The overarching goal of this thoughtful and thought-provoking book is to relate the natural desire for God to the social mediation of desire. I would distinguish three questions, which do not quite match the book's three divisions. First, what is the relationship of natural to supernatural desires? Second, what is the relationship of desires that are innate or infused to desires that are acquired through our interactions with the world, especially the social world? Third, how does the specifically Trinitarian form of the supernatural order enter into our experience of it? Rosenberg's interlocutors include de Lubac, and his recent critics, Lonergan and Girard, von Balthasar, various strands of social and cultural criticism, and such remarkable exemplars as Thérèse of Lisieux and Etty Hillesum. Lonergan's stamp is pronounced, but Rosenberg does not generally go in for jargon and involves himself in a fairly broad range of contemporary discussions.

There are fundamentally different metaphysical orientations within which the nature-grace relation might be conceived. One might think of the order of the universe as what results from the interaction of its parts, and then one privileges the completeness of finite essences. Conversely, one might think of the parts as resulting from the order of the whole, and then one emphasizes the incompleteness and openness of finite being. Rosenberg opts for the latter, to conceive otherworldly love as “supernaturally” sublating the “natural” human activities of question and answer, reflection and judgment, deliberation and commitment. Concretely there is a single field of human experience in which we are all involved with the offer and gift of divine love; the importance of “pure nature” is limited to establishing a valid line of reference for the gratuity of grace, and its practical upshot is to invite a robust theoretical account of human nature. To some extent this is standard Lonergan, but Rosenberg relates it to contemporary discussion with skill and generosity.

On the relation of innate (or infused) to acquired (elicited) desire, Rosenberg sets himself a delicate task. His instinct is to come down with Lonergan: the desire to understand is innate. But he wants to meet others (like Feingold) who hold the desire to be elicited, and to explore how an innate desire can be socially mediated. Rosenberg suggests Lonergan's natural desire “corresponds in some ways” with what for Feingold is an unconscious ontological orientation (see 94–97, also 115). Perhaps, but one would like a clearer articulation of the ways in which it does not correspond, and why. For Lonergan, the desire for God is both conscious and spontaneous: wonder is manifested in questions, but is itself prior to all determinate questions. Implicitly it regards all of being. It thus implicitly regards God, though not because God is included in the “set” of beings (see 97) but chiefly because wonder asks why and God is the final and sufficient Why. Rosenberg's difficulty here, I feel, is more on the level of expression than on the level of thought. He does not quite emancipate himself from the conceptuality of his interlocutors to create an idiom proportionate to his own ideas. (To make sense of Rosenberg, I found myself conceiving desire as immediate in its ground but mediated in its unfolding, for instance.)

With von Balthasar, Rosenberg wishes to draw upon the lives of saints as a theological resource, retrieving to this end the positive moment in Girard's analysis of mimetic desire. The supernatural order, Rosenberg contends, is distinctly Trinitarian, a participation in divine relations. Drawing here upon Doran and Ormerod, Rosenberg involves himself in some of their loose ends (particularly around sanctifying grace and charity) without tying them up. He also allows the impression that desire for God is mimetically elicited by admiration of the saints (see 148–52); it seems more coherent to say that encounter with incarnate holiness awakens a desire natural but also obscure. Still, all these elements are deployed to good effect in a pair of lovely meditations on the vocations of Saint Thérèse and Etty Hillesum, matched by a trenchant critique of American consumerism, which he urges is not simply secularism, the loss of mystery, but in fact a deviation of transcendence, a sacralization of shopping (cf. 198). Rosenberg does not ask explicitly whom we are worshiping, but the answer may be ourselves.

Rosenberg has achieved something rare: a genuine and sympathetic conversation among the neo-Scholastics, Lonergan, Girard, and la nouvelle théologie. The result is a valuable and immensely stimulating book, funded by terrific insight, for a theologically sophisticated readership.