A commendable effort well-executed.
A call for compassion based on the teachings of the world’s religions.
After a fruitful career studying and writing about comparative religion, Armstrong (The Case for God, 2009; etc.) attempts to synthesize what she has learned in one manageable and practical volume. Her goal is to increase awareness that compassion is at the heart of all major world religions and to encourage her readers to practice this virtue. Compassion, she writes, is “an attitude of principled, consistent altruism,” most often expressed in some variation of the Golden Rule. As the unifying tie of the world’s religions, compassion is the one practice most able to bring about peace in the world. Armstrong structures her book as a 12-step guide toward becoming a more compassionate person. The author begins by giving readers the task of learning more about compassion and how it is practiced across the world and across time. She exhorts readers to become more self-aware and to love oneself (“The Golden Rule requires self-knowledge; it asks that we use our own feelings as a guide to our behavior with others”), and she encourages the realization of how little we really know about other people and other cultures, and to use that insight to more fully practice empathy. Armstrong also calls upon society to practice more effective communication: “We need to ask ourselves whether we want to win the argument or seek the truth, whether we are ready to change our views if the evidence is sufficiently compelling.” Her steps conclude with the appeal to love one’s enemies. Though the author realizes that her book may not result in a newly enlightened populace, she hopes to inspire readers to at least begin the process of becoming more compassionate. For those committed to the task, she cautions that “the attempt to become a compassionate human being is a lifelong project.” As always, Armstrong weaves together the teachings of diverse religions in a graceful, approachable manner.
A commendable effort well-executed.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59559-1
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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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