This is an enlightening book about the role that Christian understandings of the dignity of the individual have had in the modern push for human rights. In four chapters, it offers vignettes about pioneers in the human rights movement(s), and showcases the role of the distinctively Christian element in their arguments. As such, the book provides a valuable historical offset to some recent attempts to set the notion of rights over against Christian commitments, and presents a clearer view of the playing ground than some other treatments might give.

I referred above to the “individual,” but Moyn intentionally steers clear of that term, preferring instead to speak of the “person” as something borne of neither individualist nor communitarian notions. Here a little more explanation on his part would have been helpful, especially as the question of the “person’s” status vis-à-vis the community is the most obvious issue defining the “playing ground” that I mentioned above. Moyn’s use of “person” is intended in service to the thinking of “personalism,” a notion “linked quickly to spiritualism and humanism and not infrequently to European identity,” and which functioned to dispute the opening moves of “liberalism and communism” (p. 69). This use of “person” only made me wish all the more for a detailed map of Moyn’s operating concepts. (The “individual” is something that can be “depersonalized,” as it was [Moyn says] in the French Revolution [p. 37].)

It is important to note that Moyn places the dawn of Christian human rights in the wake of World War II, with some attention to events shortly before that. (The book lacks a subtitle, which could have made this limitation in scope clear.) Moyn says little about the role of Christian thinking in the so-called “invention” of the individual, often attributed to the Enlightenment. Instead, his chapters discuss figures that cash out this individualism (or personalism) in the service of common decency—figures like Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, Éamon de Valera, Jacques Maritain, and Gerhard Ritter (the “first historian of human rights”). Most of this history, of course, is not Anglo-American, and many of the names will probably be new for most readers.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in ethics, or in modern history. It is also helpful for thinking through philosophical anthropology, although it is the need for the perspective this book offers (rather than the depth of its treatment) that makes it valuable on this score.

Reviewed by John C. Poirier

Publisher’s page: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/1716.html

More so, I was astonished to learn that the hawk’s complete transformation had been accomplished within three days after its removal from the wild. In that brief time it had become a voluntary prisoner, submissively doing the will of its captor and adapting to a strange and unnatural environment. But as I watched, I saw much more than a falconer and his captive bird. I saw a spiritual truth unfolding before my eyes—Truth—in the form of a question I want to ask you:

Can humans be mentally captured, removed from their natural state, subdued, and forced into a life-style that is totally alien to themselves and their role in the kingdom of God?

Image: Ruben Bagues

Let me illustrate the answer: In 1973, four bank employees in Stockholm, Sweden, were captured during a robbery and kept inside a vault. Strangely, within six days they became so devoted to their captors they not only resisted rescue but afterward refused to testify against the criminals. This psychological phenomenon became known as the Stockholm Syndrome and is identical to what happened to the hawk.

The most notorious instance of the Syndrome in America came in 1974 when 19 year-old millionaire-heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, kept in a dark closet, blindfolded, and abused. Then something strange happened; Patty joined her captors’ organization, renamed herself “Tanya” and took part in robbing a bank of which she and her parents were part owners. When captured and tried, Patty was sentenced to seven years in prison. In another case, an airline hostage later married one of her captors. Politically, we call this transformation “brain-washing”. A large Church of Christ in Boston, Massachusetts, was recently accused of using this tactic in “converting” new members. One of their steps was to deprive the people of sleep through all-night “prayer”, then, at dawn, church officials mentally bombarded them with religious ideology and overwhelmed them psychologically. In such a deviate method, the Holy Spirit was unneeded-just “mind control”.

I have a dear friend who as a child was accused of a crime he did not commit—but one to which he confessed after police interrogated him under bright lights for eight hours. Thankfully, he is a committed Christian today but his normal life was stolen from him by this horrendous childhood event. We have all heard of traumatized wives who refuse to leave an abusive husband. The style of maltreatment may change but the end-result is the same: The mind can be taken captive by powers of darkness.

Mark G. Boyer (Roman Catholic priest and college professor at Missouri State University) and Matthew S. Ver Miller (psychologist and life-coach) write from their experience in relationship, which began as mentor and mentee, then grew into a peer relationship. This brief book takes just five chapters to explore the necessity of relationship in spiritual formation. The first third of the book brings definitions, the second third explores relationship dynamics, and the final third demonstrates these at work in the gospel’s example of Jesus with his disciples, in order to bring the reader to embrace the necessity of relationship. Each chapter concludes with five to seven discussion questions, which may be helpful for an individual reader or group to process and consider the content of the chapter.

Chapter one divides human wholeness into seven dimensions in order that each of the seven parts might be defined, studied, and understood. Nevertheless, these seven dimensions are inseparable in the reality of our human experience. The seven dimensions are intellectual, psychological, emotional, physical, sexual, spiritual, and aesthetic. The authors will discuss each dimension separately and then bring the parts back into the whole, demonstrating the necessity of integration.

Boyer and Ver Miller turn the noun “friendship” into a verb, resulting in the action of “friendshipping” in chapter two. This is an entertaining concept to consider, so that one’s lived reality of friendship cannot remain static; it requires the intentional steps, time commitments, activities, experiences, and actions of friendship. Friendshipping is a costly endeavor that is vital to ones spiritual development. We are designed to be in relationship and thus, cannot be complete without ongoing relationships. Once the reader accepts the necessary actions of friendshipping, then the central thesis of Human Wholeness comes fully into the comprehension of this simple yet profound little book.

The closing chapter exegetes the life of Jesus and expounds on how he invested himself in relationships with both people and with God the Father. The curious omission of this chapter is that it only focuses on the divine aspect relationship between Father and Son, without any mention to the Holy Spirit. From a trinitarian perspective, one must wonder about the theological impossibility of this two-thirds relationship. It begs the question, is it even theologically possible to have only one or two members of the Trinity active in any event? The opening illustration of this book is one of the strands of a rope, which are intertwined into a full and unending circle. Perhaps there is a reason Boyer and Ver Miller have chosen to omit the Holy Spirit from their book, which has escaped the reviewer, but it seems that the inclusion of the third member of the Trinity would greatly enhance their thesis on the necessity of the spirituality of human relationship in the discipline of spiritual formation.

Reviewed by John R. Miller

Preview Human Wholeness: https://books.google.com/books?id=Xdf0BgAAQBAJ

Publisher’s page: http://wipfandstock.com/human-wholeness.html