Refreshingly free of self-serious dogmatism, the author’s study of other religions shows how it deepened his commitment to...
An American Catholic theologian offers a candid memoir about his unusual spiritual journey and a plea for ecumenical tolerance.
A checkered path led the author to his present calling as professor of comparative theology at the University of Notre Dame, as he recounts in these personal essays. Raised in upstate New York, Malkovsky drifted into the Catholic Church via the anti–Vietnam War movement and moved from monastic life to the study of theology in Germany, where he began to learn about liberation theology and “God’s preferential option for the poor.” His interests in the Hindu-Christian dialogue took him to the University of Pune, India, where he frequented the Christa Prema Seva Ashram and immersed himself in the study of Sanskrit. Malkovsky’s years in India profoundly influenced his sense of spirituality—by practicing yoga and meditation, being healed by an Ayurvedic physician, and observing closely the lives of the extremely poor and disenfranchised—but he also met a Muslim woman who became his wife. Though she converted to Catholicism, her family did not immediately accept her choice. Malkovsky shares how his witness and participation in Hindu and Muslim rituals such as burials and weddings have deeply moved and impressed him, adding yet another rich layer to the expression of human spirituality that can be understood and embraced by all. In a long chapter on yoga, the author takes aim at opponents of the practice, called “demonic” by some Catholics and Protestant evangelicals. For Malkovsky, yoga imparted a rigorous control over the body and a “healthy dualism” compatible with Christianity.
Refreshingly free of self-serious dogmatism, the author’s study of other religions shows how it deepened his commitment to his Christian faith.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-184068-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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