Despite this study’s striking and provocative scholarship, many readers will likely be put off by its bombastic style.
A new interpretation of the Bible challenges both its detractors and apologists.
The Bible is notorious for its internal contradictions, which critics take as a reason to reject its revelatory authority and defenders refuse to acknowledge. The Gatekeeper (The Gospel Matrix, 2015) adopts a different exegetical approach. The author concedes that there are, in fact, numerous inconsistencies but claims that they are all purposeful, inserted in order to point audiences in the direction of a higher truth. To understand the experiential value of these incongruities, a literal interpretation must be discarded in favor of one that accepts the allegorical character of the Bible. The author’s tour of the Bible is a thorough one, covering all the Gospels, the book of Revelation, and Paul’s letters, to name a small but central sampling. The Gatekeeper contends that the Christian church is really a corrupt institution, something revealed when the Bible is properly understood. The author revisits key passages, especially regarding the “body of Christ” and the “bride of Christ,” to tease out their correct meanings. One of the chief arguments of the book is an epistemological one—humanity is caught in a “matrix” that occludes unfettered access to objective reality, but the time is fast approaching when the truth can be fully disclosed. That truth will include the transcendence of the shallow vision of God as a distinct person who governs humans in favor of an all-pervasive intelligence. The Gatekeeper’s erudition is impressive, including the author’s grasp of the Bible as well as the scholarly commentary devoted to it. In addition, The Gatekeeper’s aims are not only ambitious, but are also exercised with great spiritedness—he openly challenges Bart Ehrman, a pre-eminent critic of the Bible. But the whole work is written in a gratuitously hectoring, peremptory tone, dismissing disagreement as either evil or stupid; at one point he refers to intellectual competitors as “archontic parasites.” Furthermore, the author never tires of informing the reader how revolutionary this book is, apparently a fount of sublime truth, a self-congratulatory conceit that quickly becomes tiresome.
Despite this study’s striking and provocative scholarship, many readers will likely be put off by its bombastic style.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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