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
Well-crafted and thought-provoking.
Intriguing examination of the life-and-death difference between morality and ethics.
Gustafson contends that readers will be used to thinking of the terms “morality” and “ethics” as largely interchangeable. At the very least, most see both terms in a positive light. The author argues, however, that morality has been a misused and deadly social construct throughout the ages. “Morality and ethics differ,” says the author, “because morality supports civilization and ethics supports life.” Morality, according to Gustafson, is a civilization’s way of determining good and evil. Since morality changes from one civilization to another (and differs within civilizations), it is subject to abuse. Morality, he explains further, supports the “dominator system,” whereby everyone and everything is rated and valued according to a civilization’s arbitrary sense of good and bad. Hence “morality,” as the differentiation between good and evil, has been used throughout the centuries to condone everything from slavery, to racism in America, to the Nazi campaign against the Jews. Quite the contrary, writes Gustafson–ethics supports not a particular civilization, but life itself. Mercy and humility are examples of ethical behavior and thinking, which seek to serve those marginalized by society. The author points toward Native-American cultures as examples of ethical ones, in that they served the community as a whole as well as the natural world. Moreover, he holds up Jesus Christ as a foremost exemplar of ethics–“Jesus was not moral. He was ethical...because he rejected morality’s death-dealing function and supported life instead.” Overall, the book is well-written and pulls in a wide array of authors and thinkers. Gustafson’s work is not meant to be a treatise countering every argument, but instead introduces the concept of this morality-ethics dichotomy. In the end the author calls upon readers to be aware of the dominator system they live in, and how morality is used to support it, not life.
Well-crafted and thought-provoking.Pub Date: July 31, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7414-5404-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Boyd (Mystics, Magicians, and Medicine People, 1989) serves as traveling secretary and appreciative witness to the actions of Mad Bear, a Tuscarora medicine man, in this pedantic account of their travels in the late 1970s. The pair take a spiritual and geographical journey across the United States, attending lectures and conferences devoted to healing, spirituality, and ecological and political awareness in the company of swamis, rabbis, Tibetan lamas, holistic practitioners, Japanese monks, and a panoply of other equally ethereal characters. They even appear as guests of honor at Bob Dylan's ``Rolling Thunder Review''; later, Mad Bear's tribe fetes the entire cast on the Tuscarora reservation, where Dylan is assaulted by a mousetrap and huffily leaves. If at first it is not clear to the reader that the white man has despoiled the earth and has ``assured the end of contemporary civilization,'' Boyd and his mentor deliver enough homilies and polemicize so thoroughly that the point is soon made in spades. In this New Age-y document, the reader learns that spaceships, recorded in a petroglyph on a rock wall in Arizona, brought to earth the first Native Americans; that a miniature race of beings whom Mad Bear calls ``The Little People'' has evolved side by side with humans (he has a skull the size of a Ping-Pong ball to prove it); and that Mad Bear is unceasingly clairvoyant, forever reading Boyd's thoughts—conveyed, like the dialogue, in trashy prose. As a character, Mad Bear is something of a self-promoter, although before his death in 1985 he apparently earned widespread recognition in the Native American community for his political mediating powers and his font of traditional spiritual knowledge. With a more lucid tone, this account of a medicine man's unusual life might have attracted a readership beyond fans of Boyd's previous works.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-75945-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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