Straightforward, bold, easy reading. The author’s careful survey serves as a useful corrective to Dan Brown’s fiction, which...
Episcopal priest and prolific author Chilton (Rabbi Paul, 2004, etc.) argues that Mary Magdalene influenced early Christianity—but not by sleeping with Jesus.
When they hear the name Mary Magdalene, most people imagine a prostitute or, if they’ve read The Da Vinci Code, a secret lover of Jesus. Here, Chilton (Religion/Bard College) sets the record straight. The New Testament, he reminds us, tells us that Magdalene was possessed by seven demons, and Jesus healed her. The Gospels also depict her as the first person to get the news that he had been raised from the dead. Chilton further argues that Magdalene was the nameless woman who anointed Jesus just before his arrest and crucifixion. In his account, her early shaping of Christianity (in particular, its understandings of healing) was as crucial as that of Peter and other personal followers of Jesus. Because of its deep ambivalence toward women, the church—from its earliest days through the medieval period to the present—either ignored Magdalene or reduced her to a licentious vixen. No one knows when people started passing around the story that she was Jesus’ concubine, though heretics were punished for holding that view in the early-13th century. Chilton contrasts medieval church leaders, who were uncomfortable with the idea of a powerful woman shaping the faith, with Jesus himself, who embraced “the full feminine force of divinity.” The author not only examines orthodox Christianity’s treatment of Magdalene, he also looks at the Gnostics, some of whom held sacred a Gospel ascribed to her. But that legacy is ambiguous: The Gnostics’ Magdalene is both wise and hysterical, strong and submissive.
Straightforward, bold, easy reading. The author’s careful survey serves as a useful corrective to Dan Brown’s fiction, which seems to be taken as truth by an alarming number of people.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51317-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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