An imaginative but somewhat stilted portrait of a mechanistic yet gushingly self-aware world.
Divine grace begets astrophysics in this grandiose cosmological fantasia.
Ruetz, a Catholic priest and eco-communitarian, offers this fable as a mythic reconciliation of Christian-ish themes with scientific theories of the Big Bang and evolution. In the beginning, it seems, there was a Quaternity of one God in four Persons: Elohim, his wife Sophia, their son Dabar and a feminine Holy Spirit called Ruah. Their heavenly bliss needs constructive outlets, and before you can say “Through our ecstatic love, we will create space-time as a home in which these possible new creations will live,” a 100-trillion-trillion-degree “red bubble-womb” erupts. As the new universe cools, the laws of physics takes over, anthropomorphized by a Disneyesque cast of talking subatomic particles, including the squabbling trio of Quarkie, Quarko and Quarkoff and an alliterative photon named Photie. (Sample soliloquy: “Felicitous, faithful friends, potent perseverance calls you to fastidious fidelity.”) They conduct us on a 15 billion-year narrative in which gas clouds coalesce into galaxies and heavy atomic nuclei are synthesized in supernovae and they gravitate to the nascent Earth. Despite the long-winded dialogue, Ruetz’s fable imparts interesting lore about the developing universe at a level that young readers can digest. Unfortunately, kids and adults may get lost in the story’s second half, which bogs down in details of molecular biology—“First, let us build an RNA messenger made of nucleotide bases from our free-floating raw materials and RNA bases”—as loquacious atoms plan the evolution of bacteria into eukaryotic cells. Throughout, Ruetz blends theology into the science: the fundamental forces of physics are but elaborations of a primordial impulse toward love and fellowship, while free will makes the cosmos open-ended rather than deterministic (dangerously so for a hydrogen atom whose sinful pride draws him toward a black hole). Neither scientists nor religious traditionalists are likely to be swayed by Ruetz’s vision, but it may resonate with those of a determinedly ecumenical mindset.
An imaginative but somewhat stilted portrait of a mechanistic yet gushingly self-aware world.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-1440188404
Page Count: 388
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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