A spirited cry for religious unity.
In a world filled with religious war and sectarian strife, Yousef sounds Rodney King’s famous cry: Can’t we all get along?
Where demagogues preach hate and zealots spread the gospel of division, Yousef delivers a message of peace and interreligious harmony. In his new book, he does not deny the variations between the three great Western monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Nonetheless, he argues that their similarities should outweigh their differences and that believers of all stripes should come together to begin a new religious revival. The founder of the Islamic Center of Middle Georgia, Yousef writes from a Muslim perspective, but he continually reaches across spiritual divides and finds commonalities. He hopes that his book will spur a return to faith for Christians, Jews and Muslims alike, and he claims that only such a threefold about-face will save us from the numerous, growing evils of the modern world: drugs, divorce, abuse, violence, broken homes and chronic pain. His book draws more frequently on the Quran than on the Bible, but this reliance serves as a strength; it further educates the reader. Using its holiest texts, Yousef paints a portrait of Islam as peaceful, egalitarian and compassionate. Working against critics who smear the religion as violent or sectarian, he describes his faith as advocating social welfare, equality and nonviolence. Islam would benefit from more apologists who could—like Yousef—write to a Western audience. Occasionally, he’s so enthusiastic that one feels he has sacrificed clarity for energy. He could have spent more time developing a logical organizational scheme for his slim volume, and some of his points feel underdeveloped. Nonetheless, these structural deficiencies do not decrease the value of his message; we need more prophets like Yousef to tear down the walls between us.
A spirited cry for religious unity.Pub Date: April 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-1434909350
Page Count: 90
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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