Mary

Description

In recent years Mary has stepped out of the closet of piety and devotion and become the subject of serious theological study and work. For too long Mary was an icon for the repression of women by a male dominated Church, but now Mary is seen as a vital theological symbol, a symbol of true femininity and true humanity which the Church and the modern world needs urgently. Jung has argued that the Definition of the Doctrine of the Assumption was the most important religious event since the Reformation: the feminine principle has been absorbed into the Godhead. Yet amongst some modern Catholics, as well as most Protestant Christians, the Virgin Mary is still seen as someone who has a very small part to play in the drama of salvation and creation. In Mary, Sarah Jane Boss seeks to correct this view. She argues that Christian theology should conceive of the created order, both physical and spiritual, as sacred in the highest degree, and that this understanding is already implicit in traditions of Marian doctrine and devotion. Far from being peripheral this understanding of Mary is central to Christian doctrine. It must underlie any attempt to answer the fundamental ethical questions of our age, namely that of the extent to which human beings are entitled to intervene in the natural order.

Sarah Jane Boss is Director of the Centre for Marian Studies, University of Wales, Lampeter, UK.

"....fascinating and beautifully if densely written book....Her book is notable for its combination of the practical and the devotional with a remarkable learning which ranges over the whole tradition, and which is infused with the poetry that naturally belongs to the subject itself.." --Theology "Sarah Jane Boss believes that the present 'culture of Godless animosity toward nature' is the result of Christianity's capitulation to modernism, with its exaltation of the individual and alienation of humanity from the rest of the natural world. She suggests that the reason for this situation is that Christianity lost its sense of Mary, and her response is to construct a 'green mariology' focused on Mary as Mother of God and consequently Queen of Heaven."- Mary Anne Foley, Catholic Books Review, January 2006 * Catholic Books Review *