by Charles J. Chaput ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 21, 2017
An optimistic account of the church’s future in the midst of a secular age.
What are American Catholics to do in today’s troubled world?
Chaput (Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life, 2008, etc.), the archbishop of Philadelphia, urges Christians, and Catholics in particular, to be hopeful in the midst of a changing culture. Honing in on Western and especially American society, the author posits that irreparable changes have occurred in recent decades that change how the church must view its role; though times are more difficult for the Christian faith and for the institution of the church, believers can still live with hope. Chaput begins with a healthy dose of doom and gloom, describing social ills and a general drift away from faith or even from shared value systems. He writes at length about the sea change in sexual ethics, from the advent of the birth control pill to issues surrounding gender fluidity. These changes, he asserts, have challenged society at its very core. “Ultimately,” he writes, sexual freedom “leads to questions about who a person is and what it means to be human.” Likewise, excessive relativism in our education system means that “moral truths accessible to human reason, such as those in the Ten Commandments, don’t really qualify as true.” However, “for Christians, of course, truth is a Person,” Jesus Christ, and this is what separates believers from the secular world surrounding them. Chaput goes on to encourage readers to embrace hope as a worldview and as a lifestyle. He points to the Beatitudes as a set of rules Christians can and should follow in a world that is ambivalent or even hostile to their beliefs. Finally, he encourages believers to pass on their faith in confidence and with purpose. Chaput is an erudite writer, and his work includes a wide array of quotations and allusions. His observations on Western culture are keen, and while secular-minded readers will find plenty to argue with, his writing will appeal to a wide Christian audience.
An optimistic account of the church’s future in the midst of a secular age.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62779-674-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
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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by Albert Camus ; translated by Justin O'Brien & Sandra Smith
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by Albert Camus ; translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy & Justin O'Brien
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by Albert Camus translated by Arthur Goldhammer edited by Alice Kaplan
by Stephen Batchelor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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