|
|
609 - Edith Stein: A Biography |
Edith Stein: A Biography
By Waltraud Herbstrith
San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1985.127pp. $15.95.
Stein (1891-1942) was well-known in Germany of the 20s and 30s for her work in phenomenology (student and collaborator of Husserl), as lecturer and teacher, and as participant in the liturgical renewal. Earlier studies of this Jewish convert, influenced by the circumstances leading to her death in Auschwitz, stressed her life as Jewish-Christian witness in the Third Reich. Recent scholarship recognizes her contributions to phenomenology and neo-scholasticism, her seminal study of the role of women, John of the Cross and mystical spirituality, and the import of her own spirituality. Thus this volume, a translation of an expanded 1971 work in German, devotes eight of the seventeen chapters to ideas or themes rather than biographical data. But serious readers will want more, and the volume fails them with its sparse bibliography. It provides only a partial, out-of-date listing of works in English by and about Stein, and gives no comprehensive account of Stein's works, thereby obscuring the scope and significance of the oeuvre (the collected works now number ten volumes). Nonetheless, the book has value as the first comprehensive introduction to the U.S. audience of this important figure of twentieth century Christian intellectual and spiritual history.