Brave and refreshingly open-minded.
The searching, intelligent account of a gay man's experiences growing away from God and into a thoughtful and humane atheist.
Religion blogger Stedman first heard the term "faitheist" used by a fellow atheist to disparage Stedman’s tolerance for the religious beliefs of others. In this book, he reclaims this misunderstood concept for himself and other like-minded individuals. Stedman embraces the faitheist label because it clearly shows his interest in “putting 'faith' in my fellow human beings and our shared potential to overcome the false dichotomies that keep us apart.” He began his religious explorations as a young teenager, not long before his parents divorced and he became aware of his homosexuality. However, he soon found out that the born-again Christianity to which he had dedicated himself shunned homosexuality. Stedman desperately tried to hide his orientation and “pray the gay away.” His mother took him to see a minister who validated Stedman and gave him hope that he could still have a positive relationship with God. By the time he entered college, however, his religious fervor was gone, and he had declared himself an atheist. Nevertheless, he still sought to understand religion, both intellectually and through community interfaith work. The more he delved into the deeper questions of religion and morality, the more he saw the commonalities he shared with men and women of faith. He also realized that too many atheists were demonizing "those with different metaphysical beliefs" in the same way others had demonized him for his homosexuality. Stedman concludes that greater understanding and tolerance for religious diversity is possible, but only by rehumanizing the "other" through "intentional encounter[s] with difference.”
Brave and refreshingly open-minded.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1439-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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