Books in Review  Belonging To The Universe  Copyright (c) 1992
First Things 24 (June/July 1992): 52-54.  New Age Mush
Belonging To The Universe. By Fritjof Capra and David Steindl-
Rast. Harper San Francisco. 217 pp. $18.95.  Reviewed by
Charlotte Allen  IN 1975, Fritjof Capra, an Austrian émigré
physicist and systems theorist, published The Tao of Physics, an
effort to find parallels between scientific principles and the
insights of Eastern spirituality. He later became a guru in his
own right, specializing in ecology, in Berkeley, California.
Eastern religion has for almost two centuries been the Grail
Forest for many a Western intellectual as Western philosophy,
already unhitched from its medieval tether to faith, has stalked
through the arid terrain of scientism, positivism, and various
kinds of materialism, including the Marxist. Christian divines
preached the Gospel of Progress and the Social Gospel. There was
little to satisfy the hungry heart and the yearning imagination.
Not surprisingly, Hinduism, B