A comprehensive, if not groundbreaking, exploration of religious healing.
A book surveys 1,800 years of Christian doctrine and practice related to miracle healings.
King (co-author: God Speaks, 2017) has childhood memories of attending tent revivals. When he entered the ministry, he prayed for healing in Kansas City, Missouri, at the World Revival Church, where he is a pastor. His exhaustive volume on healing is the result of 16 years of study, as the copious footnotes attest. King is wise to acknowledge the difficulty of evaluating miracles objectively: “It is a tremendous challenge to assess religious healing scientifically.” But he holds that “humanity consists of more than mere fluids, tissue, and bone.” He begins in 100 C.E. with Roman sources and rabbinical stories before proceeding to early Christian apologists, such as Justin Martyr and Origen. While there was a tradition of Greek healing cults, some figures, like Clement of Alexandria, countered that “suffering could be beneficial.” Healing is mentioned in the Apocrypha, King notes, but it seems significant that it is not a part of the creeds. St. Augustine downplayed miracles, as did Martin Luther and John Calvin, who de-emphasized the supernatural, implying that a faith based on miracles was second-rate. All the same, these leading lights did not oppose healing, and the tradition continued. Practitioners of “Radical Holiness,” which emerged from Methodism in the 1880s and fueled Pentecostalism, were known for “brusque tactics”: Maria Woodworth-Etter sent sufferers into trances or swoons while Smith Wigglesworth, a working-class Yorkshire plumber, had the alarming habit of striking ill people in the afflicted areas. King makes a convincing case for healing being especially important in the 19th century due to the ineffectiveness of medicine at the time. This ambitious first volume of a series closes with what appeared to be a “waning of the Spirit” around the 1920s. The book’s thorough chronological tour and well-researched, relevant examples are in a suitably academic tone. But amid the long quotations from primary sources and other scholars, there aren’t many memorable lines from the author himself. Overall, this work is short on fresh analysis that could distinguish it from Morton Kelsey’s and Amanda Porterfield’s classic studies.
A comprehensive, if not groundbreaking, exploration of religious healing.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9992826-0-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Christos Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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