A spirited and comprehensive overview of the scriptural foundations of Christianity.
A detailed guidebook examines modern Christian faith and practice.
Goulder-Frick intends her nonfiction debut to be both an introduction to the concepts and implementations of Christianity for newcomers to the faith and a reference tool for established believers. The book addresses four stages in readers’ spiritual lives—unbelief, belief, commitment, and discipleship—employing clear prose buttressed by copious Scriptural citations to outline the core beliefs of Christianity. These include the nature of the Trinity, the character of Jesus as both teacher and Messiah, and the precepts of Christian tolerance, charity, and self-denial: give to the poor, help the downtrodden, sublimate one’s wants to the needs of others, etc. The entire gamut of Christian subjects is covered in satisfying detail, with pertinent biblical quotations assembled on such topics as hell, angels, Satan, the mechanics of prayer, the afterlife, original sin, the personality of God, and the specific teachings of the church on such subjects as birth control and abortion. The author’s assessment of most of these topics hews to a fairly strict literal interpretation; progressive Christians will read pronouncements like “Any sexual activity that is not between a man and a woman is sin” throughout the text. And Goulder-Frick’s moral certainty occasionally prompts her to overreach: when she asserts that the teachings of Christianity provide the “criteria for right vs. wrong” throughout the world, for instance. Or when she writes that “one simply has to look up” to see that the universe is overseen by the Christian God; such claims obviously fail to take into account either the world’s atheists or its billions of believers in non-Christian deities. The author’s obvious target audience is ill-served by naïve assertions that the truth of Christianity is self-evident. But in the ambition, sweep, and comprehensiveness of the rest of the book’s teachings, Christians should find a gold mine of useful information and synthesis, with plenty of textual references to track down.
A spirited and comprehensive overview of the scriptural foundations of Christianity.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9969855-4-3
Page Count: 542
Publisher: The Key Ministry
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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