A scholarly, in-depth look at Mary’s purpose and place in modern religion.
Theologians explore the many facets of the Virgin Mary in this series of multidenominational essays.
True to its name, the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary focuses on promoting ecumenical study and, in particular, the understanding of Jesus’ mother Mary’s place within the Christian church. Here, editors Hearden and Kimball, in their debut, collect several essays presented at the ESBVM’s 2008 International Congress in Pittsburgh. The collection, after a few opening words about Marian-related doctrine and the concept of the Immaculate Conception, spans various Christian denominations and intersects with Judaism and Islam as it explores the role of Mary in the life of today’s church. The collection includes a tribute to Robert Andrews, “America’s only Byzantine mosaic iconographer,” and uses Andrews’ 23-foot mosaic on the ceiling of San Francisco’s Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church as a springboard to the book’s contents. Many spiritual concepts become visible through iconography—just as the divine promise of salvation through Christ became present on Earth through Mary, according to Christian doctrine. The collection includes discussions of Judaism’s “divine daughter,” Mary’s place in Islam as the “propagator of prophets,” and several explorations of Mary’s role among Protestants, including Methodist and United Church of Christ congregations. The book also touches on Orthodox traditions which depict Mary as a theologian in her own right. Many contributors are well-known for their work on Mariology, and it shows, but their essays may sometimes confuse readers who lack solid backgrounds in Christian thought. For others, however, the book will likely provide deeply thoughtful illuminations. It builds on a millennia-long tradition of Marian veneration and helps develop it into a potentially workable concept for the modern church, including for Protestants, who have long looked askance at Mary-centered prayer. For readers interested in the Virgin Mary specifically or in images of the feminine within the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, these essays may provide much food for thought.
A scholarly, in-depth look at Mary’s purpose and place in modern religion.Pub Date: March 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456756673
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2013
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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