A warning derived from hidden biblical codes should prove irresistible to Christian fans with a Da Vinci Code sweet tooth.
A work offers a numerological deciphering of the Book of Revelation.
The latest book from Torckler (The Millennial Code, 2012) takes 2014 as a pivotal year in human history. It was then that former government contractor Edward Snowden revealed the National Security Agency’s massive, global data-harvesting policies, which had been hidden from the public until then. This now constitutes, in Torckler’s mind, a sign of “the beginning of the end of the Christian churches’ legal freedom to operate as a morals-based church entity we’ve enjoyed and assumed with the full rights of tax freedom.” The author looks to the standard biblical sources for End of Days calculations, the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation. He hopes his elucidations will “switch the light on” in his readers’ imaginations, alerting them to the possibility that the apocalyptic predictions made in Scripture might be coming true at this moment. The prerequisites for these revelations should be familiar to students of Christian eschatology: a charismatic dictator will be aided in his rise to power by a mega-city called Babylon (not to be confused with the historical city of the same name) and will bring the entire world under one despotic rule. Torckler, writing “not as a professor but as a poet,” sifts through biblical clues using a simple cipher that assigns a number value to each letter of the alphabet: 1 for a, 2 for b, etc. This cipher gives the author an obviously generous amount of interpretational leeway, and in the nature of such analyses, he makes the most of that latitude when rolling out his speculations (“beast is used fourteen times in chapter 13 and thirty-seven times in the book of Revelation”—and many pages of the like). Christian readers should find Torckler’s energetic prose engaging, and his underlying contentions about a looming global hive mind (he notes Google’s recent prediction that the entire world will be online by 2020) add contemporary spice to his conjectures.
A warning derived from hidden biblical codes should prove irresistible to Christian fans with a Da Vinci Code sweet tooth.Pub Date: July 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-4683-9
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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