A worthwhile compilation of daily readings for Christians who believe in prosperity theology.
This third installment of a series offers 90 days of proclamations and Scriptures centered on affirming God’s blessings in readers’ lives.
According to Coker (God’fessions 2, 2015, etc.), an associate pastor of a Nigerian megachurch, Christians should stop thinking of “confession” as a negative term that acknowledges one’s shortcomings before God. Instead, the word should be reinterpreted to mean “to repeatedly and continually say a thing in order to achieve a desired end.” Just as God spoke the world into existence in Genesis and Jesus performed miracles through the mere uttering of words, so can readers who are made in God’s own image use their statements to “create, re-create, change, prohibit, and allow things” in their lives. Each of the author’s daily declarations uses proclamations, affirmations, and Scriptures—all of which are to be spoken out loud by readers—to summon life-changing miracles and transformations. These assertions cover a variety of topics, including casting out fear, obtaining wisdom, discovering one’s purpose, and, most commonly, achieving “victory” in all aspects of life, including attaining prosperity. For example, in Coker’s typical grandiose style, one daily pronouncement encourages everyone to embrace the idea that “I am born to reign and created for dominion; greatness is attracted to me. I win always, and everything is working for me.” Another reading announces: “I am wiser than my peers…I am immune to failure, and success is attracted to me.” For Christians of Pentecostal and Charismatic traditions that embrace prosperity theology, the author provides concise, potent daily affirmations that focus on the creation of wealth, success, and wisdom. Alternately, many mainline Christians may find his self-help theology off-putting in its constant emphasis on bringing blessings solely to individuals and their friends and families. Christians who follow traditions that embrace self-denial and suffering as a means to experience God will also not find a place in Coker’s daily readings. Moreover, the author is much less concerned with theological exegesis and the doctrinal implications of his statements than he is with their intended power to radically change the lives of his readers.
A worthwhile compilation of daily readings for Christians who believe in prosperity theology.Pub Date: June 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5462-3992-5
Page Count: 196
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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