A well-researched and profound religious history.
A Catholic priest’s case for the value of the liturgy of the early church.
As archivist at the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Roman Catholic Church’s patriarchal see of the city, and the director of the diocese’s liturgical office, Halaweh is particularly qualified to write about the liturgy of the Church of Jerusalem during the first 500 years of Christianity. In this book, an English translation and abridgement of his doctoral thesis, he makes the case for renewed usage of the “liturgical praxis” of the First Church of Jerusalem, “ancient practices,” he notes, that “are the expression of the purest Christian tradition.” Complicating this desire, however, is the paradox of Jerusalem, he says; the Holy City is central to Christianity, yet its Christian population “started small and remained small until the present day.” Thus, despite the “wealth of sources” on early Christian practices in the city, including modern discoveries of ancient manuscripts that remain unpublished, there’s been little attention paid to this rite. With painstaking attention to detail, Halaweh offers readers not only a glimpse into some of the first liturgical practices of Christians on record, but also provides a thorough history of the Church of Jerusalem itself. While emphasizing that “Christian worship can not be understood merely as a Christianized form of Synagogue worship,” the book’s most effective analysis centers on the influence of Judaism on early Christians in Jerusalem. For example, the book provides comparative plans of synagogues to churches, which both included a “Chair of Moses,” which demonstrate the distinctly Jewish character of Jerusalem’s church even as Christianity expanded most fervently among gentiles elsewhere. With his command of both contemporary scholarship and ancient texts, as well as a deep linguistic understanding of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek, Halaweh offers readers a remarkably researched work. Its heavy usage of often esoteric Catholic terminology may limit its readership among general audiences, but it’s an important work for scholars interested in early Christian history. Its ample use of charts and timelines provides additional reference material to future researchers.
A well-researched and profound religious history.Pub Date: July 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-72836-016-4
Page Count: 442
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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