Altogether, a breezy introduction to the fractures in contemporary American Christianity.
Journalist Shiflett tries to explain the demise of mainline Protestantism.
Noting that evangelical churches are booming while membership in Presbyterian, Methodist and Episcopalian churches is on the decline, the author wants to know two things. Why have the mainline churches felt free to overthrow centuries of church teaching in favor of a liberal gospel that talks more about inclusion than about sin and redemption? And why have traditionalists failed to stem the mainline march to the left? Central to his investigation is the recent fracas over the Episcopal Church’s ordination of a noncelibate, openly gay bishop. Gene Robinson’s election to the episcopacy has caused major fissures in his church, Shiflett recounts, adding that the other mainline denominations are sure to have battles and possibly schisms over homosexuality in the next few years. The author interviews several “progressive” Episcopal priests, as well as disgruntled mainliners who have left Protestantism for Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. He also reviews the work of “celebrity heretic” John Shelby Spong, a retired Episcopal bishop who has made a name publishing books that deny the resurrection of Jesus Christ and a theistic conception of God. Shiflett, who describes himself as an “itinerant Presbyterian,” seems relatively free of bias, though the progressives do come in for a bit more of his caustic wit than the conservatives. He describes the liberals’ flabby God as “the Wee Deity,” mocks the church bulletins that describe Palm Sunday parades merely as “fun,” and accuses progressives of valuing tolerance above all else. Liberal Christian readers may feel they’ve been caricatured, whereas traditionalists are more likely to recognize themselves in these pages. The author dips only scantily into scholarship; his argument would have benefited had he further availed himself of the many germane texts that sociologists of American religion have produced in recent years.
Altogether, a breezy introduction to the fractures in contemporary American Christianity.Pub Date: June 6, 2005
ISBN: 1-59523-007-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Sentinel
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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