A moving and insightful Christian chronicle.
A debut Christian memoir intertwines a faith narrative and a motherhood account.
The Bible is very much concerned with bodies, Shanks observes in her stirring, compassionate book, and a great majority of those are male. The Christian God is male; he sends his son for the salvation of humanity; and there is no escaping the ingrained sexism of the Old and New Testaments. Thanks to Christian dominance of Western society for the past 2,000 years, that sexism has entered into the very genetic makeup of the culture, setting up echoes of the Bible’s conception of women as secondary beings and the weaker sex, and combining those notions with all the modern trappings of patriarchal assumptions. “God values my body,” Shanks wryly observes, “if it is covered. If it is thin. If it is chaste. If it is flawless. If it is blemish-free. If it is pretty. If it is healthy. If it is young. If it is fair-skinned.” In 2018, she notes, only 11 percent of church congregations are headed by women, a number that’s scarcely changed since 1998. The stories that Christians hear from their earliest childhoods reinforce such disparities: With only a few exceptions, the heroes and villains of the Bible are all men, with women—and their bodies—most often relegated to the simplistic roles of temptress, goddess, or chattel. Shanks herself was raised in these traditions as a self-described “corn-fed Midwestern girl,” and the purpose of her book is to offer a counter-narrative to Christianity’s view of womanhood and motherhood. “God is bigger than the boxes we shove God into,” she writes, “and God created us bigger than the boxes we get shoved into.” Shanks argues that Christians miss out on the deeper meaning of their own Scripture by ignoring the feminine language and imagery present throughout. But it’s her running account of her own experiences as a mother that forms the book’s most compelling narrative thread. Female Christians—and particularly Christian mothers —should find these pages captivating.
A moving and insightful Christian chronicle.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-935205-28-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Fresh Air Books
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
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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