Bonaventure offers new insight on the role of God the Father vis-à-vis the created world and the role of the Incarnate Word as metaphysical center of all reality. The kenosis of the Father through the self-diffusion of the good inverts the notion of patriarchy and underscores the humility of God in the world. By locating universals on the level of the singular and personal, Bonaventure transforms the Neoplatonic philosophical quest into a Christian metaphysics. The author then considers the ramifications of this for the contemporary world.]T HE HIGH MIDDLE AGES were a time of change and transition, marked by the religious discovery of the universe and a new awareness of the position of the human person in the universe. In the 12th century, a Dionysian awakening coupled with the rediscovery of Plato's Timaeus gave rise to a new view of the cosmos. 1 Louis Dupré has described the Platonic revival of that century as the turn to a "new self-consciousness." 2 In view of the new awakening of the 12th century, the question of metaphysical principles that supported created reality, traditionally the quest of the philosophers, began to be challenged by Christian writers. Of course it was not as if any one writer set out to overturn classical metaphysics; however, the significance of the Incarnation posed a major challenge. It may seem odd that a barely educated young man could upset an established philosophical tradition, but Francis of Assisi succeeded in doing so. As Dupré points out, Francis's devotion to Jesus of Nazareth, the individual, opened up a new perspective on the unique particularity of the person. If the Image of all images is an individual, then the primary significance of individual ILIA DELIO, O.S.F., received the Ph.D. from Fordham University. She is assistant professor in the department of ecclesiastical history at the Washington Theological Union. The area of her specialization is Franciscan theology. Besides a recent article on Bonaventure's eschatology in Traditio 52 (1997) 153-77, she has also published Crucified Love: Bonaventure's

THE HOURS OF THE UNIVERSE: Reflections on God, Science, and the Human Journey by Ilia Delio. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2021. 242 pages, index. Paperback; $25.00. ISBN: 9781626984035. *In this exquisitely constructed book, Delio reveals the current state of her reflections on the central concern of her life and work: the relationship of God, humanity, and the universe in the context of the evolutionary process. Her unscripted career leading to this publication, narrated in her memoir Birth of a Dancing Star: My Journey from Cradle Catholic to Cyborg Christian, has exhibited the same sort of development and diversity that she finds woven into the fabric of the universe. A Franciscan sister who began her religious life as a cloistered member of the Carmelite order, Delio earned doctorates in pharmacology and historical theology and has taught at Trinity College, Washington Theological Union, Georgetown University, and Villanova University. Today, she is an award-winning author, best known for her Center for Christogenesis, which seeks to promote dialogue between faith and reason and stimulate a Christian spirituality fully infused with evolutionary consciousness. *Communicating the urgent need and prospects for that kind of spirituality is the burden of this, Delio's twentieth, book. A theology whose starting point is not evolution and the story of the universe, she insists, is a "useless fabrication" (p. xvi). Her work is rich in scriptural references, but the call to restore the book of nature to its primacy as the true first testament in Christianity's sacred canon is one of her signature themes. Though she displays no interest in apologetics or polemics, her basic assumption is the distinctively Catholic principle of the revelatory character of creation, a conviction at odds with the Protestant Reformers' suspicion of natural theology. A robust sacramental imagination permeates the entire book and provides its organizational design. Portraying the universe as the "new monastery" (p. xvii), Delio orders her reflections according to the liturgy of the hours that has structured daily prayer in Christian monastic communities for centuries: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. Delio clusters her chapters--along with prologues of original poetry--around these times of contemplation and guides the reader through the prayers of one rotation of the earth and toward what she calls a new synthesis of faith and science. *Delio's thirty-two brief chapters, each a free-standing essay, cover a broad spectrum of topics from the cosmic to the autobiographical--from quantum physics, gravitational waves, and artificial intelligence to the Eucharist during the coronavirus pandemic and the death of her beloved cat Mango. Delio addresses a number of social issues such as racism, consumerism, and homophobia and sets the full scope of her reflections against the backdrop of the threat of climate change. Her main objective is the nurturing of a Christianity mature enough to match the achievements and insights of contemporary science. In this effort, her primary dialogue partners include interfaith scholar Beatrice Bruteau, Passionist priest and self-styled geologian Thomas Berry, Hindu-Catholic mystic Raimon Panikkar, and luminaries from her elected Franciscan tradition such as Saint Francis, Bonaventure, and the contemporary spiritual writer and retreat leader Richard Rohr. Pope Francis's unprecedented encyclical on creation care, Laudato Si', is a constant touchstone for Delio, but pride of place in her personal communion of saints is granted to the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose transposition of Catholic Christianity into an evolutionary key animates virtually every page of the book. *Delio's essays orbit this Teilhardian view of things like planets in an intellectual galaxy characterized by both order and chaos. The overall effect is a prophetic warning regarding the irrelevance and near-obsolescence of any Christian system fixated on the categories of Aristotelian or Newtonian worldviews. Like her monastic and mendicant forebears, Delio calls for church reform and creative thinking. The dominant mood of the book, though, is a blend of hope and awe, even audacity. Delio's conclusion equates the rise of a "new species with a new God consciousness" (p. 240) with the second coming of Christ. *Delio's engaging book is limited by its scant attention to the menacing side of science and technology, its failure to reckon seriously with the dramatic rise of nonreligion that calls her privileging of Christian myth into question, its overestimation of the general reader's science literacy, and its tendency to align scholarly and homiletic modes of communication too closely and too uncritically. Readers seeking linear arguments for theistic evolution or Christian pantheism will have to look elsewhere. Clergy, advanced students, and believing specialists in theology and the natural sciences will find a provocative and prayerful statement of a unique Christian cosmology that informs and inspires. *Reviewed by Peter A. Huff, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Benedictine Values, Benedictine University, Lisle, IL 60532.

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[Franciscan theologians posit an integral relation between Incarnation and Creation whereby the Incarnation is grounded in the Trinity of love. The primacy of Christ as the fundamental reason for the Incarnation underscores a theocentric understanding of Incarnation that widens the meaning of salvation and places it in a cosmic content. The author explores the primacy of Christ both in its historical context and with a contemporary view toward ecology, world religions, and extraterrestrial life, emphasizing the fullness of the mystery of Christ.]