A search for meaning in a rapidly changing, often frightening, world that mostly preaches to the choir.
Welekwe, a technology consultant and evangelist, looks to the biblical past to understand our future.
As he has watched flurries of technological innovations and trends toward interconnection change our world, the author has identified positive developments, but he is also alarmed by much of what he sees. He notes how a sense of impending doom seems to hang over contemporary civilization—but as a Christian, Welekwe believes that everything happens according to God’s plan. In his introduction, the author explains that his book is a response to the works Sapiens and Homo Deus by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. Like that author, Welekwe moves from the deep past to the present to trace how we got here and predict where we’re going. But where Harari relies upon science to draw his conclusions, Welekwe depends on his faith. This is not to say that he ignores science; indeed, he writes a great deal about science in this book. Rather, the author believes that science and religion “address different sorts of questions”—a perspective common among intelligent design advocates and others who seek to reconcile these two very different approaches to unraveling the secrets of the universe. For Welekwe, the Bible is the ultimate authority. His attempts to construct rational explanations supporting the literal truth of the Bible are unlikely to convince nonbelievers—for example, he argues that the text of Genesis must be true, because no human was present at the moment of creation, so the biblical account of creation must be the product of direct communication with God. That’s quite a leap in logic, but the author’s feelings of awe and gratitude may well resonate with people who share his religious beliefs, and this book may offer them a much-needed message of hope. These readers will likely also appreciate his many biblical citations and his clear, inviting style.
A search for meaning in a rapidly changing, often frightening, world that mostly preaches to the choir.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2023
ISBN: 978-9787987988
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Forerunner Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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