This exploration of spirituality via a look back at dad and the experience of easing a friend into death is right in sync with new directions in the self-help field. A prolific writer, Chernin (A Different Kind of Listening, 1994, etc.) is also a psychoanalyst who early in her career grabbed onto issues like body image, eroticism, bisexuality, and women's relationships with their mothers; her explorations of them brought her a dedicated audience. This small book uses her memories of her quiet and thoughtful father (as opposed to her noisy and assertive mother, whom she wrote about in In My Mother's House) as a springboard to reflections on the Meaning of Life. Her belief that ``we live in a universe built fundamentally upon spiritual values'' is not, she says, ``a fashionable idea,'' although, in fact, its current trendiness quotient is up there with those of Donna Karan and Web sites. Divided into three parts, Chernin's journey begins with a reminiscence of Saturday walks with her father, of his love for his garden, and of his ``small acts of kindness and concern,'' which may have had as much impact on her dreams of a socialist future as her mother's larger and more public efforts at political change. Next is a story of a woman dying of cancer. Chernin's efforts to help- -including a promise of assisted suicide, if necessary, and episodes of energy transfer from therapist to patient—led to a new agenda for the author, a desire to work with the dying. Third is the lure of a ``divine mother,'' a Hindu woman distributing her blessings in a small town in Germany. After a visit to Mother Meera, Chernin returns to her California home inspired to reconcile her legacies of political activism and spirituality. Perhaps enough spiritual sustenance for her but not enough for the reader. Tillers of spiritual soil need to dig much deeper than the author does here.
Pub Date: July 31, 1996
ISBN: 1-56512-100-7
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A generally superb collection of both traditional and unorthodox readings of the Book of Ruth. The biblical story of Ruth—the young Moabite widow who followed her Israelite mother-in-law, Naomi, to the Land of Israel, married her husband's kinsman, and became mother of the messianic line through her descendant, King David—is an intriguing one, especially for women, who find few active female role models in the Bible. Kates, and Reimer, both teachers of Jewish texts with doctorates in literature, have assembled 30 essays, poems, stories, and dramatic narratives by contemporary female scholars, authors, psychiatrists, rabbis, and poets. All the contributors bring their professional and personal experiences to their interpretations of the Ruth story: Some are subjective accounts, such as the joint effort (``Feminine Plurals'') of psychiatrists Roberta Apfel and Lise Grondahl—an older Jewish supervisor and her young Christian supervisee—who use the relationship between Naomi and Ruth to understand and enrich their own; others, like Tamar Frankiel's kabbalistic approach to the messianic lineage in Ruth (``Ruth and the Messiah''), are more strictly scholarly. Often the two aspects are combined: Cynthia Ozick's ``Ruth'' is one part personal reminiscence, three parts textual analysis. These autobiographical and scholarly pieces are nearly always more interesting than the vanilla literary retellings of the story that add little to the conventional understanding of the text, although Gloria Goldreich's inclusion of Ruth's sister-in-law, Orpah, in her ``Ruth, Naomi, and Orpah: A Parable of Friendship'' adds a beautiful dimension to the relationship of Ruth and Naomi. Aviva Zornberg's shiur, or oral lesson, ``The Concealed Alternative,'' stands out as the most unusual; she draws on ancient commentaries as well as on Kafka, Nietzsche, and Buber to present a compelling understanding of the concept of redemption in Ruth. Despite occasional redundancies—only natural given the 400 pages of commentary on a brief text—this book is absorbing and provocative.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-345-38033-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
This second volume of Meier's magisterial attempt to create a ``consensus document'' about the historical Jesus on which scholars of all faiths could agree makes some tantalizing assertions about Jesus' public ministry. Meier (New Testament Studies/Catholic Univ.) divides this successor to Volume One (subtitled The Roots of the Problem and the Person, 1991) into three parts: an examination of the pervasive effect on Jesus of the life and career of John the Baptist, whom Meier calls Jesus' ``mentor''; an analysis of the centrality to Jesus' message of the concept of the ``kingdom of God''; and an extended discussion of the historicity of Gospel accounts of Jesus' miracles, healings, and exorcisms. Meier uses John the Baptist's career as his starting point, asserting that Jesus not only accepted baptism from the charismatic preacher at the outset of his public ministry, but he also adopted John's themes of the imminent judgment of sinners and the need for reform and repentance as integral parts of his own message. Unlike John, however, Jesus emphasized the coming of the kingdom of God, which he represented as both an approaching eschatological event and, in a mystical way, as being present in the actions, beliefs, and fellowship of the community of believers: ``The kingdom of God is in your midst'' (Luke 17:21). Meier argues that Jesus' preaching of the heavenly kingdom was most manifest in his miraculous works, which Meier inventories in painstaking detail, dividing them into exorcisms, healings, raising of the dead, and ``nature'' miracles, such as walking on water and cursing the fruitless fig tree and causing it to wither. The author concludes that the power of Jesus' message arose from his actual historical fame as a miracle worker as well as from his moral teachings. Scholarly, carefully reasoned, and lucidly written, Meier's portrait of Jesus as a fiery, wonder-working prophet rather than the gentle teacher of Christian tradition may continue the controversy (with believers and nonbelievers alike) initiated in Volume One.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-46992-6
Page Count: 1055
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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