Well-intended but bland responses to a contentious topic.
Position papers on the ongoing debate surrounding the role that religious belief should play in American public affairs.
From the introduction by Martin E. Marty, defensively titled “Faith Matters,” this collection has the sound of a project funded by grants from large, respectable foundations, employing a resolutely brave, we’re-confronting-the-issues-here tone but coming up with stunningly inoffensive conclusions. Elshtain (Divinity/Univ. of Chicago) starts off promisingly with an analysis of de Tocqueville’s advocacy of religious affiliation as a public good, but she soon wades away from consideration of the problematic aspects of his own religious positions (not to mention his ambivalence about democracy) into more familiar complaints that “dogmatic skepticism . . . is corrosive of all faith and all belief save the unexamined belief in skepticism itself.” Al-Hibri (Law/Univ. of Richmond) courageously asserts that “we need to foster honesty and appropriate disclosure in the public square” and “our position in the world and our role in it must be studied more seriously.” Haynes (Freedom Forum) urges those disturbed by the introduction of religious discourse into public schools to find common ground with those affronted by the omission of religion from the curriculum, offering as a paradigm what he calls “the civil public school,” which acknowledges the importance of religion while avoiding sectarianism. Os Guinness (Trinity Forum) pleads for a reenergized “public square” inspired by the theism of the Founding Fathers. It would be hard to find anyone who disagrees with these temperate statements—who’s going to speak up for more dishonesty in the public sphere, or greater divisiveness and more name-calling at the local Board of Ed meetings? But that’s exactly the problem: real dialogue starts with confronting real differences, and conflicts of interest that cannot necessarily be resolved through a little good faith and earnest intellectual endeavor on all sides. In fact, a little corrosive skepticism might have been just the thing here.
Well-intended but bland responses to a contentious topic.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-32206-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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