A sympathetic but clear-eyed look at the polite patriarchies that rule modern Christianity.
Jenkins examines the sexism of evangelical communities.
The author, a writer and preacher, concentrates on patriarchy, which she defines as “the ways men hold more power than women and are valued more highly.” This inequity has governed her dealings with her church: “Everything about my relationship with evangelicalism was influenced by my gender as a woman,” she writes, “especially as a woman in ministry.” She stresses early on that she’s not talking about the most extreme evangelical communities, which adhere doctrinally to the stark misogyny found in the Bible—as she puts it, she’s talking about nice people who are nonetheless operating in an unfair system. Jenkins chronicles her interactions with these nice people and nice congregations, starting in earnest with her undergraduate years at Stanford attending a nondenominational evangelical institution she calls Faith Bible Church, where people were kind and genuine. Jenkins had grown up in a church that endeavored to make its female members and pastors feel seen and respected; the change to the polite but lock-step patriarchy of other communities was jarring. These pages recount her growing awareness of church attitudes and her pointed reading of the Bible in search of counterbalancing teachings. “Because the Bible is not just full of patriarchal assumptions and mixed messages for women,” she writes. “It’s also full of liberation—if we’re looking for it.” Her analysis of familiar biblical characters, including Miriam, Pharaoh’s daughter, and the women in the parables of Jesus, is sharp and compelling, though it sometimes shows evangelical overreach, as when she writes, “Whatever she might have come to mean to us over two thousand years, though, Mary was a real historical human” (there is no historical verification for the Virgin Mary). But the energy and optimism in this text will be a pure gift to her fellow Christians yearning for a more enlightened church.
A sympathetic but clear-eyed look at the polite patriarchies that rule modern Christianity.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781958061404
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Apocryphile Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
