by Charlotte Allen ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1998
An ambitious but unsatisfying intellectual history of the quest for the historical Jesus by a contributing editor to Lingua Franca. Despite the subtitle, Allen’s point is actually that this quest reveals far more about those who engage in it than it does about a distant man from Galilee. Rejecting, for instance, theories that Jesus was black or a feminist, she writes, —the search for the ‘historical— Jesus in the end has yielded a figure who is not historical at all, and to whom historical reality is irrelevant.— She attempts to document the —historical quest— impulse in nearly all its incarnations in Western culture in the past 2,000 years, skipping from Roman emperors to German Romantics to contemporary iconoclasts like John Dominic Crossan. Along the way, we make some interesting incidental discoveries but get lost in the sheer weight of this undertaking. The author also neglects the larger question of why different philosophers, from wildly divergent cultural contexts, have resorted to the same demythologizing impulse again and again. There is surely a significant parallel, for example, in Thomas Jefferson’s careful trimming of all miracles out of his New Testament and the contemporary Jesus Seminar’s relentless pursuit of his authentic sayings. That said, some of her jagged chapters contain fruitful insights. Particularly intriguing is her discussion of Joseph Ernest Renan’s —cinematic Jesus,— a feminized, sensual creature whose portrayal benefited from Renan’s friendship with the lascivious Gustave Flaubert. Throughout, though, Allen’s tone is too harsh for her subjects, especially those still living. Elisabeth SchÅssler Fiorenza is ridiculed for presenting Jesus as —an androgynous personage of feminist leanings,— while other feminists —have re-constructed a re-imagined historical Jesus on the cross as a woman suffering from menstrual cramps.— There are some perceptive moments here, but the vast scope of the project and its occasional biases overshadow Allen’s obvious erudition.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-82725-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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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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by R. Crumb ; illustrated by R. Crumb ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 19, 2009
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.
The Book of Genesis as imagined by a veteran voice of underground comics.
R. Crumb’s pass at the opening chapters of the Bible isn’t nearly the act of heresy the comic artist’s reputation might suggest. In fact, the creator of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural is fastidiously respectful. Crumb took pains to preserve every word of Genesis—drawing from numerous source texts, but mainly Robert Alter’s translation, The Five Books of Moses (2004)—and he clearly did his homework on the clothing, shelter and landscapes that surrounded Noah, Abraham and Isaac. This dedication to faithful representation makes the book, as Crumb writes in his introduction, a “straight illustration job, with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes.” But his efforts are in their own way irreverent, and Crumb feels no particular need to deify even the most divine characters. God Himself is not much taller than Adam and Eve, and instead of omnisciently imparting orders and judgment He stands beside them in Eden, speaking to them directly. Jacob wrestles not with an angel, as is so often depicted in paintings, but with a man who looks not much different from himself. The women are uniformly Crumbian, voluptuous Earth goddesses who are both sexualized and strong-willed. (The endnotes offer a close study of the kinds of power women wielded in Genesis.) The downside of fitting all the text in is that many pages are packed tight with small panels, and too rarely—as with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—does Crumb expand his lens and treat signature events dramatically. Even the Flood is fairly restrained, though the exodus of the animals from the Ark is beautifully detailed. The author’s respect for Genesis is admirable, but it may leave readers wishing he had taken a few more chances with his interpretation, as when he draws the serpent in the Garden of Eden as a provocative half-man/half-lizard. On the whole, though, the book is largely a tribute to Crumb’s immense talents as a draftsman and stubborn adherence to the script.
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06102-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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