Interesting Book Review

Thanks, George, for the heads-up on Spengler's review of Fergus Kerr, OP's book Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians. Definitely the most interesting book review I've read in a long time - and now I want to read the book.

The review intrigued me for a number of reasons. First, Spengler begins with a rather bold premise:

To win a gunfight, first you have to bring a gun, and to win a religious war, you had better know something about religion. America's "war on terror" proceeds from a political philosophy that treats radical Islam as if it were a political movement - "Islamo-fascism" - rather than a truly religious response to the West. If we are in a fourth world war, as Norman Podhoretz proclaims, it is a religious war. The West is not fighting individual criminals, as the left insists; it is not fighting a Soviet-style state, as the Iraqi disaster makes clear; nor is it fighting a political movement. It is fighting a religion, specifically a religion that arose in enraged reaction to the West.

None of the political leaders of the West, and few of the West's opinion leaders, comprehend this. We are left with the anomaly that the only effective leader of the West is a man wholly averse to war, a pope who took his name from the Benedict who interceded for peace during World War I. Benedict XVI, alone among the leaders of the Christian world, challenges Islam as a religion, as he did in his September 2006 Regensburg address. Who is Joseph Ratzinger, this decisive figure of our times, and what led the Catholic Church to elect him? Fr Kerr has opened the coulisses of Catholic debate such that outsiders can understand the changes in Church thinking that made possible Benedict's papacy. Because Benedict is the leader not only of the Catholics but - by default - of the West, all concerned with the West's future should read his book.

Second, I was able to dig up the table of contents (not found on Amazon.com) and found that I was looking at a list of most of the 20th century Catholic theologians that I'd like to know more about. I have read bits by some of them, know bits about most of them, and own books by a few of them (lying unread in boxes at home), but a real introduction to them would help.

These are the men who have shaped contemporary Catholic theology - not without controversy (a lot of controversy), and not without some tangling with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Schillebeeckx and Küng).

Preface.
1. Before Vatican II.
2. M.-D. Chenu.
3. Yves Congar.
4. Edward Schillebeeckx.
5. Henri de Lubac.
6. Karl Rahner.
7. Bernard Lonergan.
8. Hans Urs von Balthasar.
9. Hans Küng.
10. Karol Wojtyla.
11. Joseph Ratzinger.
12. After Vatican II.
Appendix: The Anti-Modernist Oath.
Index.

Third, I'm not at all sure I'll agree with Kerr's take on things - particularly his presentation of Thomism, which he seems to assert (according to Spengler's review) that Gilson, Chenu, and de Lubac, among others, rescued from the skeletal clutches of the 16th-century Jesuit Suarez.

My husband, I think, would differ.

Nevertheless, I would like to see how the much-misappropriated Aquinas is said to fit into this scheme - particularly when I have Kevin around to read excerpts to. After we finally get our hands on the book, I hope we'll post our own review.