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SOUL BY SOUL

THE EVANGELICAL MISSION TO SPREAD THE GOSPEL TO MUSLIMS

An eye-opening look at a hidden reality of Evangelical missions.

An account of the fervent desire to promote Christianity across the world.

Brazilian journalist Carranca offers a penetrating report on the clandestine world of Evangelical missionaries, many from Latin America, who come to the Middle East to convert people. Her primary guide to this dedicated community is S.P. Luiz. In 2003, he and his family left their native Brazil—the second-largest sender of missionaries—to save souls in Afghanistan. Luiz’s journey, Carranca writes, “took me to underground house churches in Afghanistan, among persecuted Christian converts in Pakistan, to a close-mouthed summit on global Evangelism in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, and to mission fields in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey.” She came to understand that the missionaries’ work, as they saw it, was not to liberate inhabitants from poverty and oppression, but to free them from being “‘enslaved’ by Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.” Missionaries, she writes, believe “they are fighting spiritual battles, and they see poverty, wars, and disasters as caused by evil forces to which the only solution is Evangelism.” Their missions are dangerous, to be sure: They are subject to constant surveillance, death threats, and arrests. To protect themselves, they use encrypted messages and email to communicate, never talk about religion on the phone, and use fake names. They keep religious materials and images hidden; sometimes, they are forced to flee for their lives when terrorists rampage through their communities. Yet their work has been successful, with large numbers of converts, and Evangelicals’ experiences throughout the Global South have changed the sect. No longer homogeneously white and socially conservative, they have become a diverse group whose leaders, rather than support isolationist policies, see themselves as part of a global community—all “God’s Kingdom, conceived by Evangelicals as universal and borderless.”

An eye-opening look at a hidden reality of Evangelical missions.

Pub Date: April 30, 2024

ISBN: 9798987053522

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Columbia Global Reports

Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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THINK YOU'LL BE HAPPY

MOVING THROUGH GRIEF WITH GRIT, GRACE, AND GRATITUDE

Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.

Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.

“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”

Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023

ISBN: 9780063304413

Page Count: 288

Publisher: HarperOne

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023

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