Ecclesiastical reformers and liberal Catholics will find much of value in these pages, which are certain to earn Cornwell...
A thoughtful account arguing that the Catholic Church has condemned itself to irrelevance and even extinction.
Cornwell is no stranger to controversy: his books Hitler’s Pope (1999) and The Hiding Places of God (1991) have been roundly condemned by bishops, cardinals, and conservative Catholic pundits for “journalistic malfeasance” at best and apostasy at worst, and he might count himself fortunate that the Inquisition is, for the moment, inactive. Still, as a former seminarian and doubtful (though not, he hastens to add in a long discussion of his bona fides, agnostic) Catholic, he is well positioned to offer this reasoned, liberal critique of the modern church, whose troubles are many and, he suggests, mostly self-inflicted. One of those troubles is the near-reactionary cult surrounding the present pope, whose “message, invariably, is to accuse the faithful of sinfulness in the conduct of their sexual and marital relationships.” Another is the church’s position on such matters as abortion, priestly celibacy, and the ordination of women, which have served to distance Rome from its non-fanatical constituencies. Still another is the church’s confused attempt to become hip and modern on some fronts; a recent English catechism, Cornwell observes, does not get around to mentioning Jesus until page 21 (and then to state what would seem to be obvious: “for Christians, Jesus is the person who is to be followed”), while liturgy has “become adulterated with admixtures from non-Christian religion and New Age beliefs and practices,” and once-important practices such as confession are all but forgotten. Cornwell’s solutions are as numerous as his criticisms, though sometimes a little less specific; chief among them is his insistence that true “pluralism” is the best remedy for “an exclusive and ever more hierarchical, male-oriented, centralized Church based on fear and mistrust.”
Ecclesiastical reformers and liberal Catholics will find much of value in these pages, which are certain to earn Cornwell still more demerits from the Holy See.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-03002-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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