Table of Contents

Acknowledgments   

The Why and How of This Book   

  The Book of Genesis   

The human family stumbles, falls, and struggles on

  The Book of Job   

One good man refuses to be broken by tragedy and pain

  R o b e r t A l t e r , The David Story: A Translation with  Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel   

David, the sinful forerunner of the Messiah

  The Gospel of Luke   

The spokesman for women and the poor

  The Gospel of John   

The discovery that God is Love

  S t . A u g u s t i n e , The Confessions   

From a sinful youth the church’s greatest teacher emerges

  D a n t e A l i g h i e r i ,  Inferno   

On the bridge between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

  M i c h a e l W a l s h , Butler’s Lives of the Saints   

The high cost of special friendship with God

  T h o m a s à K e m p i s , The Imitation of Christ   

Hard sayings—such as Die to yourself—that still hold

  V e n . J o h n H e n r y N e w m a n , The Idea of a University   

The Magna Charta of Catholic intellectual life

  H e n r y D a v i d T h o r e a u ,  Walden   

The greatest American book by its alone-most man

  A b r a h a m L i n c o l n ,  “The Second Inaugural Address”   

The president as secular saint

  F y o d o r D o s t o y e v s k y ,  The Brothers Karamazov   

Harsh and dreadful love

  St. T h é r è s e o f L i s i e u x , The Story of a Soul   

A short, obscure life reaches around the world

  H e n r y A d a m s , Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres   

All of Christian history symbolized in one cathedral

  G . K . C h e s t e r t o n ,  Orthodoxy   

This stout, happy man spearheads a Catholic revival

  J a m e s J o y c e ,  Dubliners   

A young man’s stories steeped in the faith he rejected

   S i g r i d U n d s e t ,  Kristin Lavransdatter   

She was not always good, but she was strong

  F r a n ç o i s M a u r i a c , Thérèse   

She tried to poison her husband

   W i l l a C a t h e r , Death Comes for the Archbishop   

Based on a true story of the southwestern frontier

  M y l e s C o n n o l l y ,  Mr. Blue   

He gave away a fortune—he must have been insane

  A l b e r t S c h w e i t z e r , Out of My Life and Thought:  An Autobiography   

The “greatest man in the world” in the jungles of Gabon

  G e o r g e s B e r n a n o s , The Diary of a Country Priest   

Very alone, very sick, and not very successful

  G r a h a m G r e e n e , The Power and the Glory   

The Mexican army is after him and he drinks more than he should

  R e b e c c a W e s t , Black Lamb and Grey Falcon:  A Journey through Yugoslavia   

Into the heart and history of a country on the edge of war

  E v e l y n W a u g h , Brideshead Revisited   

England’s “best” Catholic family is falling apart

  A l a n P a t o n , Cry, the Beloved Country   

A black South African minister’s son on trial for murder

  T h o m a s M e r t o n ,  The Seven Storey Mountain   

A Trappist monk as political activist

  D i e t r i c h B o n h o e f f e r , Letters and Papers from Prison   

Not all churchmen were silent in the face of Hitler

  D o r o t h y D a y , The Long Loneliness  

Modern America’s anarchist saint

  E d w a r d S t e i c h e n , The Family of Man   

The modern photographer who showed us the human family

  P i e r r e Te i l h a r d d e C h a r d i n , S . J . ,  The Divine Milieu   

He Christianized the theory of evolution

  W a l t e r M . M i l l e r J r . , A Canticle for Leibowitz   

The science-fiction classic on how we destroy the world and try again

  J . F. P o w e r s , Morte D’Urban   

Father raises money very well, but he is vulnerable

  M i c h a e l H a r r i n g t o n , The Other America   

The Democratic Socialist inspired by Dorothy Day

  C . S . L e w i s , The Four Loves   

They are Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity

  C h r i s t o p h e r D a w s o n , The Historic Reality of Christian Culture: A Way to the Renewal of Human Life   

A historian who saw Christianity as the basis of Western culture

  E d w i n O ’ C o n n o r , The Edge of Sadness   

The author of The Last Hurrah’s best book, about a recovering priest

  M a r t i n L u t h e r K i n g J r . ,  “Letter from Birmingham Jail”   

The manifesto of the civil rights movement

  F l a n n e r y O ’ C o n n o r , Everything That Rises Must  Converge, “Revelation”   

Gothic stories in which grace emanates from the strangest sources

  A l e x H a l e y , The Autobiography of Malcolm X   

The white public saw him as an angry black man, but he was much more

  S h u s a k u E n d o , Silence   

Persecution and betrayal in seventeenth-century Japan

  G u s t a v o G u t i é r r e z , A Theology of Liberation:  History, Politics, and Salvation   

The Latin American church tries to side with the poor

  J o n a t h a n S c h e l l ,  The Fate of the Earth   

Nuclear weapons can undo the work of Genesis

  K a r l R a h n e r , S . J . , The Love of Jesus and the Love  of Neighbor

The twentieth century’s greatest theologian sums up his rule of life

  E l i s a b e t h S c h ü s s l e r F i o r e n z a , In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins   

Feminist theologians begin to be heard

  B r i a n M o o r e , Black Robe   

Like Isaac Jogues and Jean de Brébeuf, a “saint among savages”

  H e l e n P r e j e a n , Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account  of the Death Penalty in the United States   

A Louisiana nun brings death row into the American consciousness

  P e t e r A c k r o y d , The Life of Thomas More   

Is this the proper patron saint for today’s politicians?

  R o b e r t E l l s b e r g , All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints,  Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time   

Mary, John, and Jogues, sure—but Mozart, van Gogh, and Camus?

Conclusion   

Selected Sources   

TheBookofGenesis

. . .

In t h e b e g i n n i n g , God created the heaven and the earth.” John, as if in response, both echoes and continues that line as he opens his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” In the eighteenth century, the words return in another context: “all men are created equal [and] en-dowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Thus, the “image of God” in man will become the basis of Western morality, and in time, the basis for the case against slavery and for all human rights.

On Christmas Eve of 1968, as Apollo 8 circled the moon and pointed its TV camera back toward Earth, with all three networks and a hundred million households tuned in, astronaut William Anders read aloud, “In the beginning. . . .”

Of all the books of the Bible—partly because it is the first and partly because it is so poetic and so involved with issues of family, violence, love, and betrayal—Genesis has been the most challenged to hold up under centuries of interpretation, use, and abuse. As a result, in the popular mind much of its original message has been lost.

In 1999, the Kansas Board of Education voted to discourage the teaching of evolution in its schools, igniting a controversy that most people, especially in the major cities, thought had been settled years ago, and framing the discussion as if there really were a conflict between the scientific theory of evolution and the Bible’s mythic account of how life began. This debate is

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sometimes cast as if only secularists can be true scientists and as if believers shut down their brains and accept on faith what their reason tells them cannot be so. And this is in spite of the recent meeting between Pope John Paul II and spiritually minded scien-tists, at which the pope accepted evolution as a fact.

Reporters ask presidential candidates whether they believe in evolution or the biblical account, and the candidates back off from an intelligent response. Feminists blame Genesis for por-traying the first woman as the serpent’s accomplice. Capitalists and environmentalists argue over whether God’s giving man “dominion” over Eden justifies strip mining or requires that we preserve the garden-earth for future generations.

The purpose of Genesis is not to teach us facts, but to use its stories to illustrate our relationships with God and one another. To appreciate the lessons of Genesis, it helps to understand that the book, once attributed to Moses, has at least three authors, each representing a different oral tradition, and each of these traditions is present throughout the book with its own emphasis or theology.

The Yahwist source (which refers to God by the name “Yahweh”) is the oldest, dating from the tenth century b.c. It portrays God as personal, walking in the Garden, involved in human affairs. This author wrote the story of Adam and Eve and their sin. The Priestly source stresses God’s transcendence and the observance of rules, as we see in the creation of the world and in God’s rest-ing on the Sabbath. The Elohist author (who calls God “Elohim”) uses stories of angels and dreams to show God communicating indirectly with people rather than dealing with them face to face. A fourth, called the Deuteronomic tradition, comes into play in the other four books of the Pentateuch and emphasizes the law.

The book’s structure consists of Israel’s primeval history, including two creation accounts and the story of the Flood, fol-lowed by the three family sagas of Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph. Each demonstrates in its own way the consequences of the Fall described in the first chapters, as well as God’s continual renewal of his covenant in spite of humankind’s folly and sin.

Scholars comment on various themes that knit the tales together. One focuses on the verb “to beget,” as the patriarchal

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stories are all about men whose wives are barren until God in-tervenes and gives them the son they need to carry on the line. Human history is seen as a fulfillment of God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply,” and God might even be imagined as “beget-ting” the world in the beginning.

Throughout the stories, we encounter a complex collection of literary forms. There are myths, such as that of the Flood, that borrow and transform stories from pagan neighbors. There is poetry, and there is narrative prose often suddenly flowing into poetry, as we see in “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gn 1:27).

There are long genealogies. Some stories are as long as 230 lines and some, such as the Tower of Babel, as short as 25. There are puzzling tales of deceit, brutality, and incest that the narrator seems to condone and stories in which every rational, democratic bone in us insists that God’s behavior has been irrational, inhu-man, or unfair.

So here are three things to keep in mind:

1. In the tenth century b.c. the Hebrews’ concept of God is beginning to evolve. The story of Abraham is revolutionary in that he leaves Mesopotamia largely because he begins to perceive God as One. For a long while, that One will have the characteristics of a tribal warlord. Only much later will Jesus reveal him as Father and John’s Gospel name him Love.

2. The authors do not attempt to portray necessarily good persons, but people who are as weak, mean, and deceitful as ourselves and other people we know. Somehow, through God’s intervention, they nonetheless accomplish God’s purposes.

3. We should not read these stories through the lens of the Enlightenment or of twentieth-century progress, but as stories told by Middle Eastern nomads for centuries before they were written down. These stories answered questions for them, such as How did we get here? Why do we suffer? What went wrong? Is there any hope?

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The first sin, for example, does not look like a sin to us. Catholic François Mauriac and unbeliever André Gide, both French nov-elists, were friends in spite of their deep religious differences, and when Gide would visit, they would read aloud to one another, Mauriac reading the creation and Fall from Genesis. They had a problem with the two trees in the Garden and with God’s com-mand. Did this mean that God was frightened by man’s free will or threatened by the discovery of conscience?

To “eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” as Adam and Eve were forbidden to do, means to know how to make adult decisions for oneself, to achieve autonomy. Today we call that “maturity” and expect every young person to achieve it. The point for the Yahwist writer, however, was that God had drawn a line and to cross it was an act of rebellion. Meanwhile, the point retains its validity for us in a larger sense: we see the human consequences of our collective decision in politics and in social behavior to deny any authority higher than our own.

A better story for our purposes, I think, is Cain’s murder of Abel, with his cynical denial that we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. This first murder flows inevitably from that “first bite of the apple” and leads inexorably to the murder on Calvary, where the forces of corrupt politics and corrupt religion join to destroy Jesus. The powers that be cannot stand the sight of infinite good-ness as it is embodied in this bold man.

Some theologians prefer to consider the Crucifixion rather than the Fall in Eden as the “original sin.” When we do so, we are less likely to pinpoint the offense in some mythical time and place for which we feel no responsibility. For Pilate and the Sanhedrin, the Crucifixion was just another act of violence in a world indifferent to crime and killing. We condone their act when, in our personal lives and national policies, we treat life as cheap.

The greatest story in Genesis, however, and perhaps the great-est in the Old Testament, is one that frames the book and answers Cain’s question. It is the story of Joseph, son of Jacob, who was sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers. Joseph rises in power in the Pharaoh’s court by interpreting the Pharaoh’s dreams and

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confronts his brothers thirteen years later when famine strikes Palestine and they come to Egypt for grain.

Those who feel they have been betrayed by those closest to them and are tormented by this memory, tempted to lick the wound and get even, must read the story of Joseph slowly. Joseph is able to interpret his abandonment by his family as God’s provi-dence, sending him to Egypt where he could foresee the famine and store the grain that would feed the world. “I am your brother Joseph” can be seen not just as the turning point of a beautiful story, or as a sublime moment of pre-Christian forgiveness, but as a perfect ending to Genesis and a summary of the social-moral law.

Meanwhile, back around the moon, Anders, having read four lines, passed the text to James Lovell. He read his part and passed it to Frank Borman, who concluded, “. . . and God saw that it was good.”

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One Reader’s Journey

through the Christian Classics

. , . .

ForeWord magazine

Book of theYear

⁄⁄ ...

A Christian reading of the classics

“These books are spiritual classics in that . . . they have worked their magic on

centuries and generations of readers.”

Book of theYear

distinguished author and teacher Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., takes readers on a journey through his library and shows how fulfilling it can be to approach literature with a Christian worldview. In this award-winning book, Schroth reveals the timeless relevance and vibrant spirit of fifty classic works by giving a brief overview of each and drawing connections to moral and ethical issues of the twenty-first century.

From the book of Genesis and dante’s Inferno to Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking, the essays in this collection will encourage readers to look at great works of literature in new ways. With this book—which includes works that are traditionally considered classics as well as some surprises—Schroth challenges readers to discover, or rediscover, these titles and explore the provocative issues they present.

“Schroth’s reflections suggest how we may think more deeply and act more courageously by engagement with the written word.”

, America magazine

“This volume offers us the wisdom of a lifelong reader of good books. May his enthusiasm, learning worn lightly, and critically perceptive eye

lead many to consider the works he lovingly presents to us.”

.,author, Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision

One R

eader’s Journey through the C

hristian Classics

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St. AugustineDante Alighieri

Thomas à KempisJohn Henry NewmanHenry David Thoreau

Abraham LincolnFyodor Dostoyevsky

Thérèse of LisieuxHenry Adams

G. K. ChestertonJames Joyce

Sigrid UndsetFrançois Mauriac

Willa CatherMyles Connolly

Albert SchweitzerGeorges Bernanos

Graham GreeneRebecca West

Evelyn WaughAlan Paton

Thomas MertonDietrich Bonhoeffer

Dorothy DayEdward Steichen

Teilhard de ChardinJ. F. Powers

Michael HarringtonC. S. Lewis

Christopher DawsonEdwin O’Connor

Martin Luther King Jr.Flannery O’Connor

Alex HaleyShusaku Endo

Gustavo GutiérrezJonathan Schell

Karl RahnerElisabeth Fiorenza

Brian MooreHelen Prejean

Peter AckroydRobert Ellsberg

ForeWord magazine’s

bronze medal