Saving the Environment, Theologically
At Home in the Cosmos.
David Toolan.
Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2001.
256 pp. $25.00 (Hardcover).

It is necessary to distinguish this book from another with a very similar title, Stuart Kauffman's 1995 At Home in the Universe. Both books deal with scientific ideas explained for nonscientific readers, but beyond that, the books and the authors are quite different. Stuart Kauffman is a mathematical biologist, who, as part of the Santa Fe Institute, is a noted expert on complexity. His book is about how complexity relates to evolution, and only at the end does any religious thought appear. Although David Toolan, S.J., associate editor of America magazine, mentions the concept of complexity, his book is really about environmentalism. As one might expect, it is suffused with a deeply religious attitude.

Father Toolan takes care to build a case for being green. He defends the environmental movement with a thoroughgoing biblical theology of creation, repeating the arguments that we humans are responsible for the world that God has given us, and that too often we have done a terrible job. Toolan explains why the Judeo-Christian tradition—rightly interpreted—calls on all of us to nurture the environment.

As frequently happens in attempts to mold opinion, there is a basic dualism in the presentation. Toolan has heroes and villains whom he quotes for his purposes. His heroes include fellow Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Barry Commoner, Thomas Berry, Aldo Leopold, Pope John Paul II, and the Hebrew prophets. The villains are not so readily identified as individuals; they are characterized as economists, bankers, and devotees of materialism. Toolan prefers dynamism to stasis, and here I agree with him completely. He refers with approval to "process cosmology," the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, filtered through the recent work of John Haught. He correctly identifies the logical consequence of such ideas as panentheism: God is present in nature, but God is much more than nature.

Toolan raises the very important questions of purpose and values. Is there any purpose to the universe? He believes that the answer is yes. He castigates scientists such as Jacques Monod, Steven Weinberg, and Richard Dawkins for maintaining that there is no purpose to the universe. It should be noted that Weinberg does not claim that the universe is pointless, but rather that we cannot learn what the point is by studying science only.

If the universe is created by God with a purpose—even if we cannot discern what that purpose might be—it follows that we must not desecrate the environment. We must be stewards of God's creation and not engage in pollution or in profligate use of such resources as clean water and energy. Too often we hear this message from someone who is afraid to say that an important dimension of such issues is population control. I admire Toolan's courage on this issue. I only wish he could make more specific suggestions about how this could be accomplished.

Views of the universe have changed with time. The Middle Ages saw a sacramental universe, not only in the systematic theology of Thomas Aquinas, but also in the mystical visions of Francis of Assisi. The Enlightenment featured a materialistic universe, one definitely not to the author's taste: Toolan has no liking for the mechanistic and deterministic thought of Newton, Laplace, and their followers. Our own day looks to a semiotic universe, based on information. As Catholic theologian Karl Schmitz-Moormann put it, creation is informed: creatio informata. Such a universe is dynamic, interconnected, self-organizing, indeterminate, and evolutionary. These properties are summarized in the term complexity. A semiotic universe is also one that has meaning and purpose.

This book is pleasant to read. The author takes us on discursive tours of interesting concepts, places, and people, but we always come back to the main subject: the environment is worth protecting.

Children, Christ, and Theology
The Child in Christian Thought.
Marcia J. Bunge, editor.
Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001. 504 pp. $24.00 (Softcover).

Despite the fact that most, if not all, professors of theology were once children, there seems to be little interest in teaching the theology of childhood in seminaries and schools of theology, based on the number of such courses. True, children are prominent subjects in most religious education courses and in a few pastoral care classes. However, in these two areas we teach adults about children using only adult perspectives on children, never using children's perspectives about themselves, and never asking what children contribute to adults. This is astonishing in a faith tradition named after one who indicated that adults must be like children to enter the kingdom of God. This comment of Christ's, like his other hard sayings—such as "turn the other cheek"—is often dismissed with, "He didn't really mean that."

The Child in Christian Thought takes children and childhood very seriously by examining what noted theologians from the earliest time to the present have thought about children. Marcia Bunge has assembled an impressive group of scholars, each assigned a chapter on a particular theologian. The scholars write extraordinarily well, bringing the teachings of a given theologian to life. The book includes oft-cited theologians—such as Chrysostom, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Barth, Rahner—as well as less studied ones—Menno Simmons, A. H. Francke, Jonathan Edwards, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Horace Bushnell, and Mary Church Terrell. Ideas about children from feminist and African-American viewpoints are also explored.

Each author presents a theologian's ideas about children by first providing insight into that theologian's own childhood or parenthood, if such information is available. "Heady" theologians become more appealingly human when one reads about their childhood indiscretions or relationships with their parents, their deep feelings about their own children, or their profound sorrow when one of their children has died. Such information, especially when it is in the theologians' own words, provides valuable insight into the genesis of their ideas about children and childhood. While some theologians are obviously embarrassed about the immaturity of young children, others seem to be humbled by children's innate inability to do genuine evil, despite their immaturity.

Each chapter addresses its theologian's ideas on the nature of children as well as parental, societal, and ecclesial responsibilities to children. The relationship of such ideas to the theologian's larger theological concerns is also explored, including the influence of contemporaneous social, cultural, and political beliefs. Finally, the relevance of each theologian's ideas for our present-day views of children and our parental, societal, and ecclesial obligations to them is highlighted.

The Child in Christian Thought would be an outstanding textbook in a systematic theology. But the book is not only for those who do, or will, minister to children in a religious or spiritual sense. Because of its comprehensive scope and its accessibility, it has appeal to anyone who cares for and about children and who wonders how various denominations developed their ideas about childhood or child raising. Because the authors have succeeded in connecting the theologians' ideas to present-day societal problems or concerns, the book would also be useful to those who shape policy—local or national—on children and families.

The chapters remind us, sometimes painfully, that some of the most learned among us, throughout the ages, have been unable to embrace fully Jesus' words on the value of children as models to all who seek to enter God's reign. How tragic! For we are all, in the end, children of God, not adults of God.

The chapter on Karl Rahner's theology of childhood concludes with words meant to touch us all. Rahner's theological anthropology reminds us not only that our obligation is to nurture the children who are given to us, but that each one of us, again and again, must become that child we were in the beginning. It invites those of us who are adults to allow our childhood trust, openness, expectation, and willingness to be dependent on others to be released, "Not as a fond or bitter memory, but as a facet of what we hope to become."