Next book

DO CHILDREN NEED RELIGION?

HOW PARENTS TODAY ARE THINKING ABOUT THE BIG QUESTIONS

The answer seems to be ``yes,'' although Fay (A Mortal Condition, 1983) so hedges her answers in this thoughtful but meandering discussion that some readers may close the covers more bewildered than before. This much is clear: Fay, an ex-Catholic, doesn't write for the majority of Americans who fit snugly into a traditional faith; she addresses herself to baby boomers who have abandoned their childhood religion but feel uneasy in a home emptied of God (a subsidiary target is boomers in cross-faith marriages). Fay raises issues that most child experts (e.g., Spock, Leach, Brazelton) fail to address: What do we tell Jack and Jill about God? (``Will it be a revisionist She or the ancient He, a black God, a white God, or one tactfully disembodied and color-free?''). What about death? Heaven? The meaning of right and wrong? Fay asks friends for their advice and opinions, describes her own Catholic upbringing, tells how she responds to the questions of her young daughter, Anna. She dips into child psychology and faith development, and sometimes loses herself in statistical material. Gradually, the real issue emerges: not whether kids need God, but whether their parents do. As anecdotes proliferate, the impression grows of a generation that has lost something precious and doesn't know how to recapture it. Some claim cultural rather than spiritual allegiance to a faith; others jump to new religions or try to jazz up old ones. In each case, it boils down to parents searching for their own religious bearings before passing the compass to their children—a risky business, as Fay points out (the next generation may inherit spiritual myopia, as well as an inability to swim in what Fay calls ``the symbolic stream of Western culture''). Too hesitant for baby boomers looking for clear-cut advice— and for just that reason, an intelligent presentation of the price of uncertainty.

Pub Date: March 15, 1993

ISBN: 0-679-42054-1

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993

Next book

THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

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

Next book

THE ART OF SOLITUDE

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

Close Quickview