For those who follow intramural politics within the Catholic Church, a capably written examination of an organization that...
Its defenders characterize Opus Dei, that ultra-Catholic movement, as a knitting circle, its detractors as a dangerous cult. Allen, Vatican correspondent for National Catholic Reporter ,finds middle ground.
Opus Dei, or “God’s Work,” a conservative service organization founded in 1928 by the Spanish cleric (and now saint) Josemaría Escrivá, is resolutely closed to outsiders, and it takes work indeed to get in. Allen, whose Conclave (2002) was a prescient guide to the recent papal election, likens the organization to Guinness Stout in a world of Bud Lite, inasmuch as “it makes no apologies for either its many calories or its high alcohol content.” Critics hold that its doctrine can be a little content-free, mistrustful of ideas and long on pat solutions, and, thanks at least in part to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Opus Dei has a slightly sinister connotation to outsiders. Several controversies surround it. Does Opus Dei recruit? Do its leaders demand blind allegiance? Does it have an anti-Semitic element? Allen wanders through the orbits of the faithful and some of the fallen away to address such questions, chalking up good points (for instance, no Opus Dei priest has ever been accused of sexual abuse) while assessing weaknesses, including a body of doctrine that can seem confused, as when Escrivá declared in a homily that freedom entails absolute devotion “to the service of the truth which redeems, when it is spent in seeking God’s infinite love which liberates us from all forms of slavery.” Must freedom mean submission? And is Opus Dei dangerous? Probably not, one would conclude from Allen’s thoughtful consideration; it tends to square with the Catholic Church in its conservative declarations, but its influence may not extend much beyond its membership, which is about as large as the Australian diocese of Hobart, Tasmania.
For those who follow intramural politics within the Catholic Church, a capably written examination of an organization that controls as much wealth “as a midsized American diocese.”Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51449-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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