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of sources” on early Christian practices in the city, including modern discoveries of ancient manuscripts that remain unpublished, there’s been little attention paid to this rite.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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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