by April Michelle Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 19, 2012
An enthusiastically conceived and readable breakdown of principles for embracing an upright religious life.
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A debut guide offers a core group of principles designed to help readers in their search for “truth in its purest form.”
Early in her book, Lewis confesses that despite her Christian faith and upbringing, she found herself wandering in life, feeling “an insatiable hunger to find out how to be happy once and for all.” While asking such evergreen questions as what is the meaning of life and “how do we lace love into every facet of our lives in such a way that we live in higher quality?,” she read extensively and gradually began to discover “universal connections” between the viewpoints of “scientists, religious teachers, philosophers, yogis, motivational speakers, and even musicians.” From this wide-ranging mixture of sources, she eventually developed what she refers to as the “STABLE philosophy,” in which the word “stable” acts as an acronym for a set of principles she advocates as a method of illuminating the important things in life. The first two letters of the word stand for “Sound Thought,” with the author stressing that optimism is always a conscious choice: “You can hear the positive and you can hear the negative. Let the positive win!” The “AB” represents the principle of “Always Believe,” which Lewis frames as a call to a consistent and fervent manifestation of her Christian faith. The final letters signify “Life of Excellence,” a principle that applies to daily objectives—“Be a light in a dark world,” Lewis urges. The prose throughout her heartfelt book is clear, involving, and passionate, with the author warning her readers that “fear is the biggest obstacle to accomplishing anything at all in this life.” Along the way, Lewis occasionally misrepresents the positions of the scientific and/or atheist communities (members do not believe humans were “created from nothing,” for instance—creation ex nihilo is a religious notion). But her account of her own personal journey from confusion to the clarity of her STABLE philosophy has a powerfully persuasive narrative quality.
An enthusiastically conceived and readable breakdown of principles for embracing an upright religious life.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4624-0471-1
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Inspiring Voices
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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 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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