A New Look at Grace
Bill Huebsch, Twenty-Third Publications).
Reviewer: John Kane

(This book was originally published in 1988 as A Spirituality of Wholeness: The New Look at Grace, but I believe the new title is A New Look at Grace. The text remains unchanged.) It was written primarily for those with an "older" (pre-Vatican II) sense of God and sin and grace and sacraments, with the intention of introducing them, via a series of meditative and poetic chapters (written in poetic "sense-lines"), to the newer theologies of grace. These theologies (represented above all by Rahner) emphasize the primacy of the presence of God within human experience. The sacramental system of the Church, on this view, is secondary. It and other forms of prayer are important as ways to open our awareness to the action of God that is always already there in our actual human (and often very secular) experience. I have found that the book helps even the younger generations (who have little sense of the older Catholic understandings of God and grace) to come to a much more real sense of the presence and love of God. Yet the book's weakness (from my perspective) is that it so emphasizes the priority of God's presence within our individual lives and experience, that it does not give sufficient attention to our need for community, church, and tradition. Still, it's a helpful book.

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