A richly detailed book of much scholarly interest to students and practitioners of church-based social activism.
Intellectual history of Martin Luther King Jr.’s forebears in the tradition of social gospel and how he extended their work into the political sphere.
The social gospel, or what we might now more broadly call liberation theology, paired questions of religion with questions of social justice, taking Protestantism off the pulpit and into the streets. As much-published scholar Dorrien (Religion/Columbia Univ.; The New Abolition: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel, 2015, etc.) writes, the Progressive- and New Deal–era social gospel leaders who preceded King “earned degrees from elite universities that gave no thought of hiring them as professors.” As such, segregated from white academic audiences, they forged their own intellectual traditions, blending sociology, political science, theology, and other disciplines. Some of the significant figures included Mordecai Johnson, who, in the face of opposition, helped make Howard University into a center of civil rights activism, wielding the law school as a sharp instrument in the 1930s; Adam Clayton Powell Sr., who helped dismantle white power politics in Harlem, “rallying Harlemites against Tammany misrule” and preaching a sometimes-heretical view of the Bible that “rejected all versions of substitutionary atonement”; and Bayard Rustin, a strong advocate of the Gandhian principles that would inform King’s movement, joining with “prophetic black church Christianity” and other strains of thought. Dorrien capably shows how these strains came together into a coherent whole to demand, with great moral authority, equality of opportunity for all citizens. That movement, writes the author, was not without critics on the left as well as the right—e.g., one activist who believed that the involvement of middle-class blacks and liberal white allies “was establishment liberalism celebrating itself.” If not entirely successful, though, Dorrien notes, King’s version of the social gospel movement remains relevant today, with later interpreters such as Cornel West, John Lewis, and Jesse Jackson carrying on the struggle in the political and theological realms.
A richly detailed book of much scholarly interest to students and practitioners of church-based social activism.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-300-20561-9
Page Count: 632
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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