The Time Is Now: A Call to Uncommon Courage

Benedictine nun and activist Chittister (The Gift of Years) offers a pulpit-thumping call to assume a stance and voice of prophetic spirituality to resist oppression and injustice. The idea is as old as the Hebrew Bible, Chittister writes, with its great prophets castigating a corrupt nation. She refers to Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, and others from the biblical tradition, but also widens her lens to include such modern thinkers as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr. While Chittister’s intent is admirable, her execution is undercooked. Unfortunately, too much of her argument gets bogged down in generalities (“We watch bureaucrats in big cars pretending to be important. We see resident critics come and go”), and the prose can be florid (“The hopes of the human heart once aflame were impossible to extinguish”). Chittister so frequently drags in a thought or injunction from a panoply of leaders and inspirational figures—Helen Keller, John F. Kennedy, Mary Pickford, and John A. Shedd among them—that the effect becomes one of a motivational pastiche rather than a powerful prod. This will be a disappointment to fans of Chittister’s more rigorous work. (Mar.)