Dark money meets medieval thought in this intriguing exposé of American Catholicism and its rightist discontents.
A close-up study of the once-unlikely wedding of the Catholic right with hardcore Protestant advocates of small government and White supremacy.
The Catholic vote is important, writes journalist McConahay, author of The Tango War: 75% turned out in 2016, “and since 1952, their vote usually goes to the winning presidential candidate.” In 2016, that meant Trump, who, for all his irreligious behavior, commanded the allegiance of a large number of American priests and bishops—and not solely because of the abortion issue. The rightward turn, which, the author notes, puts many members of the American Catholic hierarchy against the views of the current pope, dates back to the Reagan era, when Catholic activist Paul Weyrich forged an alliance with the evangelical right, with Jerry Falwell’s so-called Moral Majority (a term coined by Weyrich) leading the charge to pull down the wall separating church and state. In another unholy alliance, right-wing Catholics also made common cause with the Koch brothers, who, though professing no objections to same-sex marriage or abortion, shared their hatred for government intervention in business and social issues. McConahay examines the Catholic connection with such prominent right-wing actors as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his Trump-adherent wife, a Catholic convert, along with forerunners such as Phyllis Schlafly and Richard Viguerie. Ironies abound, not least Catholic support for Trump against fellow religionist Joseph Biden and the widespread episcopal rejection of science to resist vaccinations and climate change programs, to say nothing of their dismissal of the notion that women can ever serve as priests or deacons. In this searching yet occasionally heavy-handed investigation, McConahay concludes—as have many before her—that the trajectory of the American Catholic Church may one day lead to a schism with Rome—backed, of course, by White nationalist dollars.
Dark money meets medieval thought in this intriguing exposé of American Catholicism and its rightist discontents.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781685890285
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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