[Midweek Edition] Brief Review: DOM HELDER CAMARA: ESSENTIAL WRITINGS
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
A Brief Review of
Dom Helder Camara:
Essential Writings.
Edited by Francis McDonagh.
Paperback: Orbis Books, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
Reviewed by Chris Smith.
Equal parts prophet, priest and poet, Dom Helder Camara was one of the twentieth century’s most striking voices in the cry against the excesses of Western culture. Unfortunately, today as the crises brought on by our excessive lifestyles in the West only continue to escalate, the life and work of this Brazilian priest is not known well enough. Thankfully, however, Orbis Books — who has long been the primary publisher of Camara’s works in English translation — has released a wonderful introduction, one of the newest volumes in their “Modern Spiritual Masters” Series. Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings was edited by Francis McDonagh, who also wrote a useful introduction to the book, which offers a brief biography and begins to frame a context in which Camara can be understood. After McDonagh’s introduction, the remainder of the book consists of excerpts from Camara’s works, organized thematically. The four dimensions of Camara’s writings into which the excerpts here are organized are “A Church of Service and Poverty, “From Paternalism to Liberation,” “Walking with God” and “The Unity of Creation.” Even those readers who are familiar with the social justice dimensions of Camara’s prose works, might be not be familiar with Camara’s poetic works, many of which embrace themes of unity and peace with creation. McDonagh provides an excellent introduction to these poetic works in the fourth and final chapter of the book. Consider this excerpt, for instance, from the poem “Brother Birds”:
Jane Jacobs’ Manhattan in the 1960s was already a megalopolis with approximately the 1.6 million people that live there today. The marks of a healthy city community she identified – such as density, diversified uses of spaces, and neighborhoods – turn out to be equally useful when describing natural ecologies, namely the pre-colonial island of Mannahatta, home to at least fifty-five distinct “ecological communities” of old-growth forests, salt marshes, swamps and the like, several hundred plant and animal species, and a human population of between two- and six-hundred people, the Lenape. The monumental task of assembling a vision of Manhattan as Henry Hudson and company would have first seen it on September 12, 1609 has been the task of Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist based out of the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is the resulting book chronicling years of research and map-making, and filled out with extensive illustrations of the verdant green of Mannahatta (that’s right) by Markley Boyer, which are a striking contrast when acting as diptychs with bird’s-eye photographs of present-day Manhattan.
I’m not a scientist. I admit to reading voraciously just about anything I can in science, just so as long as it does not require adding another specialty to my life. As purely an amateur (as in, from the French, amāre, meaning, “to love”), I enjoy reading New Scientist and Scientific American, but I’m not likely to discover the Higgs boson. So when I picked up Theology in the Context of Science—written by the famous physicist turned priest, John Polkinghorne—I was interested in what he had to say about the relationship between theology and science, and what theology in the context of science would look like.
