by Anita Brookner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 2006
Written for those who already share the author’s point of view, not for the larger number of Americans somewhere between his...
A less-than-convincing warning that the Christian right is trying to set up a theocracy in the United States.
Rudin, a retired U.S. Air Force chaplain, takes a hyperbolic approach, referring to Christian conservatives as “Christocrats . . . willing to sacrifice historic American freedoms and rights for a greater good: God’s plan for the United States.” An early chapter takes his home state of Virginia as a case study, describing two youthful encounters with religious bigotry, in 1942 and 1950, and a 1995 meeting with Reverend Pat Robertson as “events [that] defined for me in a personal way the goals of today’s Christocrats in America and the methods they employ to achieve them.” Rudin moves on to explain the differences among the various Protestant denominations; to explore the concept of evangelicalism within varying traditions; and to trace the Christian right’s move from political separation to political engagement in the 1980s. He also discusses the complex relationship evangelicals have had with the Jewish community. The book’s second half examines fundamentalists’ attempts to impose hard-line Christian beliefs on others within the context of varying “rooms”: the bedroom, the schoolroom, the courtroom, etc. Throughout these chapters, he provides examples of actions taken by the Christian right in the legal, legislative, educational and media arenas. Rudin has done a great deal of homework, but in the end he simply sounds like a member of one fringe group attacking another fringe group. The aggressive language he utilizes throughout—“the current American Civil War,” “Christocratic shock troops,” etc.—and his sky-is-falling tone make the author seem as unobjective, if not as unreasonable, as many of the evangelicals at whom he points a self-righteous finger.
Written for those who already share the author’s point of view, not for the larger number of Americans somewhere between his extremism and that of and the Christian right.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2006
ISBN: 1-56025-797-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
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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by Albert Camus ; translated by Justin O'Brien & Sandra Smith
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by Albert Camus ; translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy & Justin O'Brien
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by Albert Camus translated by Arthur Goldhammer edited by Alice Kaplan
by Stephen Batchelor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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