Cut-and-dried comparisons of the world's great religions. Despite her misleading title, Eck (Comparative Religion/Harvard; Banaras, 1982) gives an account that's far more academic than personal. As a student of religion at Smith in the mid-60's, Eck jumped on the bandwagon and headed East—in every possible sense. Eventually she found herself in Banaras, one of the great shrines of India, where she spent several years studying the sacred texts and rituals of Hinduism. There, Eck suffered the usual confusions that beset Western Christians upon their first exposure to a coherent polytheistic culture, and—in an attempt to displace the ``true/false'' dichotomy that had been erected in her mind as much by Christian claims of universality as by Western ideas of rationalism—she seized upon the ecumenical movement then underway: ``The ecumenical movement became a new Pentecostal movement, gathering from a hundred countries, speaking dozens of languages, and miraculously experiencing the uniting energy of the Holy Spirit.'' Here, in that spirit of ecumenism, Eck gives us a little bit of everything—Hindu, Muslim, Christian, etc.—and tells us not so much what each religion is as what it resembles. But this approach can succeed only if guided by an originality and prescience that can highlight the unexpected patterns of familiar subjects—and, in this respect, Eck falls flat. No creed is examined in any depth; no belief is taken at face value; and every contradiction (between and within each religion) is explained away. There are some interesting historical asides, particularly in regard to the formation of the World Council of Churches, but these get swallowed up in platitudes. Intellectual meandering that eventually falls off the map. Eck, in the best ecumenical style, tries to reconcile contradictory beliefs by reducing them to their lowest common denominator- -seemingly without realizing that this robs them of imaginative force.
Pub Date: Aug. 28, 1993
ISBN: 0-8070-7302-4
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1993
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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