An all-inclusive reading of Christianity unlike any that readers may have encountered in Sunday school.
An intriguing interpretation of the Christian concept of the afterlife.
Biblical scholars have often characterized Jesus Christ’s repeated promise of the kingdom of heaven, one of the main tenets of Christianity, as a strictly either-or proposition. “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live,” Jesus tells his followers, and time after time (in Luke 3: 7-9 and Matthew 3:10, among other verses), he stresses that such salvation isn’t necessarily universal: Those who willfully reject Christian teachings will be denied heaven and cast into unending fire. This is about as unambiguous as any religious teaching gets, so DuRocher, in his debut, has his work cut out for him when he claims that there is no denial of heaven and that all human souls achieve salvation—the only question is how long it takes them to do it. Through patient and often very inventive readings of some of the New Testament’s most famous parables, the author develops what is essentially a new variation of traditional Christian theology—one that may strike virtually all Christian readers as nearly unrecognizable. “Long ago, there was no kingdom of heaven—there was no God,” he writes. “There was only hell. And hell was everywhere. Hell consisted of just two things: souls like us, and super dense matter.” In DuRocher’s view, souls who accept the way of Christianity join the family of God and Jesus and reach the kingdom of heaven in complete tranquility, and those who refuse experience purgative fire and torment but end up in heaven as well. Many further details— that God is mostly just a place, that Jesus is essentially the equal of his followers, and so on—resemble no known brand of Christianity and occasionally read like discussions of quantum field theory (“[A] single soul may have inside of itself many—perhaps trillions of—bits of sin energy”). However, if the main goal of the author’s energetic, likable book is to make readers think, it succeeds admirably.
An all-inclusive reading of Christianity unlike any that readers may have encountered in Sunday school.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 269
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
A new convert to the game of football, Oppenheimer (Private Demons, 1988) decided to observe, record, and analyze the daily activity of her son's 1988 Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School team. Like the team's season, the results are mixed. Toby, senior offensive lineman in only his second year, didn't like the idea: ``What seventeen-year-old wants his mother hanging around a locker room?'' The BCC Barons and head coach Pete White, meanwhile, felt there was reason for optimism despite going 5-5 in 1987, their best record in years. ``Win 8 in '88 and go to state!'' was the battle cry. The talent at this ethnically diverse, affluent suburban school included a 300-lb. center, a 5'-6'' Korean linebacker, a swift Jamaican running back, and an assortment of blacks, Asians, and white kids more inclined toward soccer. It wasn't always a comfortable mix. As Oppenheimer follows their progress, she scrutinizes their attitudes toward one another and the coaches, toward winning and losing, their sex lives, and their use of drugs and alcohol. Fighting off her own anxieties—``Zen and the art of football parenting''—about her son, she rarely inserts herself in the picture but allows the boys to speak in their own, often inarticulate, tiresome way: But I'm, like, okay, so I go, and he goes.... There's a disappointing opening game; a racist coach (``black kids...were more arrogant, tougher, meaner''); a bitter, injury-rife, one-point loss to rival Einstein; the boys' cockiness following the homecoming victory; and, finally, the season-ending trouncing at the hands of ``mammoth, untouchable, abandon-all-hope'' Gaithersburg. The annual banquet, despite the 4-6 record, would toast individual achievements and look toward next year. At times self-conscious and shrill (the locker room, ``a place for the ancient rites of grabass'') and at other times perceptive, but Oppenheimer never quite puts it all together. Rather like missing the point after.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-68754-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
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