A strongly worded and empathetic call for Christians to accept “the counsel of God” in all things.
A debut Christian manual exhorts believers to put their total trust in God.
Smith’s passionately written book features a series of hard-won spiritual lessons and insights revolving for the most part around what the author sees as the material world’s inherent tendency to distract and deceive. Christians, she urges, must always strive to utilize a different kind of seeing—they should navigate through the temptations and degradations of the world using not the gauge of normal life, but an all-encompassing trust in God’s guidance. “When we are focused on Him, we are free to walk and exercise the equipping that we receive from Him,” Smith writes. “Keeping our thoughts focused on Him is faith in action because we are placing our trust in Him and not walking by what we see.” As God’s children, she insists, believers should be motivated and led by the Holy Spirit in their spiritual journeys through a fallen realm beset with “a host of hassles.” The author frankly acknowledges the complex modern world and its demands, but her emphasis throughout her book is on imploring her fellow Christians to rely on God to overcome those difficulties. One of the main strengths of Smith’s faith narrative is its sympathy; she returns often to the fallible experiences of her readers in which they may feel sorely tried, as though they were standing alone in a godless society. In countering these emotions, she uses personal convictions and well-chosen Scriptural quotations to remind her readers that “God works from within” and that therefore, the inner dimension is the place to start in renewing the strength of their faith. She advocates focusing on the “still small voice” that can steer readers even when they feel most forsaken. Many of these encouragements are standard fare for Christian guides of this type, but they’re no less powerful for their familiarity when they’re presented this energetically.
A strongly worded and empathetic call for Christians to accept “the counsel of God” in all things.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-8921-8
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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