A deep meditation on Wesley’s accomplishments likely to inspire lively debate within the Methodist tradition.
A groundbreaking new study of John Wesley’s theology.
Having over 30 years’ experience as a minister in the Methodist tradition as well as a slew of advanced degrees in divinity, psychology, and education, debut author Ellison is well-positioned to provide a fresh perspective on the ideological development of John Wesley, the 18th-century theologian and one of the founders of Methodism. Rather than focus narrowly on the doctrinal components of Wesley’s views, Ellison tackles his understanding of experimental religion and the way in which he slowly formulated his positions over time. Wesley, who was heavily influenced by Enlightenment philosophy, especially its empiricist strain, wanted to devise an approach to religion and faith closely hewn to lived human experience—a “theological set of ideas which can help individual persons to meaningfully interpret their experiences.” “Wesley’s methods were pragmatic, more like the scientists of the 19th century than his 18 century contemporaries,” Ellison writes. “Wesley was the one to identify the early Methodists as the spiritual descendants of that group of ancient physicians who were first described by the name.” This entailed developing a kind of psychology of faith that in many ways anticipated the historically significant writing of William James. However, this psychological rendering as Wesley saw it doesn’t simplistically reduce the experience of faith to a psychological phenomenon shorn of fundamentally spiritual elements. According to Ellison, the core of Wesley’s Universalism is a doctrine of atonement that argued for the “belief in the universal redemption of humankind and all of creation.” In the author’s reading, Wesley turns out to be a nimble philosopher whose thought underwent a revision in his more mature years, shifting his worldview closer to Arminianism than to Calvinism. While this book is likely too scholarly to appeal to a broad audience, the arguments are always presented in lucid, accessible prose. It’s hard to imagine an examination of Wesley’s thought that does greater justice to his subtlety as a thinker or better captures his extraordinary prescience.
A deep meditation on Wesley’s accomplishments likely to inspire lively debate within the Methodist tradition.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499270563
Page Count: 172
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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
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