Word: pelikan
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...Mary would be a teenage-girl-gang leader" today. If this seems a bit all embracing (since the hunters, torturers and murderers no doubt have their own Marys), that too is typical. Mary, Cunneen writes, transcends cultural and religious bounds and speaks to a perennial human need." Or, as Pelikan, over lunch at Yale, puts it, "Everyone has a mother...
...Pelikan lovingly tracks successive Marian personae, such as Second Eve, Paragon of Chastity, Queen of Heaven and Blessed Mother, through to the present. He is fascinated with what the Victorian-era Cardinal and theologian John Henry Newman called the "development of doctrine"--the process, infuriating to traditional Protestants, whereby Catholic Popes and bishops continued promulgating articles of Christian faith long after the last biblical word was written. Mary is a prime example: her scant treatment in the Gospels left a vacuum that the church, often preceded and probably influenced by popular belief, has been gradually filling over the centuries...
...feminism. Those inspired by the upcoming season to reflect on the Heavenly Mother's ups and downs (as well as those who remembered to celebrate the recent Feast of the Immaculate Conception) will lose themselves in two current books: Cunneen's In Search of Mary (Ballantine; $14) and Jaroslav Pelikan's Mary Through the Centuries (Yale University Press; $25). No one reading either of them will be tempted to count Miraculous Medals out permanently...
...story of Marian devotion as we might recognize it begins in A.D. 431 in the Greek city of Ephesus. As Pelikan points out, the scenes featuring Mary in the New Testament "could all be printed out on a few pages," and the early church's emphasis on her seems correspondingly small: the first recorded prayer to Mary dates only to the 3rd century. At Ephesus, however, a council of church fathers confronting the charge that Jesus was a man who attained divinity rather than having always possessed it responded by stressing Jesus' eternal godliness and pointedly awarding Mary the appellation...
...Pelikan has just completed 50 years' teaching history primarily at Yale, and commands the respect of both Catholic and Protestant scholars. As a Lutheran, however, he enjoys a certain emotional distance from his material. Cunneen, a retired English professor and a religious journalist, delves into Marian history with less authority but with the once-burned affection of a woman who, rummaging recently through a drawer, was moved to discover her old rosary. Cunneen qualifies as a Catholic feminist: she is painfully aware of the line that runs between Saint Athanasius' 4th century contention that Mary "remained continually at home, living...