Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Sharing God’s Company: A Theology of the Communion of Saints by David Matzko McCarthyMark RyanSharing God’s Company: A Theology of the Communion of Saints By David Matzko McCarthy GRAND RAPIDS: WILLIAM B. EERDMANS, 2012. 182 PP. $28.00What is the meaning of “communion” as it occurs in Christian references to the “Communion of Saints”? It clearly implies a particular social bond, but of what sort? David Matzko McCarthy observes that recent attempts to account [End Page 192] for the saints and Christians’ relations with them tend to thin out the meaning of communion. Modern approaches turn saints into exemplars intended to inspire us as we live within egalitarian, leveled societies, whereas postmodern approaches turn the lives of the saints into texts, subject to interpretive play. In both approaches the possibility of real relationship is left behind as the saints become subservient to our modern sensibilities. What McCarthy seeks to revive is substantial, real relationships with saints that can draw us out of ourselves.In chapters 1 and 2 McCarthy uses the family to indicate the strong bonds signified by the Communion of Saints (COS)—bonds that respond to our “social desire.” The COS extends such kinship across time and space, without banishing ordinary time and particular places. Yet the kind of social tie embodied in the COS has been rendered a problem by our modern biases with regard to knowledge, representation, and social life—in short, our sense of reality. If we are to enrich our participation in the COS, McCarthy implies, we must work the metaphysical ground to make it a little more hospitable to the lives of the saints. The remaining chapters consider how the reality embodied in the COS challenges modern sensibilities with regard to what is real. They do so by allowing literary and visual representations of the saints—in hagiography, scripture, statues, and painting—to interrogate modern forms of representation and the assumptions about reality and time that underlie these forms.McCarthy uses Beverly Donofrio’s Looking for Mary to exemplify the trajectory of his book. Donofrio weaves together her own life and her pilgrimage to Medjugorge with the story of Mary from the Annunciation to the present day. Of particular importance, she narrates a transformation whereby her personal stories are engrafted into the life of Mary, rather than the other way around. In this, her story illustrates how Mary becomes the key agent in de-centering the author’s life as an autonomous agent, and resituating it in the COS with Mary as her patron and route. It shows the difference between an approach to the saints that domesticates them for use in our world and one where we surrender and become part of theirs.McCarthy’s previous work is notable for its concern with family and neighborhood as the practical context, or “home,” for the Christian life. In this book, “the question of home goes deeper. Does our life together here and now have any connection to the course of things and to life as a whole?” (8) In his introduction to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Moral Theology, which he edits, he mapped out the terrain of moral theology between “hyper-enchantment,” which seeks a magic bullet for modern ills, and impersonal mechanism, which posits a “nature” abstracted from human meanings. In this book, he begins to present a fuller vision of this terrain in the form of a kinship that stretches across time and place. As he writes, “The saints and their lives embody an [End Page 193] incarnational reality; they populate the borderlands between the future and now, there and here, and heaven and earth. … They bring ordinary life and people into a real experience of communitas” (53).The book is relevant to Christian ethics, then, because of its account of what we want most, and the moral ecology in which such desire could be at home. It is tempting to treat the COS as an optional “extra” to be added to the “factory model” of moral goodness in the Christian life. McCarthy’s exceptional gift is displayed in showing us how ordinary and basic is our desire to be part...