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OBEN, Freda Mary. The Life and Thought of St. Edith Stein. New York: Alba House, 2001. vii + 164 pp. Paper, $12.95-Oben, translator of Essays on Woman (2d ed., 1996), has written and lectured amply on Stein. Her second book (following Edith Stein, Scholar, Feminist, Saint [New York: Alba House, 1988]), seeks to expound Stein's essential contributions in three areas: her life, her thought, and her effect on Jewish-Christian dialogue.
Oben essentially follows Stein's own autobiography (Life in a Jewish Family), enriched by conversations with living relatives. The extent to which life in Stein's family (devout mother, nonobservant children) was actually Jewish is never adequately addressed, and Stein's conversion is presented as a confluence of circumstances and spiritual more than cultural factors. Oben's treatment of Stein's scholarly career as a disciple of Husserl includes a simple explanation of the phenomenological method and a short summary of Stein's comparative study of Husserl and Aquinas. The period from Stein's religious vocation up until her death at Auschwitz provides the occasion for a presentation of her spirituality through a series of personalized reflections set off against an outline of her magnum opus, Finite and Eternal Being (1952), finished by Stein in a Carmelite convent.
Oben next presents three foci of Stein's philosophical works: the role and dignity of woman, the centrality of the person, and the relation of the individual to society. A nice, thorough outline of the first stands against the background of the education of young women in pre-war Germany, including Oben's own dramatization of what Stein might have to say to the young women of today. Oben follows with an account of Stein's philosophical thought, initially drawn from Stein's doctoral dissertation, On the Problem of Empathy (Stein's philosophy of the person), and then from later sources: Finite and Eternal Being,...