poems, and short
stories of the last century or so. Burns's volume, a compre
hensive and absorbing anthology of interdisciplinary essays
taken from a 2004 regional SBL, recognizes this trend and
investigates how the figure of Jesus and the symbol of Christ
has been appropriated by modern as well as postmodern
artists. Here, ten clear chapters explore this quest for the
artistic Jesus. Featured themes range widely-modern uses of
biblical exegesis, antithetical treatments of Marxism,
Romantic as well as Freudian applications of sexual love,
Jewish and Muslim treatments of the crucified Christ, and
what The Da Vinci Code and The Passion of the Christ reveal
about current American religion. Featured artists include A.
M. al-Aqqad, D. Brown, S. Bulgakov, M. Chagall, M. Gibson,
D. H. Lawrence, N. Kazantzakis, N. Mailer, N. Ricci, C. Potok,
J. Saramago, and M. Scorsese. I have used this text in my
undergraduate theology and culture classes, where students
appreciate its clarity, and, given the ongoing artistic depic
tions of Jesus, especially those from the Global South (see
films by A. Bhimsingh, M. Dornford-May, J. C. Lammare, E.
Subiela, and N. Talebzadeh), this study contributes to an
enlightening, continuing dialogue.
Darren J. N. Middleton
Texas Christian University
HALOS AND AVATARS: PLAYING VIDEO GAMES
WITH GOD. Edited by Craig Detweiler. Louisville, KY:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. Pp. vii + 248. Paper,
$19.95.
Detweiler's edited volume breaks new ground in the
areas of religion and popular culture, as well as religion and

Religious Studies Review

VOLUME 3

media studies, by bringing theology to video games. The

collected essays are broadly aimed at scholars, gamers,
parents, and players alike. The result is an approachable and
timely volume that combines practical topics such as the
evolution of the gaming console and the myth of the seden
tary gamer with a theoretical rigor that eschews hackneyed
arguments over whether video games are good or evil. The
book is divided into three sections. The first explores belief,
discipleship, and sacred space in the tension between the
story a game tells and the techniques a player uses to navi
gate, even defeat, that story. The second section deals with
the game playing experience itself and dilemmas such as
whether Christians should kill in video games, and whether
play and competition in gaming is mutually exclusive. The
third section presents the complexities of gaming and online
identities by discussing cybersociality and a virtual mar
riage in Second Life. The book is limited by an almost exclu
sive focus on Christian themes and theology. (There is one
chapter on "Islamogaming.") Expanding the range of theo
logical voices and religious topics beyond Christianity would
make this an even more valuable resource by introducing a
much needed cross-cultural element to current discussions
of the global phenomenon of gaming. Despite this, the col
lected essays are an important starting point for theological
engagements with new media.
/. Sage Elwell
Texas Christian University
THEOLOGY AND THE VICTORIAN NOVEL. By J.
Russell Perkin. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's Uni
versity Press, 2009. Pp. ix + 273. Cloth, $85.00.
A professor of English at Saint Mary's University, J.
Russell Perkin offers an exemplary contribution to
nineteenth-century religion and literature studies. After dis
cussing the often uneasy alliance between fiction and doc
trine, he explores how Tractarianism and liberal theology
shaped the Victorian novel, and he emerges from each of his
book's solid seven chapters with close and persuasive read
ings of works by W. M. Thackeray, C. Bront, C. M. Yonge, A.
Trollope, G. Eliot, T. Hardy, M A. Ward, and W. Pater. Perkin
upholds religion's prominent role in the lives of the novelists
he considers. Yet he gives nuance to this customary observation by showing how and why the Victorian period may
best be seen as an age of faith diversified by moments of
doubt and an age of doubt diversified by moments of faith.
While Perkin investigates and extols the otherness of Victorian culture, he concludes his study by arguing for the
enduring or contemporary spiritual relevance of his selected
Victorian novels, and he emphasizes Pater's literary art as a
fecund resource for thinking theologically today. Erudite and
engaging, this book would work well in upper-division
undergraduate and graduate level courses in religion, theology, and literary studies.
Darren J. N. Middleton
Texas Christian University
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2010

ARISTOPHANES AND THE CARNIVAL OF

GENRES. By Charles Platter. Baltimore, MD: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. x+ 257. Cloth,
$55.00.
The book's title is indicative of the Bakhtinian influence
on this contemporary study of Aristophanes. Bakhtin's concepts of the dialogic imagination and carnival consciousness
are applied to the corpus of Aristophanes's works. The invocation of Bakhtinian insights for the study of comedy is not
an innovation in itself, but what makes Platter's study interesting is the way it scrutinizes the intertextuality of Aristophanes. Aristophanian comedy is interpreted as a carnival
of genres, a strategy that the dramatist indulged in deliberately to create the effect of ambivalence. Platter points out
that it is not necessarily against the tragic tradition that the
comedy pitted itself, but the epic-mythic tradition. Aristophanes was irreverent in approach and appropriated heterogeneous sources to achieve his ends. Platter analyzes
these sources and their final impact of the comedies with the
help of specific texts. The result is an open-ended reading of
Aristophanes somewhat along the lines of poststructuralist
approaches, which is rewarding in itself. The privileging of
ambivalence of course runs the risk of depoliticizing/
decontextualizing Aristophanes, which can sometimes be
detrimental to a comprehensive study of an author. But
Platter is aware of these hidden snares and takes care to
pre-empt such potential failings. This approach makes this
book a valuable addition to Aristophanian research in particular, and the study of comedy as a whole.
Mini Chandran
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India

THE MARROW OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE: ESSAYS

ON FOLKLORE. By William A. Wilson. Edited by Jill Terry
Rudy. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006. Pp. 321.
Paper, $24.95.
Folklore is an area that has largely been neglected by
academic departments in general, even as they acknowledge
its importance in their studies. It is this lacuna that Wilson's
book attempts to redress. The essays reflect the scholarship
in folklore that Wilson enjoyed as an academic, but it is not
just scholarship that makes this collection valuable. Each of
the essays is prefaced with a note written by a person who
once interacted with Wilson closely in that particular area,
making it come alive with a personal touch. Wilson is unpretentious and lucid in his writing. He starts from the basics,
beginning by dispelling common misconceptions about folklore, the chief one being that folklore is what we had in the
past and the people we refer to as "folk" are those unlettered
few on the margins of society. He defines folklore as the
outcome of a coping strategy that we continue to make use of
in our everyday lives-we only have to look into ourselves
and discover a treasure trove of folklore. Wilson's focus is on
the Mormon community; the book would have benefited if it
had encompassed a wider range and looked at non-Western

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