Lehmann makes an important and timely point, which is that American religion has always been about money.
A lively study of how the prim Puritans of old, “tireless strivers after divine favor and sticklers for political order,” became the mega-churchy materialists of today.
The timeworn American Protestant form of discourse is the jeremiad. Bookforum co-editor and Baffler senior editor Lehmann (Rich People Things: Real-Life Secrets of the Predator Class, 2011) avoids that approach in favor of a full among-the-money-changers attack. Those money-changers, sticklers for authority and hierarchy, turn out to be the real subject of his book, from John Winthrop’s apologies for inequality to his latter-day heirs. Although they profess to render unto Caesar, many of the leaders of the religious right are Caesar, and their Money Cult, as Lehmann dubs it, equates wealth with spiritual value. Joel Osteen and other dialing-for-dollars preachers have become ascendant in the metamorphosis of the “baser materials of competitive capitalist self-assertion into a kind of saving grace.” What’s more, by the author’s account, they’ve carried the mainstream with them in this transmutation; the Sermon on the Mount notwithstanding, the dominant view now is that what matters is to come out with the most toys. Lehmann notes that the idea of prosperity promised by the First Awakening, with God providing all that one needs, is very different from the “transcendant abundance” of today, with God providing a shiny new car, a lovely home entertainment system, and enough fine clothes to make the fastidious Osteen, who “believes that God…has selected your car according to his will,” proud. Lehmann is careful to document his claims as progress, and though a supporter of the religious right might take issue with the general tenor of his argument, his observations are unimpeachable. One in particular concerns the rich irony attendant in an atheistic social Darwinism, the champion of laissez faire capitalism, becoming the governing creed of the ultrareligious, with no rival movement to contest it.
Lehmann makes an important and timely point, which is that American religion has always been about money.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61219-508-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
