A comprehensive prayer manual that takes a maximalist approach.
A debut guidebook on how to pray more successfully.
Most Christians acknowledge the importance of prayer, but that doesn’t mean that they’re praying as much as they should be, according to Washington, the senior pastor of Albuquerque, New Mexico’s Abundant Life Community Church. Prayer isn’t only for Sundays or moments of extreme stress, he says, noting that those who pray infrequently can’t expect God to answer them. Christians should be praying a lot more, he asserts, and he wrote this book to tell them how, asserting that “Effective prayer is the key element to rising above a mediocre, average, or ordinary Christian life.” The author examines not only prayer’s purpose, but also its mechanics, dynamics, and content. He offers extensive quotations from Scripture and a bit of theological discussion as he lays out a regimen that’s anything but casual. Readers may think they know how to pray, but do they know the “Seven Principles of Physical Needs” or the “Five Essentials for Good Stewardship”? What about the “Six Weapons of the Armor of God?” At more than 400 pages in length, the book presents a much more complex view of prayer than most people have likely experienced before. Still, Washington’s deep dive is friendly and accessible, without many of the admonishments that one might expect. That said, the author is a fan of lists and acronyms, which begin to feel cloying, and some lines feel devoid of real substance: “Spiritual Purity + Effective Prayer + Effective Praise = Power for Effective Living. This equation also gives the order or normal progression of events that result in power for effective living.” Washington mostly bases his interpretation of God on biblical accounts, but the rather needy vision of the deity that emerges may not mesh with many readers’ beliefs. For readers who are looking to increase the intensity of their prayer, however, it’s difficult to imagine a more enthusiastic guide.
A comprehensive prayer manual that takes a maximalist approach.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-2505-6
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
