A provocative, if brief, account of Jesus’ thoughts on a spiritually sound church.
A call for a revival of committed Christianity that draws upon the book of Revelation.
According to debut author Perkins, we’re living in dangerous times, and more than ever, people need the strength and guidance of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, he says, today’s churches are spiritually hobbled and unequal to the exigent task before them. The author mines the second and third chapters of the book of Revelation to interpret Jesus’ vision of what a successful church should be like. Jesus addressed seven different churches in Asia Minor, Perkins notes, providing an appraisal of each one’s virtues and vices; for example, the church at Thyatira was a “compromising” one that too easily accommodated “outside influences” and succumbed to temptations. In one of the author’s most telling examples, the church of Sardis is proclaimed by Jesus to be “dead”—emptied of spiritual energy, due to inert self-satisfaction. The author takes readers on a tour of all seven of Jesus’ letters and ultimately concludes that the real problem lies not with a church’s bureaucratic structure but with its members. Each Christian should strive to be a healthy church unto himself, he writes, and a beacon of hope to others in imitation of Christ. This is a brief study of fewer than 100 pages, but Perkins writes with clarity and informal verve throughout. That said, the topical references seem a bit dated at times; at one point, for example, he complains about the “debt-ceiling fiasco during the Obama administration.” Also, the analogies that he draws between the book of Revelation and modern times are overly broad—why, precisely, are today’s churches so vulnerable to spiritual corruption, according to Perkins, while New Orleans churches of the 1970s and ’80s were not? Finally, the author never establishes why the world is in a greater crisis now than it was during, say, World War II. The premise of the book is astute—that if one wants to build a healthy Christian church, one should consult the counsel of Christ himself—but its execution could have been more searching and rigorous.
A provocative, if brief, account of Jesus’ thoughts on a spiritually sound church.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-5592-1
Page Count: 108
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2017
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
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