An honest autobiographical account of a journalist’s return to faith on her own terms. As the religion reporter for the Dallas Morning News, Wicker has found she has to meet her subjects’ claims to faith with a mixture of respect, understanding, and a healthy dose of journalistic skepticism. Her own faith journey has been a rocky one. Raised a Texas fundamentalist within the narrow confines of the Southern Baptist tradition, Wicker was told what to believe and how to live—until a rebellious young adulthood led her away from the fold and into the paths of temptation. By her own admission, Wicker made some terrible choices, especially in love, and sank into a deep despair about ever changing her life. She experienced a moment of surrender in a department store when, as the Baptists of her youth would describe it, she gave her life over to God. Along the way, she met and married a man who taught her more about grace and unconditional love than a whole lifetime of sermons. Through that love and a rediscovery of the transformative, quiet power of prayer, Wicker became a self-accepting person who was then able to reach out to others for the first time. She also utilized this new grace in her professional life, seeking to understand how religious conviction has changed people’s lives in Dallas and beyond. Ultimately, Wicker was able to write a long, sympathetic feature story about the specter of her youth: the Southern Baptist Church. While she still disagrees with the pat answers sometimes espoused by down-home Texas Baptists, she realized while doing the story that they all had the same questions, and that the process of seeking might be the most important common denominator of all. Valuable not only for its frank, personal struggles with faith, but also for Wicker’s memorable interviews with religious folks of all persuasions.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-19272-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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