A positive, emotional, and straightforward manual on Christian coping strategies.
A Christian guide focuses on leaning on God during life’s rock-bottom moments.
The heart of Bernath’s sequel is a holistic call for readers to embrace the kinder and more uplifting aspects of the Christian faith. In a series of brief chapters, she draws on aspects of her own life, including intervals of heavy drinking and a rape she suffered during her college years, in order to illustrate the kinds of setbacks and tragedies her readers may likewise encounter. Throughout her book, she encourages her readers to follow the healing tenets of the Christian faith they share and to let those precepts guide them in dealing with other people. At one point, she asserts: “When we devalue those around us, we don’t treat them as God treats them. Devaluing others makes it that much easier for mistreatment or abuse to occur too—whether the abuse is physical, sexual, verbal, or in any of its other forms. The destruction in this world that comes from abuse results from someone not seeing another as valuable as God sees that person.” Each of the manual’s chapters offers open, lined space for readers to include their own thoughts and experiences. All of the heartfelt sections continue the narrative throughline of God’s wide-ranging compassion. Bernath deftly illustrates this mercy by sharing the fact that God “made himself real to me in a tangible way,” helping her to overcome the nightmares that plagued her childhood. “Darkness has no power over light, just as Satan has no power over God,” she writes. “Satan’s darkness cannot overcome God’s light.” Readers familiar with this kind of Christian inspirational literature will be better able to reconcile the contradictions here—by the author’s own theology, if God is always watching, then he observes myriad serious crimes and doesn’t intervene. Likewise, when she claims “God will never ask us to do something he isn’t also willing to do,” she’s overlooking the fact that God isn’t willing to worship someone. Still, her upbeat message of hope and compassion will appeal to Christian readers.
A positive, emotional, and straightforward manual on Christian coping strategies.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63195-282-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morgan James Faith
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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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