A stern but friendly treatise on the obligations of faith.
A passionate series of chapter-long reflections on the true nature of the Christian calling.
In his nonfiction debut, Aragon continues a long Christian tradition that began with the epistles of St. Paul. He transforms a series of Scripture lessons, originally designed for use in prisons, into a handbook for an intense, renewed personal faith, rather than “passive fellowship,” which he warns is the false premise of too much major-denomination Christianity. The Christian faith, he says, is not, in fact, a religion, but rather a “bona fide intimate relationship with the Godhead.” In order to experience it, he asserts, the faithful must be willing to “exchange the worldly things that hold the affections of life” for a straightforward, wholesale life of faith. He deals with the subject of prisoners, who have, in many cases, faced the rock bottom of their lives; to these and other readers, he offers kindly but hard-line testimony about what true, nondogmatic Christianity requires from those who seek its mercy: total surrender. “Let’s get rid of that religious pacifier that has put the body of Christ into a deep sleep…and get the courage to make the choice to return to the true teacher and tutor, the Holy Spirit,” he writes. He earnestly calls for Christians to “imitate and duplicate” the union that Jesus Christ had with his Father, and stresses that all the faithful need to do so is to hold the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit inside their own hearts. To help that process, Aragon provides a great many learned, readable scriptural analyses throughout this book, including “Dispelling Religious Myths about the Kingdom” and “Removing the Hurdles of Entering the Kingdom.” These textual lessons will be valuable to Bible study groups, and Aragon’s frank, searching account of his own personal interpretations of Christianity’s heart will interest all other believers.
A stern but friendly treatise on the obligations of faith.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4917-1472-0
Page Count: 244
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 8, 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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