A thoughtful exposition on love and its reverberations throughout creation.
Taking “God is love” seriously.
Wirzba (Theology and Ecology/Duke Univ. School of Divinity; From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World, 2015, etc.) takes a holistic and earthy approach to finding the purpose and core of Christianity. According to the author, it all comes down to love. It was love that brought creation into being, love that sustains it, and love that awaits it. With this idea as a basic backdrop, Wirzba builds a theology and an ethic for life. “Our way into the fullness of life is the way of love,” he writes. “That is the central claim of this book.” At its best, the Christian church is a “training camp for love,” even if it has not always functioned in this way. Though Wirzba’s argument would seem to best fit the dynamics of human relationships, he discusses love in the context of all creation. He asserts that God’s love brought creation about, and that creation, in every facet, is a reflection of that love. Just as God sustains creation, so should we. Creation, the author believes, is in fact itself an infinite network of relationships and should be viewed as such. Wirzba defines sin as “the failure of love.” Sin is not the absence of love but the misuse of God’s creative genius and of his love for creation. We are not born into sin, as many faith traditions suggest, but choose or inherit it out of ignorance. Wirzba makes it clear that sin can and does touch on our treatment of all creation, manifesting itself even in a selfish desire for cheap food. Some readers may dismiss the author as being theologically light or overly simplistic. However, there is a level of depth here. Wirzba especially endorses a theology that is ecologically sensitive without being eco-centric—a nuanced but important difference.
A thoughtful exposition on love and its reverberations throughout creation.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0062385819
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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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