Tangled and murky, despite glimmers of a hopeful, alternative faith.
A chronicle of a progressive evangelical church that fell into infighting and eventual decline.
In a landscape that emphasizes rightward-leaning evangelicalism, New Yorker writer Griswold offers the counterpoint of a “radical evangelical” church. Founded by Gwen and Rod White in 1996, Circle of Hope had grown to four congregations in greater Philadelphia by the time the author began following them in 2019. The pastors helped their members overcome painful past religious experiences and performed acts of companionship and service in their gentrifying neighborhoods. Like countless other organizations, Circle of Hope lurched toward a crisis of identity in 2020, confronting both the pandemic and the nationwide reckoning with racist systems of oppression. As each pastor attempted to lead, their shared mission and collaboration began to fray, leaving the church at a precipice. A crucial conversation about the tension among personal devotion, social activism, and institutional loyalty sits at the center of Griswold’s text, especially meaningful in the current political environment. The author’s own history makes her an especially powerful voice, and she offers an engaging mix of sympathy and reserved skepticism. However, flaws in narrative structure and spotty details muddle the chronology and significance of each interaction between the pastors and other church leaders. Griswold devotes much attention to shifting alliances and personal slights whose impacts seem out of proportion to their presentation, leaving more profound and pertinent themes—racism, sexism, the blind spots of founders and leaders, and the relationship between political and religious identity—simmering under the surface. The author titles each chapter with the name of one of the pastors she profiles, but she presents an array of perspectives in each section, jumping back and forth among people and events along a relatively condensed timeline. This lack of clarity diminishes the impact of Griswold’s well-intentioned investigation.
Tangled and murky, despite glimmers of a hopeful, alternative faith.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780374601683
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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