Badly flawed, both in its design and its execution.
An academic perspective on 40 years of change in America’s religious behaviors and beliefs.
When Porterfield (Religious Studies/Univ. of Wyoming) was growing up in the late 1950s, the Reformed Church and its liberal pastor were at the center of her town’s religious establishment—and of the civic observances that celebrated its middle-class, mainline Protestant culture. Forty years later, the religious landscape of “post-Protestant” America is profoundly different, with Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, pagans, Muslims, and devotees of an eclectic, syncretistic spirituality claiming a respectful hearing and a substantial following in the public square. What happened? The author examines the ways in which America’s traditional Puritan-Protestant religious culture, with its emphasis on the personal experience of grace, the equality of believers before God, and the practical benefits of religion in private and public life, prepared the way for today’s spiritual supermarket. Her project is an ambitious one, and there is a good deal of truth in her observations. But this is a deeply unsatisfying study. The focus is so heavily upon academics (and their middle-class students) that most of the variety and excitement of American religious life since 1960 gets left out. Postwar evangelicals, Mormons, Jews (except Jewish Buddhists and Orthodox women anxious about sex), blacks (except Martin Luther King Jr.), Pentecostals, Catholic charismatics, Barthians—everyone, in fact, not part of the liberal/radical religious culture she celebrates—have no part of Porterfield’s “Awakening.” She writes mainly of a small and aging cohort, people now in their 50s and 60s, who seem to have little influence on religion outside the academy and the increasingly otiose mainline denominations. And along with her narrow focus goes a high level of generality, offering neither richness of detail nor theoretical perspicacity—as well as a complacent, almost self-congratulatory tone.
Badly flawed, both in its design and its execution.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-513137-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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