it is entirely alien” found an echo in the Supreme Court’s judgment in the Sushmita Ghosh case (more popularly known as the Sarla Mudgal case). However, given that Ventura is a specialist in law and religion, there is surpris- ingly little in the book on the court’s proclivity to discuss theology and intervene in religious practices. This is particularly relevant in the Indian context with which I am more familiar. Some of the landmark judgments in which the Indian Supreme Court expounded on the nature of religion and in particular Hinduism, such as Yag- napurushdasji, are missing. Whether or not they won their legal battles, the three protagonists with which Ventura starts and ends his book—Sushmita, Gareth, and Shabina—forced the courts, and indeed their nations, to rethink contentious issues related to religion and law. It is a pity that the author did not confine himself to elaborating on these cases. RONOJOY SEN, National University of Singapore. WOLFE,JUDITH. Heidegger and Theology. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. 256 pp. $29.95 (paper). Judith Wolfe has succeeded in writing an introduction to the topic of Heidegger and theology that is compact but very rich, informed by her thorough knowledge of sources, including Heidegger’s extensive correspondence and recent German schol- arship. Despite its wealth of facts and references, this book is also quite readable, and readers will be drawn onward by a multitude of questions that, as Wolfe argues, re- main relevant to philosophy and theology today. Wolfe is the author of Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s Early Thought (Oxford, 2013); she pays special attention to eschatology here as well, but she ranges throughout Hei- degger’s thought and its theological reception to explore a variety of “pressure points” (198). Wolfe begins with Heidegger’s roots in ultramontanist and antimodernist Cathol- icism (9–24). Heidegger gradually broke free from this worldview as he searched for the lived, existential origin of phenomena that were dogmatically codified in Cath- olic doctrine. This line of thought brought him closer to Protestantism, and during his years in Protestant Marburg (1923–28) he formed an enduring friendship with Rudolf Bultmann. Heidegger’s early thought, culminating in Being and Time (1927), constitutes what Wolfe calls an “eschatology without eschaton” (3). The human condition is a ques- tion that is unanswerable (83), due to our ineluctable finitude and incompletion. We are “always essentially on the way,” Heidegger writes to Elisabeth Blochmann in 1918 (quoted on 46). He thus ranks philosophy, as an essentially questioning activity, higher than theology, with its drive toward answers (64). He also rejects any suggestion of an ultimate fulfillment or an arrival in the presence of God. Against St. Augustine’s view that “man was made for eternity,” Heidegger identifies an individual’s ownmost possibility, as he calls it, as being toward death (53). (On the fraught relation between Heidegger and Augustine, see Ryan Coyne, Heidegger’s Confessions [Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 2015]). Yet instead of simply embracing secular existence—a life that sinks contentedly into transient everydayness—early Heidegger insists that the authentic individual must resist complacency, instead remaining open to the experience of “affliction” (Bedrängnis; 49) and anxiety (Angst ). In one of her most independent reflections, Wolfe asks whether such an attitude does not presuppose some desire for transcendence The Journal of Religion 296 This content downloaded from 109.152.092.214 on March 29, 2017 08:02:31 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).