A short but richly pragmatic approach to prayer.
Rowlett (Praying Together, 2002, etc.), a retired Methodist minister and author of four previous books about Christian devotion, offers a helpful, concise guide to prayer.
This book is written not only for readers who want to include prayer in the fabric of their lives, but also for study groups, and as such, it can provide a useful prayer framework. The author distinguishes between “primitive” concepts that locate the divine “out there somewhere” and her concept of a Christian God who knows the secrets of the human heart. “The heart has been described as the location of God’s presence,” Rowlett writes. “Perhaps because it has been thought of as the source of life, the core of a person’s being.” In a simple, clear and straightforward style, this brief book sets out precise prayer methodologies that can be used for many different circumstances and challenges in life. Each chapter focuses on a different type of prayer, and the author explores these approaches in some depth, enriching her discussion of prayer’s practical uses. The book then provides a series of prayer prompts that readers may use according to their own personal needs. Rowlett develops a careful methodology—a Benedictine way of using reading, reflection, response and contemplation to develop an active, engaged prayer practice. Although the author often provides examples of prayers from her Methodist background, she also draws from other sources, including the late German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rick Warren, the conservative pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. She also continually reflects on the challenges that contemporary Christian practitioners face in developing and nurturing prayer. “Careful listening is a challenge in the twenty-first century,” Rowlett writes, and she underscores the necessity of paying close attention to one’s inner counsel when establishing a regular prayer practice.
A short but richly pragmatic approach to prayer.Pub Date: June 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1449795153
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The ever-popular and highly readable C.S. Lewis has "done it again." This time with a book beginning with the premise "God is Love" and analyzing the four loves man knows well, but often understands little, Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity, exploring along the way the threads of Need-Love and Gift-Love that run through all. It is written with a deep perception of human beings and a background of excellent scholarship. Lewis proposes that all loves are a search for, perhaps a conflict with, and sometimes a denial of, love of God. "Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?" To relate the human activities called loves to the Love which is God, Lewis cites three graces as parts of Charity: Divine Gift-Love, a supernatural Need-love of Himself and a supernatural Need-love of one another, to which God gives a third, "He can awake in man, towards Himself a supernatural Appreciative love. This of all gifts is the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true center of all human and angelic life. With this all things are possible." From a reading of this book laymen and clergy alike will reap great rewards: a deeper knowledge of an insight into human loves, and, indeed, humans, offered with beauty and humor and a soaring description of man's search for God through Love.
Pub Date: July 27, 1960
ISBN: 0156329301
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
Hannah Arendt is one of the world's most profound political scientists: her scholarship is sterling, her philosophical- psychological insights staggering; two of her books Origins of Totalitariansim and Human Condition are among the few significant works in her field and our era. Whenever she publishes, it is an event. And although she is not at her best in this close study of the American and French revolutions and their meaning for the 20th century, still on every page we are in the presence of a mind of high individuality, great interest and intellectual integrity. It is her thesis that the Founding Fathers were faithful above all else to the ideal of freedom as the end and justification of revolution and thereby they assured its success. On the other hand, the Rousseau-Robespierre misalliance, the idea of the general will binding the many into the one, the transformation of the Rights of Man into the rights of Sans-Culotte, not only ultimately led to the Reign of Terror but also the whole catalogue of post-1792 ideological corruptions. The malhcurcux became the enrages, then the Industrial Revolution's miserables. And the Marxist Leninist acceptance of the new absolutism, which was done in the name of historical necessity and the name of the proletariat as a "natural" force, subsequently absolved both tyranny and blood baths as stages along the way... A powerful indictment and illumination, both immediate and enduring.
Pub Date: March 15, 1963
ISBN: 0143039903
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1963
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