A scholarly yet intensely personal evaluation of Christian salvation.
A scholarly treatise on Lent and the nature of Christian redemption.
Lent, stretching for the roughly six weeks from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday and commemorating the interval between the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and his resurrection from the dead, is the focal point of Lopes’ inspirational debut. But the book’s title is happily misleading. What Lopes offers here goes far deeper than “reflections”: he opens his book with a searching and quite scholarly history of the concept of sin in the Judeo-Christian tradition and of Lent itself, which has developed into a period of serious reflection and the voluntary chastisement of appetites and excesses. Lopes considers these topics across a broad range of ancient cultures and mythologies and only gradually shifts his emphasis from scholarship to salvation. His examination of the meaning and mechanics of Christian salvation comes to dominate the second half of the book (ushered in with a calamitous typo of “The Dessert” for “The Desert”), in which Lopes talks about the deeper implications of the Lenten season and each individual’s process toward divine reconciliation—what he paints as a far more meaningful process than the typical ways in which Lent is observed. “To travel the road in front of us,” Lopes says, “is to do more than give up chocolate for Lent or to attend daily Mass, even though the latter is certainly appropriate.” Instead, he concentrates on the largest possible questions: Where am I? What am I? Who am I? Why am I? Throughout these latter sections he stresses the Lenten spirit of self-accountability, reminding readers that “Your journey to knowing who you are is ongoing. You are not today the person you will be tomorrow.” Only when you take responsibility for your own sins, Lopes insists, will you begin your journey. His book concludes with a scene-by-scene breakdown of the salvation themes of the New Testament that’s both erudite and vividly dramatic.
A scholarly yet intensely personal evaluation of Christian salvation.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490851532
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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