An appealingly urgent view of the way Christians can sanctify their relationship with God.
A debut Christian guide explores the redemptive power of the Holy Spirit.
John the Baptist in the Gospel of Matthew warns his followers not to mistake him for the one who’s coming. John baptizes people with water, but the Messiah will use the Holy Spirit and fire. In her slim handbook, Brizendine concentrates on this prediction as a promise and a way for her fellow fundamentalist Christians to conduct their own faith journeys. She urges them to take the risk of accepting the Holy Spirit into their own lives, even if that prospect frightens them. The “fiery furnace” of the Holy Spirit is their friend, she writes: “We should not fear it but embrace it.” In this engaging manual, she tells many stories from her own walk of faith and from the odyssey of a friend and mentor, who likewise had some dramatic personal encounters with the Holy Spirit. Brizendine does a remarkably smooth job of integrating the ordinary world into these tales of spiritual exultation. The sense that spiritual experiences are somehow walled off from everyday life (a common split vision in faith memoirs of this kind) is never present in these pages. Rather, this is a working-world, real-time urging on the author’s part for her readers to feel the “unquenchable, eternal, life-preserving” fire of the Holy Spirit in their own lives. Christians are in a transition period, she assures her audience, between the “law to grace” initiated by Jesus and the arrival of the kingdom of heaven. In her view, the fire of the Holy Spirit is provided as a source of strength for the faithful. In clear and enthusiastic prose, she often encourages her readers to embrace the full force of their religious beliefs. “You are a child of God,” she writes. “He has placed a powerful anointing on you and in you, and he wants to release it through you.”
An appealingly urgent view of the way Christians can sanctify their relationship with God.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973600-97-8
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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