A spirited critique of contemporary Christianity that demands it become both more intellectually rigorous and inclusive.
Holland’s first book takes modern Christianity to task for philosophical and moral complacency. In his view, the way Christianity is currently practiced is a pervasive hypocrisy that undermines the true teaching of Christ. “The problem with Christianity is: Christians so scarcely resemble Christ in any way,” he writes. The argument begins with a Socratic call to accept one’s ignorance and eliminate the hubristic sense of certainty he believes permeates Christian thinking: “Christians are prone to supernaturally feel no need to check the validity of the knowledge they strongly revere.” Also, he contends that Christians tend to rely too heavily, and blindly, on scriptural text to settle every debate, missing opportunities for thoughtful reflection. This closed-mindedness has unfortunate moral consequences, leading to the intemperate condemnation, and exclusion, of whole groups of would-be Christians. The author focuses on the LGBT community and divorcés; the section devoted to the latter group includes an intensely personal account of the author’s own experience. There is also a chapter-length treatment of abortion, challenging the Christian prohibition of it. The causes of the decline of Christian practice and belief are many, but Holland singles out the corrupting influences of capitalism and denominationalism, or the fracturing of the Church into doctrinal cliques driven by a spirit of exclusion rather than spiritual unity. The author’s arguments, always provocative, sometimes falter when he paints with overbroad strokes, something he often accuses Christians of doing. For example: “The way Christians treat divorced persons is disgusting.” The title of the book, of course, is less than sympathetic to dissent. Also, while the discussion of biblical text is typically rigorous, some parts would have benefited from a more expansive scholarly consideration. The chapter devoted to capitalism should have discussed Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical in 2009, Caritas in Veritate, which presents a much more complex view of the relation between the church’s teaching and commerce. Still, Holland manages a timely, nuanced examination of the church’s excessive traditionalism and the ways its resistance to progress degrades its members’ spirituality.
A powerful, personal account of how the Christian church’s true message has become disfigured in modern times.
Pub Date: April 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615945842
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Walking Thru Ministries
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2014
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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