It is always difficult to review a collection of essays. The easy way out is simply to write a few introductory words, a few concluding words, and sandwich between them the titles of each of the individual essays along with the names of their respective authors. Doing so in this case would not do justice to this rich collection of sixteen essays, the last of which is Kollar's conclusion. As the title of the volume suggests, the authors come from three different religious traditions, with Christianity represented by more than one Christian church. No author is responsible for more than one essay.
The collection grew out of an international conference on wealth and poverty held at Faith University, Istanbul, Turkey, in June 2014 under the aegis of the Hickey Center for Interfaith Studies and Dialogue, based at Nazareth College, in Rochester, New York. Its sixteen chapters are organized into four parts, “Personification of Poverty and Wealth,” “Doctrines about Poverty and Wealth,” “Spiritual Traditions about Poverty and Wealth,” and “Sharing the Wealth.”
The first part focuses on four heroes in the often-told stories of the Scriptures of the three Abrahamic faiths, two mythical and two historical. Readers of the Christian Bible are familiar with the story of Job and the Canticle of Mary, the Magnificat. Focusing on the frame of Job's story, they may be less familiar with Job's struggle with poverty, just as they may fail to grasp the challenge of Mary's canticle for today's Christian believer. They are undoubtedly less aware of the Qur'an's mythical story of the evil Qarum and the historical care of the poor in the vast area that was Islamic Hindustan during the course of several centuries.
“Doctrines about Poverty and Wealth” comprises three quite different essays. I found the first, “Socioeconomic and Gender Justice in the Quran: Modern Challenges,” to be less than satisfying—only because Zainab Alwani tried to say too much in too few pages. It would have been preferable, at least in this reader's view, were one essay to have been devoted to gender justice and another to socioeconomic justice. Not only are these topics important in themselves but they are also singularly important for the view of Islam held by non-Muslims. The central essay of part 2 is Regina Boisclair's study of the gospel lections in three principal Christian lectionaries. A second historical piece, focusing on the confluence of Islam and Orthodox Christianity in modern Russia, brings part 2 to a conclusion.
Part 3 contains five essays on spirituality and poverty and wealth. Three of them are decidedly Roman Catholic in orientation: a study of the adaptation of the Franciscans’ ideal of poverty to changing social conditions, an examination of liberation theology and the “non-person,” and an overview of contemporary Catholic ideals for economic justice. The names of Benedict and Francis grace this section, in which the charts on pages 233–34 should be the stuff of Catholic religious education, homilies, and study groups. Essays on the Muslim doctrine of Al-Fana’, the purification of the self, and on prophetic ethics in the monotheistic tradition coalesce to make this third part of the volume perhaps its most valuable section.
The last part of the book consists of three essays on sharing wealth, written respectively from Jewish, Muslim, and Christian perspectives. All told, this volume contains a number of insightful studies. They should be pondered in their individuality, but there may be some advantage for a reader who does not belong to one or another of these three religious traditions to read in sequence the group of essays that emanate from an unfamiliar tradition. Much insight and appreciation of another religious tradition can be gained from such a reorganization of one's reading.
