Religious Studies Review · VOLUME 36 · NUMBER 4 · DECEMBER 2010

THAT THEY MAY BE ONE: CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING ON RACISM, TRIBALISM, AND XENO­PHOBIA. 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 pre­decessors, 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 "Islamopho-bia," she integrates a Franciscan ethos into CST's founda­tional 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 care­fully 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 con­tinents 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 FRAME­WORK FOR SOCIAL ETHICS. By Nimi Wariboko. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. Pp. xi + 237. Hard­cover, $65.00.

Wariboko, the Katherine Β. Stuart Professor of Christian Ethics at Andover Newton Theological School, was trained in social ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary, studied eco­nomics 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 excel­lence as a virtue (à 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 self-transformation, 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

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. ν + 241. Paper, $29.95.

Jesus of Nazareth makes more than a few cameo appear­ances in the films, novels, paintings, poems, and short stories of the last century or so. Burns's volume, a compre­hensive 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 depic­tions 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

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Religious Studies Review · VOLUME 3ό · NUMBER 4 · DECEMBER 2010

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 seden­tary 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 navi­gate, 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 mar­riage in Second Life. The book is limited by an almost exclu­sive focus on Christian themes and theology. (There is one chapter on "Islamogaming.") Expanding the range of theo­logical 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 col­lected 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 Uni­versity 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 dis­cussing the often uneasy alliance between fiction and doc­trine, 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 read­ings of works by W. M. Thackeray, C. Brontë, 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

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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