A gentle, understatedly wise collection of reflections on issues of modern Christian faith.
An award-winning television producer and pastor collects letters she’s sent to spiritual inquirers far and wide.
Sorg’s warm, welcoming debut nonfiction work continues a millennia-old tradition of spiritual discussion and instruction in apostolic letters to the faithful. She clearly intends these missives to be more conversational than official—the type of advice, encouragement, and gentle reproof that a pastor might dispense to departing congregants after a Sunday service. Her dispatches cover a broad range of faith-related topics, and they’re united by the author’s unaffected, straightforward manner, something she sees as missing too often from official church pronouncements: “One of the many symptoms of the institutional church’s current illness,” she writes, “is that its language is tired, trite, over-used and meaningless.” Her approachable language reinforces her message about the importance of clarity in matters of faith, a note she strikes throughout this brief book: “Knowing what we believe and how that gets worked out can make our lives richer, more fulfilling, and a whole lot easier,” she writes, adding that such inner certainty is preferable to “flying by the seat of the pants.” Her correspondents ask a variety of questions, involving many aspects of living a faithful life in modern times, and her responses are keyed to the humanity of her audience. She reminds them periodically of their intimate connection to the fount of their faith—that Jesus “intimately understands” what it is to be human: “We are connected not only to the One who created us but also to the One who is us,” she writes, adding that “we can’t cop out and say God just doesn’t get it.” The restorative, encouraging tone is consistent in these letters. Overall, they put a human face on pastoral care by stressing the individuality of religious experience, which can be as dramatic as a revelation or as quiet as a private voice. Obviously intended for a progressive Christian readership, Sorg’s book will give them some sound, unobtrusive guidance.
A gentle, understatedly wise collection of reflections on issues of modern Christian faith.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490852263
Page Count: 134
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: March 30, 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
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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