A thoughtful, theologically rigorous account of missionary life, but one that’s limited by its brevity and lack of examples.
A brief instructional manual for readers who aspire to become Christian missionaries.
According to debut author Singleton, a teacher and preacher at the Temple of Faith Apostolic Church in Killeen, Texas, the “missionary holds a high position in today’s church,” and is an essential agent in the spreading of God’s word and combating the forces of Satan. The ultimate purpose of a missionary, she says, is to “win souls for the Lord,” to “restore” those who are otherwise lost, and to deliver people from the “bondage of sin.” In this book, the author aims to provide a short introduction to the missionary life and its basic animating principles. She also explains relevant practical matters, such as the establishment of a missionary department and how fasting and prayer may be used as tools in missionary work. Singleton’s study deeply draws from Scripture, impressively scouring its contents for guidance, and she draws a profound connection between missionary aims and the ministry of Jesus Christ: “Missionaries are reflections of Jesus Christ….God has set missionaries in the church for the purpose of picking up the pieces of weak and shattered lives and putting them back together again (Acts 13:47).” She also discusses what she sees as Satan’s obstacles to salvation, including hidden, “presumptuous sins” and “secret faults.” Singleton’s account isn’t intended to be comprehensive but prefatory—a primer for people interested in a missionary life that they may not yet fully comprehend. She writes lucidly, and with a remarkably focused sense of gravity, never digressing too much from her biblical inspirations. However, she also writes in an impersonal style, without concrete personal or hypothetical examples to illustrate her points. As a consequence, her counsel can feel rather obscure. For example, what precisely does it mean that a missionary must be “blameless”? Even so, Singleton’s account is sure to be of interest to fellow Christians who feel called to missionary life, although it may only whet their appetite for further reading.
A thoughtful, theologically rigorous account of missionary life, but one that’s limited by its brevity and lack of examples.Pub Date: May 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-4268-8
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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