The moral here: Spirituality can transcend religion, but stick with the right accessories.
Directed by self-admitted “deep whim,” novelist (Zombie, 2000, etc.) and biographer (City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara, 1993) Gooch profiles Americans seeking personal spirituality apart from mainstream denominational options.
From the Urantia Book (supposedly dictated by extraterrestrials to a 1920s Chicago businessman) to high-profile Hinduism, ascetic Catholic monasticism, breakaway gay congregations, and new followers of Islam, Gooch delves into today’s more exotic worshipful styles. He lets his interviews reveal searches for a personal connection to God that begin (and often end) with a certain quality of ritual, postulating that mainstream Judeo-Christian denominations don’t provide it anymore. Departure from the Latin mass and other Catholic modernizations lumped under the rubric “Vatican II,” abandonment of the King James Bible, and similar efforts by denominational leaders to make institutional religion more accessible have instead made personal contact with God seem more remote to many, states the author. Thus the trappings of the guru and the furnishings of the ashram are essential in attracting the kind of high-media-profile, cash-contributing converts who will underwrite the flourishing of Eastern styles of mysticism as envisioned by, say, Deepak Chopra in America. Having written for Out magazine, Gooch is hypersensitive to gender-orientation triggers. Particularly while visiting monks in a Trappist monastery near Bardstown, Kentucky, he asks straightforward questions about their lives and gets at least some frank answers. In his view, the gay congregations who now support the burgeoning Metropolitan Community Churches, including the grand-scale Cathedral of Hope planned for Dallas, may despise the conservative faithful but still fervently embrace the faith. Of his own search, Gooch notes from his diary, “I chanted with the Sufis on Friday and was back on Sunday morning taking Communion at St. John’s in the Village.”
The moral here: Spirituality can transcend religion, but stick with the right accessories.Pub Date: April 9, 2002
ISBN: 0-679-44709-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
An engaging, if sometimes spotty, history of the Jews who resided in the Iberian Peninsula until their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497. A distinguished scholar and author of many books on modern Jewish history (A History of the Jews in America, 1992), Sachar has done little, if any, original research here, but he nicely synthesizes secondary sources. He shows how the late medieval Convivencia—the period of Jewish-Islamic mutual tolerance and cultural cross-fertilization—gave way to the nationwide pogroms of 1391, in which 30,000 Jews were killed (4,000 in Seville alone). Following this violence, the Inquisition that began in the late 15th century, and the expulsions, Sephardic Jews spread throughout the Mediterranean littoral and the Ottoman Empire, as well as to Holland, England, the Western Hemisphere (in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Inquisition's long arm pursued conversos—crypto- Jews who professed to be practicing Christians—to such places as Lima and Mexico City), and beyond. In almost every country where they settled, the Sephardim incorporated their pride in and yearning for Spain in a distinctive Jewish language, Ladino. Sachar's strengths include succinct and informative discussions of Sephardic communal and intellectual history, his excellent unfolding of the Inquisition's complex history, and his many colorful anecdotes of the Sephardic ``rich and famous.'' However, his coverage of the middle class and poor, of Sephardic women, and of the early modern period (16501850) is weak and, occasionally, embarrassingly clichÇd (he claims that ``by the eighteenth century, the Jews of Italy had become superstitious, neurotic, timorous''). Finally, he ``takes a stab'' at discussing the contemporary Sephardic communities of Israel and France (but not, puzzlingly, of the US, where about 200,000 Sephardim live), but this too is so brief as to be greatly inadequate. A more detailed and comprehensive history of Sephardic Jewry waits to be written. For now, Farewell Espa§a provides a quick introduction that, if a little light in terms of scholarship, contains a fluid and often fascinating narrative.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40960-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Lambent prose and a general lack of self-indulgence characterize these essays on the Catholic canon of saints. Each of the 20 contemporary authors whom FSG assistant editor Elie has assembled here centers his or her contribution on a particular holy man or woman—usually a saint for whom they were named or whom they have adopted as a patron. The Catholic experience predominates, but Elie intersperses other perspectives. After a serviceable introduction by Robert Coles, Bruce Bawer sets the pace with a fine essay on St. Francis of Assisi, artfully stitching a biographical account with a personal meditation on the lessons he teaches. Kathryn Harrison follows with a forceful tale of how her namesake, St. Catherine, inspired in her an anorectic self-abnegation. Literary types may be impressed by Richard Bausch's epiphany of Thomas Aquinas as paragon both of faith and of the modern spirit—achieved, Bausch lets us know, through the mediation of his friend Walker Percy. Francine Prose writes about Saint Teresa of vila by focusing on the seemingly unlikely notion of irony; Tobias Wolff, in contrast, presents a most straightforward saint, the adventurous Jean de BrÇbeuf, martyred among the North American Indians. Also in the Americas, Enrique Fern†ndez discusses Cuba's santer°a religion, an Afro-Caribbean form of saint worship that provides an interesting counterpoint to the more traditional Christianity under discussion elsewhere. Editor Elie builds a summa of sainthood around his recent encounter with the figure of Doubting Thomas, in the form of a Renaissance bronze of Thomas with Christ. A critique of the official Church sanction of canonization comes in Martin E. Marty's look at the still unsanctified Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement. Valuable for inspiration, but also for information—the details of the lives and deaths of many saints are here, refracted through 20 idiosyncratic, often powerful points of view.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-100101-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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