A useful manual for Christians seeking to find the roots of their faith in Jewish Scripture.
In his nonfiction debut, Mapp tracks down and explicates threads of Christian prophecy in the Scriptures, operating under the familiar religious assumption that, as he puts it, “The entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is about Him.”
Mapp extensively explores the Old Testament, finding incidents and symbols that he contends foreshadow later happenings in the life and ministry of Jesus. He “decodes” these incidents—events ranging from the creation of Adam and Eve to the Flood and Noah’s Ark to the Israelites’ years of wandering in the desert—by overlaying them with Christian symbology. The author envisions most of the greatest Jewish prophets and leaders, from Isaac to Joshua to Moses, as precursors and archetypes of the Christ story, even when these connections are heavily conflicted. For example, Mapp (following many experts) attempts to find Christian parallels in the worldly, entirely human life of King David. “Of course, the type breaks down in a number of key aspects,” he concedes in this instance. Bible “decoding” accounts like Mapp’s typically make allowances of this kind. Although the author contends that “many notable Old Testament passages…forecast details of His life with amazing accuracy,” “amazing accuracy” would be for Jeremiah or Ezekiel to say, “In 1,025 years, a man named Jesus will be born in Bethlehem who will be the Son of God.” “Amazing accuracy,” in other words, requires no decoding. Instead of such clarity, explicators of Christian prophecy seem forced into the same kind of word games that Mapp plays in his book, sifting through Old Testament texts for phrases that can be applied to New Testament contexts. It’s a venerable practice (indeed, the authors of the four Gospels were the first to indulge), but Mapp’s efforts will probably fail to persuade his unconvinced readers that the Old Testament writers had Jesus in mind. Yet for devout Christians who place importance on the New Testament being the fulfillment of the Old (who have, in Mapp’s tidy phrasing, the “gladly held conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord”), this book provides a handy gathering of the most popular of these interpretations. As a bonus, Mapp’s readings of the New Testament—particularly the Gospel of St. John—are enjoyably nuanced.
A useful manual for Christians seeking to find the roots of their faith in Jewish Scripture.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5127-1040-3
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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