A formidable and potent Christian assessment of systemic racism.
A veteran minister and activist analyzes George Floyd’s murder through a theological lens in this debut book.
As the founding pastor of Family of Faith African Methodist Episcopal Church in the U.S. Virgin Islands and a former congressional staffer and nonprofit lobbyist, Brown in his three-decade ministerial career has long focused on the intersection of faith and social justice. In the wake of Floyd’s 2020 murder, the author delivered a sermon that became the foundation of this book, a work that he believes is his “divine assignment.” Central to his thesis is that the biblical concept of scapegoating is “infused in the very DNA” of America’s criminal justice system, from district attorneys and judges who disproportionately target supposed Black criminals to police officers who deploy “ritualized…excessive force to brutalize black and brown bodies.” Educated under philosopher Cornel West at Princeton Theological Seminary, Brown provides a thorough exegesis of the Levitical ritual of scapegoating that lies at the center of Yom Kippur’s atonement theology in the volume’s initial chapters. In “the most important set of rituals in all of the Pentateuch,” Israelites were instructed to not only sacrifice types of animals, but also to release a goat into the wilderness. This so-called “scapegoat” would carry “on itself all the sins of the people.” Variations of this ritual, Brown effectively demonstrates, would be used and abused throughout the rest of the Bible’s historical narrative, from the scapegoating of Isaiah’s “Suffering Servant” to the beheading of John the Baptist. Connecting this premise to the present, with a heavy sampling of imagery pertaining to Jesus, the book concludes with a triumphant theological declaration that the protests following Floyd’s murder transformed him in death “from a defeated scapegoat”—who was demonized by powerful men like President Donald Trump—into a “victorious lamb.” As a seasoned pastor, the author blends his scholarly expertise of Christian doctrine with the approachable style of a professional orator. And while at times repetitive, this work is a powerful rallying call for Christians “to open more eyes and pull down strongholds” of White supremacy and move to a “more sacred definition of community.”
A formidable and potent Christian assessment of systemic racism.Pub Date: July 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1665529303
Page Count: 170
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
