Next book

GENEROUS LIVES

AMERICAN CATHOLIC WOMEN TODAY

A smooth weave of oral histories and scholarly analysis that shows that Catholic women are just like everyone else. Redmont, Northeast regional director of the National Conference of Catholics and Jews, draws on interviews with 110 women, aged 17 to 92, rich and poor, conservative and liberal, single, married, divorced, and widowed. The survey, then, is small but ``purposefully inclusive.'' By and large, these Catholic women echo the national mood: evenly divided on abortion, to mention the hottest topic, but with the same appealing idiosyncracies that one finds in America at large (pro-choice Republicans, pro-life feminists). Most oppose capital punishment, are uneasy about homosexuality, reject radical feminism but have a deep respect for the ``innate wisdom'' of women. On Catholic-oriented issues, where Redmont places most of her attention, results run the same. Half of the women pray regularly, go to confession, claim a devotion to Mary; the rest shrug off these traditional practices. The loudest argument with the Church is about divorce; the highest praise, for the Church's work against poverty. Two surprises: widespread ambivalence over ordination of women, and support from many Hispanics for the Church's ban on birth control. The oral histories have the ease and directness of chats with a backyard neighbor. Marlene Jones says that ``Jesus is the man who got me through my divorce.'' Nancy Vitti thinks the Pope ``should stay home a bit.'' Sylvia Park, 92, says, ``I thank God every day that I had my religion.'' Redmont celebrates this ordinariness and suggests that Catholicism is the most feminine of religions, pointing out that the belief that ``God is present in the ordinary life is characteristically Catholic. It is also characteristically female.'' An admirable survey, above all for its refusal to follow an ideological agenda. As such, far more valuable than recent agitprop on similar topics, such as Sherry Anderson and Patricia Hopkins's The Feminine Face of God (1991).

Pub Date: Sept. 18, 1992

ISBN: 0-688-06707-7

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992

Next book

THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

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

Next book

THE ART OF SOLITUDE

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

Close Quickview