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Waltraud Herbstrith
EDITH STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY Paperback: 207 pages Publisher: Ignatius Press. ISBN-10: 0898704103 Reviewed by Patrick Killough (1) biblio.com 02/01/2011 Would you recommend this book to other readers? * * * * * YES! review: You may never or barely have heard of Edith Stein before now. But odds are great that as the years go on, you and many more readers will become familiar with this pioneering feminist and philosopher. She was born into a large, devout orthodox Jewish family In Breslau, German Silesia, in 1891, and was gassed with her sister Rosa at a Nazi extermination camp in Auschwitz, Poland in 1942. In 1922 Stein, since her teens an unbelieving but unmilitant free-thinking agnostic, was baptized a Christian. In 1933 she entered in Cologne a cloistered convent of the Carmelite Order reformed centuries earlier by Stein's great model, Saint Teresa of Avila. Edith Stein's chosen name in religion was Teresia Benedicta a cruce (Teresa Benedicta of the Cross). A Jewish Christ crucified for all mankind became the abiding focus of her personal religious life. In 1998 Pope John Paul II, himself a onetime professor of philosophy, proclaimed Edith Stein a Roman Catholic saint. German Carmelite nun Waltraud Herbstrith's EDITH STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY was published in German in 1971, well before her heroine's canonization as a saint. The version I am reviewing here was published in 1985, being a lucid, easily read English translation of the fifth (expanded) German edition of 1983. In 17 short chapters, author Herbstrith tells a balanced story which in almost every detail was completely unknown to me. I came to Edith Stein as part of my recently begun study of "phenomenology," an approach to philosophizing created by Stein's teacher and mentor Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938). I knew that like her academic colleague Martin Heidegger, Stein had been Husserl's graduate assistant. I also knew that she had been canonized. I knew that many Jews remain upset at Catholics claiming her as a Christian martyr when the Nazis had killed her solely for being a Jew. But everything beyond that in EDITH STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY was new to me. And I could scarcely put the book down to draw breath. Stein was a great, great human being in more dimensions than the academic and the religious. Edith Stein from childhood to death was proud to be Jewish. Even after conversion to Christianity she continued to attend synagogue in Breslau with her mother, sometimes, however, praying the psalms in Latin! She was also a proud German. "It
caused her intense suffering that baptized Christians like Hitler and
Himmler were taking the guilt of such awful crimes upon themselves" (Ch.
17). Haters like them, she argued, must not be allowed to win. "... hate is not stronger than love."
In philosophy, her doctoral thesis under Husserl used his method of phenomenology to probe "empathy" among human beings. Later Edith Stein did pioneering work in a perhaps failed attempt to reconcile phenomenology with the thinking of the medieval Catholic philosopher and theologian, Saint Thomas Aquinas. For over a decade an active Catholic laywoman, Stein was at that time in great demand as a lecturer among teachers and professional women championing the still novel concept that women, single or married, had a right to live active professional lives. Edith Stein, even living quietly in austere, cloistered convents in Germany and the Netherlands, was ordered by her superiors to write. She probed the spiritual insights of other Carmelite greats such as Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross. In 1941 she could have left the Netherlands for a Carmelite convent in Switzerland. But they had no room for her sister Rosa, also a Catholic convert and living in Edith's convent. Without Rosa, Edith Stein refused to leave Holland and save her own life. Some (not all) other members of the Stein family had by then emigrated safely to the United States. Nazis rounded up all Jewish Catholics in the Netherlands one week after that nation's Catholic bishops denounced Nazi anti-Jewish activities. Unwilling to arrest the Catholic hierarchy of the Netherlands, the German Nazis, in documented retaliation, rounded up all baptized Jews in the Netherlands. There are a few, very touching eye-witness accounts of the last days of Edith and Rosa on the way to their deaths at Auschwitz. -- As
she and her sister were about to be
whisked away from their Dutch convent by the Gestapo, Edith took a
stunned Rosa by the hand. She was heard to say:
"Come, Rosa. We're going for our people."
-- Two Dutch laymen bearing blankets and clothes from her convent were Sister Teresa's last visitors hours before the trains carried over a thousand baptized Jews from the Netherlandss through Germany (and Edith's native Breslau) to Auschwitz. To relieve tension, the two men jokingly offered the famous nun a cigarette. "That made her laugh. She told us that back in her days as a university student she had done her share of smoking, and dancing too" (Ch. 16). -OOO-
http://www.biblio.com/books/9435240.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 02/01/2011 name of review: Edith Stein's "vocation, the merging of Judaism and Christianity into a single redemptive unity" rating: * * * * * review: Who was Edith Stein? And why should you care? She was born Jewish on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in 1891 in the city of Breslau in German Silesia (now Poland). Edith Stein was the youngest of eleven children raised in a devout Hebrew family. She lovingly told their story in a very long book, LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891 - 1916. With her older sister Rosa, Edith Stein was gassed to death at Auschwitz in 1942 at age 50. A brilliant youngster, Edith Stein from her early teens until well into her 20s ceased to pray, became atheistic. Nonetheless she accompanied her widowed mother on foot every Sabbath to their synagogue and never told her family of her spiritual distancing from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Edith studied for four semesters at the University of Breslau. Psychology was her major but the experimental field did not satisfy her longing for certainty and for a form of knowledge with believable criteria for its own truth. Having discovered at the University of Goettingen a new approach to philosophy called "phenomenology,' Edith Stein transferred there in 1913 to work for her doctorate under phenomenology's founder, Edmund Husserl, a Jew who had converted to Lutheranism. Stein wrote: "I was
twenty-one and all excited over everything that was going to happen to
me. Dear old Goettingen! I think only people who were there between
1909 and 1914, in the brief flowering of the Goettingen school of
phenomenology, can appreciate what that name contains for us" (Ch.
2).
When the first world war broke out, Edith volunteered at a hospital to nurse Austrian soldiers recuperating from infectious diseases. In 1916 Husserl accepted a professorship at the University of Freiburg, bringing Edith Stein along with him as his graduate assistant. That same year Stein was awarded her doctorate for a dissertation, "ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY," readily available today in book form in English. She wrote in the next few years a number of original philosophical monologs applying Husserl's methods of analysis -- to politics and other subjects. In Freiburg, atheist Stein was led to study Christianity as well, inspired by a number of Christian friends, phenomenologists and philosophers, some fallen in the war. Advancement in her planned academic career (she wished to become a university Professor of Philosophy) was blocked because of her being a woman born a few decades too soon. Edith Stein returned to Breslau. In 1922, aged 29, after years of hesitating between Germany's two major Christian faiths, Stein was baptized a Roman Catholic. For the next eleven years she was an active Jewish Catholic lay woman and school teacher, in great demand as translator, lecturer and advocate of women's right to pursue fully professional careers. Much of this time she lived in a community of Dominican nuns. In 1933, just after her 42nd birthday, Edith Stein became a postulant in the Carmelite Convent in Cologne. In 1938, after Kristallnacht and the intensifying Nazi persecution of Jews, her convent sent her to Carmelites in Echt, Netherlands -- an area not yet conquered by Germany. In July 1942, in retaliation for the Catholic bishops of the Netherlands having protested anti-Semitism from every pulpit in the Kingdom, the Gestapo arrested every baptized Jew they could lay their hands on, including Edith Stein and her sister Rosa. Together the two Steins died at Auschwitz not two weeks later. Ironically, the train carrying more than a thousand Christian Jews to Poland passed through their home of Breslau, where Edith Stein was recognized at the train station. Fortunately, some of their siblings had succeeded in time in migrating to the USA. All this and much, much more is told in EDITH STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY by Waltraud Herbstrith. The book was published in German in 1971 and appeared in excellent English translation in 1985, reissued later. What neither author nor translator could then know was that in 1998 Pope John Paul II (himself a former professor of philosphy and admirer of phenomenology) would declare Edith Stein a saint, under her name in religion of Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce. That name has been, erroneously I think, in one American documentary film mistranlated as "Teresa blessed by the Cross." Better is "Teresa Benedicta of the Cross." Teresa she chose in 1933 to honor Saint Teresa of Avila, who four centuries earlier had reformed the Carmelites, both women and men. Benedicta expressed Edith Stein's abiding love of Saint Benedict of Nursia, founder of Western monasticism. And the cross meant Jesus the Jew crucified for all men and women. The biography by Waltraud Herbstrith makes it abundantly clear that Edith Stein was consciously and blessedly Jewish until the day she was executed. Even after her baptism she continued walking with her mother to the Breslau synagogue and worshpping there with her. In 1933 she wrote in vain to Pope Pius XI begging him to issue a papal encyclical letter condemning German anti-semitism. In philosophy, Stein was a synthesizer, laboring to bring together Husserl's phenomenology with the 13th Century metaphysics of Saint Thomas Aquinas. She was also a synthesizer, a unifier, in religion and theology: "Anti-Semitic
persecution was pushing Edith Stein closer to the realization of her
unique vocation, the merging of Judaism and Christianity into a single
redemptive unity" (Ch. 11).
Not long before her death she told her Jesuit confessor: "You
don't know what it means to me to be a daughter of the chosen people --
to belong to Christ, not only spiritually, but according to the flesh"
(Ch. 11).
Edith Stein believed that as early as Hitler's political takeover of Germany in 1933, God was offering the cross to his Son's chosen people. But it would soon be the turn of Christians as well to take up their cross of Jeus and come follow him. How could onetime baptized Christians like Hitler and Himmler do what they were doing to God's chosen people? It was a great mystery to Edith Stein. But to Edith, born on the Day of Atonement, it could not be the evil, personally guilty Nazis who could possibly be chosen by God to atone for Nazi sins. That atonement could only be offered to God by the good, the righteous: the Jews, the Christians or anyone honestly seeking to live as God wants people to live. And atonment would be performed by being crucified with or at least in imitation of Christ. EDITH STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY is a fine book. It is about a great feminist, educator, writer, philosopher, translator, mistress of the spiritual life and both a Jewish and a Christian martyr. In book clubs it will prove instructive and provoke powerful discussions. -OOO- http://community.cafelibri.com/reviews/d/UserReview-Waltraud_Herbstrith_EDITH_STEIN _A_BIOGRAPHY-74-1692780-200572-Edith_Stein_s_vocation_the_merging_of_Judaism.html http://www.lunch.com/Reviews/d/Waltraud_Herbstrith_EDITH_STEIN _A_BIOGRAPHY-74-1692780.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (3) bn.com 02/02/2011 title of review: Edith Stein: A Woman for All Seasons rating: * * * * * review: In 1998, Pope John Paul II declared convert from Judaism Edith Stein (1891 - 1942) a martyr for Christ and a saint. Many Jews were offended. They thought that Hitler's Nazis had seized Stein and her sister Rosa from a Carmelite convent in Echt, Netherlands, and gassed them at Auschwitz simply because they were Jews, period. Catholics responded that all baptized Jews in the Netherlands were rounded up by the Gestapo a week after every Catholic pulpit in the Kingdom had denounced anti-Semitism. Waltraud Herbstrith's invaluable EDITH STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY was written in German in 1971. A later edition was translated into very readable English in 1985. At that time neither author nor translator knew that canonization was in the works. Pope John Paul II, a former professor of philosophy in Poland, honored her only years later. Thus Herbstrith's text is not overpowered by the later public controversies that followed canonization. In Herbstrith's biography, Edith Stein was many things, but not a canonized Christian saint. Edith Stein was born in 1891 in the German Silesian city of Breslau (now in Poland). She was the youngest of eleven children (four died young) of an economically successful orthodox Jewish family. In her teens, Edith Stein stopped praying and believing in the God of Abraham. Stein recounts her life at length in readily available LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY: 1891 - 1916. Edith kept her atheism to herself and continued (as apparently not all her siblings did) to accompany her mother to synagogue. *** Edith Stein was a brilliant student, linguist, translator from English and Latin into German. In 1916, after time out as a volunteer nurse at an army hospital, she took a PhD at the University of Freiburg. Her dissertation, now readily available in English translation, was ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY. *** Her university years were happy. She smoked. She danced. She found the man she thought that she would marry. During her university years, Stein moved slowly away from atheism. Baptized Catholic in 1922, Stein spent the next eleven years as a Catholic lay woman and recognized intellectual much in demand as a speaker for women's rights, including the right to live a professional life. When in Breslau, she joined her mother in worshipping in synagogue. In 1933 Edith Stein became a nun. Her philsophical writing were bold. Her grasp of spirituality grew intense. She rejoiced in being united to Christ both as a disciple and as a fellow Jew. -OOO- recommended reading: -- Edmund Husserl - LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS -- Edith Stein - ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY, LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891 - 1916. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Edith-Stein/Waltraud-Herbstrith/ e/9780898704105/?itm=1&USRI=herbstrith+-+edith+stein http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/review .aspx?reviewid=1545150 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 02/02/2011 title of review: Edith Stein was "a fellow-seeker with those searching for truth" rating: * * * * * review: She was born into an orthodox German Silesian Jewish family in the city of Breslau in 1891. Her life was ended by Nazi gassing at Auschwitz, Poland in 1942. She was declared a Roman Catholic martyr and saint in 1998. She was Doctor of Philosophy Fraeulein Edith Stein, later a Carmelite nun, Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce. Her story was written in German in 1971 and translated into very readable English in 1985 as EDITH STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY. If there is any one constant in her 50 year life, it is Edith's passionate search for abiding truth. Not finding it in her inherited Judaism, she stopped praying as a precocious teenager, though she never let on to her pious widowed mother that she was now a convinced atheist. In university she began immersion in experimental psychologyin Breslau, but that young science presented Edith no credible warrant for its claims to be true. She then sought and discovered a more satisfying field of truth-finding at the University of Goettingen: academic philosophy, and especially Professor Edmund Husserl's newly invented approach called "phenomenology." Husserl taught his many students, youthful Martin Heidegger and Edith Stein being his two standouts, to find abiding truth in the timeless essences of phenomena as they presented themselves to the knowing ego. When she was not busy philosophizing, first at Goettingen and later as Husserl's graduate assistant at Freiburg, Edith Stein made many friends among the young phenomenologists, surprisingly many of whom were either Jewish or Christian converts from Judaism (like her "dear Master" Husserl himself). The example of so many young thinkers busily searching for and finding God in organized revealed religions made Stein hope for something more certain than her hitherto confident atheism or the world-immanent, non-transcendental warrants of phenomenology. She asked one friend whether he believed in a personal God, a God who knows and wills and loves his creatures. No, she heard, God was just Spirit. Not good enough for Edith! Meanwhile she took her PhD degree under Husserl in 1916 with a brilliant phenomenological analysis "On The Problem of Empathy." What is this talent that makes one person able to get inside the mind and soul of another and see things from the other's point of view? For a time in World War I, Edith Stein tended wounded Austrian soldiers in a military hospital. For this she was decorated. In her university years Edith loved hiking with friends in the countryside. She smoked. She danced. She had picked out her future husband in an academic circle. As a tutor and teacher of German in a Dominican school for girls, she won the affection of many. In the summer of 1921 Edith Stein made a long visit to young phenomenologist friends, the Conrad-Martiuses at their farm. Her hosts went out one evening. Looking for something to read on their bookshelves, Stein found the four centuries old AUTOBIOGRAPHY of Saint Teresa of Avila of the Catholic Order of Carmelites. "Once
she began reading it, she found it impossible to put the book down and
stayed up reading the entire night. When she finally finished it the
next morning, she said to herself, 'This is the truth'" (Ch.
5).
On January 1, 1922, Edith was baptized Roman Catholic. She abandoned her earlier plan to marry, hoping to become a nun, but fearing the sorrow this would cause her devout Jewish mother. Stein spent the next eleven years tutoring, teaching in a Catholic school for girls and writing brilliantly about and producing original monographs in phenomenology. She was also much in demand by teachers and professional women as a lecturer. To them Edith stressed the equal rights of women and men to lifelong work in the professions. During holidays she faithfully attended synagogue in Breslau with her mother and prayed by her side. In 1933, on Hitler's rise to power, Edith Stein wrote Pope Pius XI urging him to write an encyclical condemining Nazi anti-Semitism. It is not clear that her letter ever reached the Bishop of Rome. In October of the same year, at age 42, Edith Stein joined the Carmelite convent in Cologne. Five years later, when Kristallnacht extinguished the final civil rights of German Jews, her superiors sent Stein to a Carmelite convent in Echt, Kingdom of the Netherlands. In 1942, the victorious Nazis retaliated against Dutch bishops who had thundered against deportation of Jews by arresting baptized Jews, despite earlier promises not to do so. A few days later Edith and her sister Rosa along with another thousand Christian Jews were shipped to Auschwitz by train and executed. Throughout her life, Edith Stein continued to seek certitude. She translated "On Truth" by Saint Thomas Aquinas. She attempted the reconciliation of Catholic philosophizing with that of Husserl's epistemology. Her efforts were later remembered by a former Polish professor of philosophy and admirer of phenomenology, Pope John Paul II. Through prayer and God's grace Edith found the unexpected certitude of religious faith and commitment. She offered her own suffering to God, if possible, to spare his chosen Jewish people from atheistic governments now rising across Europe. She exulted not long before her arrest in being united to Jesus not just by faith but through their shared Jewishness. Recall that "Empathy" was the subject of her 1916 doctoral dissertation. Witness after witness affirms that Edith Stein was indeed empathetic with the joys and sufferings and worries of others to an extraordinary extent. Her longtime friend and spiritual advisor the Benedictine Abbot Raphael Walzer put it this way: Edith Stein possessed "a tender, even maternal, solicitude for
others. She was plain and direct with ordinary
people, learned with the scholars, a fellow-seeker with those searching
for the truth. I could almost say she was a sinner with sinners"
(Ch. 8).
Waltraud Herbstrith's biography EDITH STEIN draws heavily on Edith Stein's own autobiographical writings and the recollections of her contemporaries. All of this saint's basic writings, philosophical and spiritual, are now available in English translations. -OOO- tags: edith stein, edmund husserl, carmelite religious order, auschwitz, phenomenology, saint thomas aquinas, saint teresa of avila http://www.amazon.com/Edith-Stein-Biography-Waltraud-Herbstrith/ dp/B000M4912M/ref=sr_1_16?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid= 1295952392&sr=1-16 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- (5) epinions.com 02/03/2011 Review Title: On the road to Auschwitz: "Come, Rosa, we're going for our people." Product Rating: ***** Pros: Edith Stein prayerfully offered her life to atone for Nazi wrongs to her Jewish people. Cons: Stein's biographer was not trained in philosophy -- her subject's original claim to fame. The Bottom Line: EDITH STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY is the balanced, thoroughly researched, but slightly outdated story of a Jewish woman in search of truth and love. More recent biographies await you. aohcapablanca's Full Review: Waltraud Herbstrith - Edith Stein: A Biography ... It may be best to begin by first reading the last two chapters ("Final Accounts" and "Epilogue") of Waltraud Herbstrith's EDITH STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY. People who know anything at all about Edith Stein (1891 - 1942), know only that she and her sister Rosa were gassed by Nazis at Auschwitz. Reading the details of Edith Stein's final hours will give you the motivation, I suspect, to want to learn much more of the non-religious earlier professional academic life of one of Europe's most original female philosophers. In 1940 Hitler's Nazi Germany conquered the Kingdom of the Netherlands. In 1942 Dutch Protestant and Catholic leaders sent a joint telegram to Reichskommisar Arthur Seyss-Inquart protesting rising deportation of Dutch Jews. German authorities, in a conciliatory mood, promised not to deport "Jewish Christians." This apparently satisfied severely threatened Protestant leaders. But on July 26, 1942 a letter from the bishop of Utrecht was read in every Catholic pulpit in the Netherlands, expressing solidarity with the Jewish people. Unwilling to arrest the bishops, the Nazis swiftly struck at baptized Jews instead. On Sunday August 2, Catholic Jews were rounded up all across the Kingdom. At five p.m. two SS officers appeared at the Carmelite cloistered convent in Echt. They gave two nuns, Edith Stein and her older sister Rosa, five minutes to pack their bags. The streets quickly filled with neighbors angered by the arrest. One witness said that Rosa appeared disoriented as the sisters walked toward the SS officers' car. "Seeing this, a neighbor recalled, Edith
Stein took her by the hand and said reassuringly, 'Come, Rosa. We're
going for our people'" (Ch. 16).
On August 9, 1942 Edith and Rosa Stein, with hundreds of other baptized Jews, were exterminated in Poland's Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Edith Stein had been born the last of eleven children in an orthodox Jewish family in the city of Breslau in German Silesia (now Poland). Her father died 2 1/2 years later and his widow successfully managed the family lumber business. Biographer Waltraud Herbstrith, herself a German Carmelite nun, in 1971 issued EDITH STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY. It appeared in very readable English translation in 1985. Neither author nor translator foresaw that in 1998 former Polish professor of philosopher, Pope John Paul II, would proclaim Edith Stein a Roman Catholic martyr and saint. The subsequent protest by many Jews (their view: Stein was killed because Jewish, nothing to do with her Christianity) has in the view of others diverted attention from Stein's earlier academic contributions as an original philosopher. Indeed, she was the favorite student of Edmund Husserl, founder of the phenomenological movement within German philosophy, even more highly regarded as Husserl's student than the world-famous philosopher and later eminent Nazi, Martin Heidegger. As controversy subsides over whether Edith Stein was a Jewish or a Christian (or both) martyr, scholarly attention focuses increasingly on Stein's non-religious writings as an original philosopher. It helps that all of her major works are now available in English. Edith Stein's summa cum laude doctoral dissertion for Husserl in 1916 was "On the Problem of Empathy." An atheist since her teens, Stein wrote brilliantly on how one person, through knowing, is able to see things as another person sees them, feels them, thinks about her or his surroundings. In her first four semesters at the University of Breslau, Stein had majored in experimental psychology. This new field she found, however, too primitive and lacking in certitude. In Husserl's phenomenology Stein happily found truth and certainty, but not about ultimate and transcendental issues such as the human person and whether there could be a personal God characterized by knowing, willing and loving. Curiously, many phenomenologists, in that movement's heyday at Goettingen, 1909 - 1914, including Professor Husserl himself, were either unhyphenated Jews or Jews converted to Lutheranism or Catholicism. Edith Stein, in her student days, was fun-loving, a great hiker, friend of all the passionate young phenomenologists. She smoked. She loved dancing. She wanted to marry and had already picked out her future husband from among her university set. One night in the summer of 1921 at the country farm of a young phenomenologist couple, Edith selected at random for bedtime reading the four-century old Autobiography of Carmelite reformer Saint Teresa of Avila. She read all night long and in the morning said to herself, "This is the truth." On January 1, 1922 she was baptized a Catholic. Meanwhile, as she had even when an atheist teenager, Edith Stein continued to accompany her aged mother every Saturday on foot to the Breslau synagogue, only this time praying the psalms (sometimes in Latin!) fervently at her side. Stein continued her work in philosophy, writing monograph after monograph on personality, politics, education, the rights of women, especially the rights of professional women to equality with men. She also attempted to reconcile the phenomenology of her "dear Master" Edmund Husserl with the mainstream Catholic philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225 -1274). But, to biographer Herbstrith, Stein's great reputation in her day and later as an original philosopher is clearly secondary to Edith's Christian faith and to her effort to form a salvific synthesis between Judaism and Christianity. Very early Stein foresaw the evils that Hitler and Himmler would bring upon both Jews and Christians. In 1933 she begged Pope Pius XI to denounce German anti-Semitism. Not long before her death she told her Jesuit confessor: "You
don't know what it means to me to be a daughter of the chosen people --
to belong to Christ, not only spiritually, but according to the flesh"
(Ch. 11).
Several of her brothers and sisters escaped to the USA. Another brother and his family were, howver, also killed by the Nazis. Both as Catholic laywoman and later as consecrated nun, Edith Stein was a woman who loved to pray. In religion she chose for her name Teresa Benedicta a Cruce. Note the empasis on Cruce/Crux = Cross. Stein believed that only good people everywhere, of any religion, but especially the victimized Jews and Jewish Christians, could possibly be acceptable to atone to God for evil willingly chosen as their personal responsibility by once baptized Christians such as Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels. God must have transferred the Cross from Jesus to the Jews, in a profound mystery. Somehow, though, it had to be that God was not thereby withdrawing his love from his "chosen people." EDITH STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY is not a bad starting point for probing the life and works of an amazing woman "for all seasons." It perhaps overemphasizes Stein's religious dimension at the expense of her earlier, initially atheistic, search for truth in philosophy. But other later more academically qualified biographers have righted that balance. For more depth, I recommend Alasdair MacIntyre - EDITH STEIN: A PHILOSOPHICAL PROLOGUE 1913 - 1922. Bottom line: my intuition and my prayer are that, despite all the initial hurts caused to many Jews resulting from Stein's canonization as a Christian saint, her life can and will support continuous discussion and mutual learning by Christians and Jews about their intertwined religious histories, warts and all. -OOO- http://www.epinions.com/reviews/Edith_Stein_A_Biography_the_Untold_Story_of_the_Philosopher _and_Mystic_Who_Lost_Her_Life_in_the_Death_Camps_of_Auschwitz_by_Waltraud_Herbstrith/skp_~ 1/search_string_~WALTRAUD%2520HERBSTRITH%2520-%2520EDITH%2520STEIN =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/herbstrith_stein.html |