A biographer and religious theorist analyzes the great divide between healthy sexual expression and spirituality in modern Christianity.
“Perhaps it is a relief to check our bodies at the door when we go to church,” writes Frykholm, but the candid plights described by the nine individuals he profiles were not resolved that effortlessly. The author focused on interviews with Protestant Christians because she believes the disharmony in connecting “one’s whole self to something spiritual” has significant Protestant roots. Each of her subjects shares “the pain of a toxic culture of religion and sexuality,” and their tales are rife with fear, shame and isolation. Frykholm begins with recollections of her adolescence, when her limits were tested by an increasingly frisky boyfriend while her sensibilities continued to be shaped by her Baptist roots. In the first section, both “Sarah,” the daughter of a Korean Presbyterian minister, and “Mark,” the son of a suburban Ohio Methodist minister, found themselves estranged from Christianity once they were faced with the “crisis” of sexuality. Other frank memories of sex addiction, abuse and street prostitution are equally powerful. Frykholm acknowledges that the homosexual population wrestles frequently with this conundrum, and that demographic is featured prominently. Paul emerged as a successful gay pastor in his community despite coming out publicly to his congregation, while Megan embraced a lesbian relationship, but only after years of self-doubt and hesitancy. Using keen insight and a host of memorable voices, Frykholm successfully relates her desire to utilize “our stories, our bodies, our sexualities, our minds, and our souls to love one another better.” A culturally significant collection that explores the challenges of reconciling pleasure with piety.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0466-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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