An intriguing, wide-ranging essay on some of the most contentious issues in modern Christianity.
In his debut, Miller identifies how modern attitudes in organized Christianity can turn off potential parishioners.
The author has had an on-again, off-again relationship with organized religion. In his young adulthood, he referred to himself as a “none,” since, although he still had faith, he didn’t feel at home in the Pentecostal Church. He couldn’t reconcile the teachings of the church with what he knew to be truth. Later, he discovered he enjoyed the connection of active worship and returned, although he still disagreed with certain teachings and practices. The author uses his personal history, detailed in the introduction, to identify what he sees as bothersome themes in organized Christianity and evaluates them in historical context. In an engaging scholarly essay, he draws on writings by Christian leaders from the years 100 to 1000; during that era, the Bible took official form, and church leaders calmly debated the tenets of the religion as they shaped it. Miller argues that many of Christianity’s most controversial positions are modern creations that wouldn’t have found support earlier in Christianity’s history. Early church leaders rejected an all-or-nothing view of the Bible, he asserts, and might have contested notions that the Bible must be taken literally, that Scripture trumps science, and that homosexuals and minorities are lesser humans. This personable, well-written book stands out for its numerous historical references. Despite its compelling style and well-reasoned arguments, however, it likely won’t win over readers who have opposing viewpoints.
An intriguing, wide-ranging essay on some of the most contentious issues in modern Christianity.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 110
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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