More provocative than exacting, this re-evaluation of religious dogma will appeal to anyone who wants an intellectually...
Allsop’s theological treatise radically re-examines the Bible as a source of revelation and moral instruction, while reassessing the relationship it prescribes between God and man.
Writing in response to his crisis of faith, Allsop scours the Bible for a universally applicable doctrine and comes up empty. Instead, he finds a pastiche of apocryphal stories, irresolvable contradictions and some genuinely edifying moral lessons that only make sense when considered in their context. He adumbrates an interpretive approach that views biblical writing as the work of fallible human beings rather than the divinely inspired word of God. This leads to fundamental reconsiderations of basic church teachings like the divinity and resurrection of Christ, the intelligibility of the Apostles’ Creed, the nature of petitionary prayer and the promise of personal immortality. The author’s view that God refrains from directly intervening in human affairs functions as the crux of his attempt to wrestle biblical principles from their institutional misinterpretations. Allsop’s writing is admirably lucid, even breezy, for such a weighty topic. However, his tone sometimes becomes overly strident, frequently proclaiming too confidently what is “obvious to any reasonably careful reader.” Also, he has a tendency to present arguments as “personal reflections” rather than occasions for scholarly exegesis. Given that the nature of his topic depends on close textual analysis, the author should more frequently and rigorously engage the massive body of scholarship that presents alternatives to his often idiosyncratic readings. Finally, episodic excursions into political commentary about topics such as terrorism and environmental disaster are more distracting than edifying, not to mention dyspeptic—he refers to the “unfolding story of the human race” as a “black comedy.” Still, the author makes a moving argument for taking the Bible seriously, since it expresses “moral principles that resonate with our deepest sense of what is right and promises that meet our deepest longings.”
More provocative than exacting, this re-evaluation of religious dogma will appeal to anyone who wants an intellectually light, accessible introduction to scripture-based skepticism.Pub Date: June 30, 2006
ISBN: 978-1412029247
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The ever-popular and highly readable C.S. Lewis has "done it again." This time with a book beginning with the premise "God is Love" and analyzing the four loves man knows well, but often understands little, Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity, exploring along the way the threads of Need-Love and Gift-Love that run through all. It is written with a deep perception of human beings and a background of excellent scholarship. Lewis proposes that all loves are a search for, perhaps a conflict with, and sometimes a denial of, love of God. "Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?" To relate the human activities called loves to the Love which is God, Lewis cites three graces as parts of Charity: Divine Gift-Love, a supernatural Need-love of Himself and a supernatural Need-love of one another, to which God gives a third, "He can awake in man, towards Himself a supernatural Appreciative love. This of all gifts is the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true center of all human and angelic life. With this all things are possible." From a reading of this book laymen and clergy alike will reap great rewards: a deeper knowledge of an insight into human loves, and, indeed, humans, offered with beauty and humor and a soaring description of man's search for God through Love.
Pub Date: July 27, 1960
ISBN: 0156329301
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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