A Brightly Burning Christian
God and the World: A Conversation with Peter Seewald
by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Ft. Collins, Colorado: Ignatius Press, 2002
(460 pages; $18.95, paper)
reviewed by Carl E. Olson
God and the World: Believing and Living in Our Time is an apt title for the third lengthy interview Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has given the German journalist Peter Seewald, after The Ratzinger Report (Ignatius, 1987) and Salt of the Earth (Ignatius, 1997). Much like Pope John Paul II, he places the doctrinal details within the big picture: the panorama of the human drama and salvation history. Many people lack faith, he says, because they are “no longer capable of being overwhelmed by the magnitude of the whole.” Such people, especially intellectuals, fail to “keep the meaning of the whole in view, and to allow oneself to be impressed, to be ready to accept the unexpected.”
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Carl E. Olson is the author of Will Catholics Be ?Left Behind?? (Ignatius), and co-author, with Sandra Miesel, of The Da Vinci Hoax (Ignatius).
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