Customer Reviews (1)

A tough but still fascinating study
Although this book is written in difficult, technical language, it nevertheless provides the reader with remarkable insights into the nature of the human person and the importance of understanding how communities influence the individual. A worthwhile read for those with patience who are interested in these topics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Setting our Faces toward Jerusalem
Setting our Faces toward Jerusalem
book review of
Edith Stein: Trusting Godýs Purpose

by Sister Fran Gangloff, OSF

During the week of September 11, 2001, the day of the four suicide airplane hijackings and terrorist attacks on the United States, I received in the mail a review copy of - Edith Stein: Trusting Godýs Purpose - in the series of ýa retreat withý published by St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2001.The book is authored by Patricia L. Macks, the 74 page, softcover book (ISBN - 086716 - 387 - 9)

The title of Day One struck me immediately - ýSetting our faces toward Jerusalem.ýFor it seems to me that our whole country and most of the world and each one of us are called by the tragic events to face the suffering with courage and determination, to set out faces steadily like flint as Jesus did toward the Holy City - where suffering and death encompass the seekers of truth and peace.

Edith faced her finest moment, knowing full what it meant, when Nazi soldiers arrested her at the Carmel at Echt in Holland.She said to her sister (blood sister and companion in the Carmel convent) - ýCome Rosa, let us go to die for our people.ý

The seven day retreat moves through the themes of - Jerusalem, Relationship, Empathy, Prayer, Eucharist, Sabbath, and Cross - using Jewish and Christian reference points in Edithýs life and writings as a Jewish woman, intellectual scholar, convert to Catholicism, and Carmelite nun.Edith, AKA Sister Benedicta, victim of the 1940ýs Holocaust and recently canonized saint of the Catholic Church, becomes in this book a wonderful mentor and guide for our own difficult times.

A retreat with Edith deepens respect for the religious rights and beliefs of all persons.When Edith, in her final days, told others - ýwe are traveling eastý - she knew it was toward a death camp.Her words also hold a larger meaning - we are traveling from the seen reality to unseen truth where God may be found - west or east.We set our faces toward Jerusalem.

The book lists eight suggestions for Deepening Your Acquaintance with Edith.Having read and studied them all, I strongly agree and highly recommend these choices.I also highly recommend this Edith Stein retreat book.

Jewish faith and Christian faith were changed forever in the aftermath of the Holocaust.We are still feeling its effects 60 years later.All religious faiths in America - Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, and all the others - are deeply changed forever and challenged by the events of 9 - 11 and its aftermath.This book - used as retreat or personal meditation and prayer - strengthens us to set our faces like flint, like Jesus, toward the pain of these changes and challenges.We set our faces toward Jerusalem. ... Read more

Book Description
"A valuable contribution to the existing literature on Edith Stein. These quality essays are written by a well-established international network of commentators and translators of Stein." —Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, author of Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World

"We badly need this new book on Edith Stein, so that we may ponder how a brilliant Jewish woman in Weimar Germany could become a Carmelite nun, yet retain a vivid Jewish identity and close ties to her family. The essays help us synthesize Stein's troubling legacy as an accomplished philosopher, a Catholic saint, a Jewish daughter, and a stubborn feminist who was trapped in very dark times indeed." —Deborah Hertz, Herman Wouk Chair in Modern Jewish Studies, University of California at San Diego, and author of Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin

"Readers will be fascinated by this multidisciplinary, state-of-the-art, well-contextualized essay collage on the life and writings of Edith Stein. A remarkable woman in every respect, the deeply spiritual Edith Stein crossed many seemingly uncrossable boundaries—national, linguistic, religious, intellectual—in her search for understanding of the human condition. This volume, ably orchestrated by Joyce Berkman, provides English-language readers an excellent introduction to a brilliant, complex, twentieth-century European woman: intellectual, philosopher, feminist, Jew, Christian, and Catholic saint." —Karen Offen, Ph.D., Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Stanford University

Controversy surrounding the beatification and canonization of Edith Stein, a Catholic convert of Jewish heritage who was murdered at Auschwitz, has eclipsed scholarly and public attention to Stein's extraordinary development as a philosopher. Divided into three sections—biographical explorations, Stein's feminist theory and pedagogy, and her creative philosophical contributions—the sixteen essays in this volume represent the first comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis in English of Stein's life and philosophical writings. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

informative, but only just!
This is an interesting book, enough that I wish it were a great one. Generous delving into Hadewijch of Antwerp, her mysticism and its rights, right to the essence of Hadewigian spirituality-- there are some fine passages illumined with Bouyer's considerable gifts, and a superb translation (by Mother Columba Hart) of a Hadewijch spring aubade that leaves you pinned to its two pages for a spell!Bouyer's thought is lean and clean, and admirable for that, but pointlessly smug with a really old-fashioned modernism.Some of his remarks on Elizabeth of the Trinity betray this tendency, and in fact nearly indicate that he hasn't understood her mystic gifts one whit, however well-schooled his observations are.This affectation is less noticable in his remarks on Therese Martin, although he reckons Elizabeth Catez's family "more open to the world and generally more cultured" than the Martins.He loves Edith Stein most of all, of course, and he manages some genuinely interesting insights into a rather overexposed spirituality.The lines he draws between Stein and Husserl are interesting enough, but nothing new, I think because he's apparently miles from grasping the living charism of Carmel.While he devotedly mentions Teresa- "such a scatterbrain, the copies of whose spiritual writings betray superficiality and a pretentious vacuum on every page"- Fr. Bouyer might benefit most from reading again not only the 'Life', but 'The Book of Foundations' as well, to receive, hopefully, what he has not yet learned-- interestingly, the very Thing received freely, learned quickly and lived profoundly by Elizabeth of the Trinity.Predictable scholarship, book has no soul, take a pass. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Review of Metaphysics, published by Philosophy Education Society, Inc. on September 1, 1998. The length of the article is 890 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Edith Stein: Woman, second edition, revised.(Review)
Author: Prudence Allen
Publication: The Review of Metaphysics (Refereed)
Date: September 1, 1998
Publisher: Philosophy Education Society, Inc.
Volume: 52Issue: 205Page: 180(1)

Article Type: Book Review

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Book Description
Murdered at Auschwitz, Edith Stein has become a figure of controversy in the Jewish-Catholic dialogue. Some observers, both Jews and Christians, insist that Stein was sent to the gas chambers because of her Jewish blood and that it would be inappropriate, at least at this time, to declare her a saint of the Holocaust. Others find in her canonization a healing symbol after the atrocities committed against Jews in Christian nations during World War II. In this volume, members of both religious traditions speak to the issue. Contributors: Judith Hershropf Banki, Suzanne Batzdorff, Rachel Feldhay Brenner, Harry James Cargas, Eugene Fisher, Zev Garber, Freda Mary Oben, Daniel Polish, Emanuel Tanay, and Nechama Tec. ... Read more

Book Description
In this moving account of the life, work, and ethics of four Jewish women intellectuals in the world of the Holocaust, Rachel Feldhay Brenner explores the ways in which these women sought to maintain their faith in humanity while aware of intensifying destruction. She argues that through their written responses of autobiographical self-assertion Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, and Etty Hillesum resisted the Nazi terror in ways that defy its horrifying dehumanization.

Personal identity crises engendered the intellectual-spiritual acts of autobiographical self-searching for each of these women. About to become a nun in 1933, Edith Stein embarked on her autobiography as a daughter of a Jewish family. Fleeing France and deportation in 1942, Simone Weil examined her inner struggle with faith and the Church in her "Spiritual Autobiography." Hiding for more than two years in the attic, Anne Frank poignantly confided in her diary about her efforts to become a better person. Having volunteered as a social worker in Westerbork, Etty Hillesum searched her soul for love in the reality of terror. In each case, autobiographical writing becomes an act of defiance that asserts humanity in a dehumanized/dehumanizing world.

By focusing on the four women's accomplishments as intellectuals, writers, and thinkers, Brenner's account liberates them from other posthumous treatments that depict them as symbols of altruism, sanctity, and victimization. Her approach also elucidates the particular predicament of Western Jewish intellectuals who trusted the ideals of the Enlightenment and believed in human fellowship. While suffering the terror of physical annihilation decreed by the Final Solution, these Jews had to contend with their exclusion from the world that they considered theirs. On yet another level, this study of four extraordinary life stories contributes to a deeper understanding of the postwar development of ethical, theological, and feminist thought. In showing concern about a world that had ceased to care for them, Stein, Weil, Frank, and Hillesum demonstrated that the meaning of human existence consisted in the responsibility for the other, in the protection of the suffering God, in the primary value of relatedness through empathy. Arguing that their ethical tenets anticipated the thought of such postwar thinkers as Levinas, Fackenheim, Tillich, Arendt, and Nodding, Brenner proposes that the breakup of the humanist tradition of the Enlightenment in the Holocaust engendered the postwar exploration of humanist potential in self-givenness to the other. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, published by Institute on Religion and Public Life on February 1, 1999. The length of the article is 665 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: STIRRING A STORM.(canonization of Edith Stein)
Author: Richard Neuhaus
Publication: First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life (Refereed)
Date: February 1, 1999
Publisher: Institute on Religion and Public Life
Page: 70(1)

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Book Description
This digital document is an article from Actas de la Academia Luventicus, published by Academia de Ciencias Luventicus on September 1, 2002. The length of the article is 2651 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Edith Stein: resena biografica.
Author: Carina Valeria Mainieri
Publication: Actas de la Academia Luventicus (Refereed)
Date: September 1, 2002
Publisher: Academia de Ciencias Luventicus
Issue: 2Page: NA(7)

Article Type: Biography

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