A moving look at the human search for communion with God at perhaps its most extreme.
Gripping tale of five young men who entered Catholicism’s most rigorous contemplative monastic order.
Founded in 1084, the Carthusian order remained virtually unchanged through the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, declares Maguire, scholar-in-residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library. (It is now slightly more democratic, though post–Vatican II members do not generally consider the changes substantial.) Emphasizing prayer, members of the order led very individual lives, speaking rarely, living austerely and having virtually no contact with the world outside the monastery’s walls. Drawing upon copious letters, e-mails, conversations with former and current members of the order and several nearly unprecedented visits to the English Carthusian monastery of Parkminster, Maguire recreates the personal stories of five men who entered Parkminster in 1960 and 1961. Her goal is “to capture this slice of history that had been frozen in time for nearly 1,000 years.” She does that and more. Her interwoven accounts of the five Parkminster novices convey a deep engagement with their emotional struggles as they grappled month after month with an enclosed world of solitude and silence, encountering, for the most part, only their deepest selves and God. As Maguire describes the psychological pressures that mounted upon these five men, driving some near to madness, the reader comes to understand better the concept of the contemplative lifestyle, and what it demands and promises. The author opens the monastery door, providing a vivid account of the order’s lifestyle and worship, while also exploring the inner struggles of that life.
A moving look at the human search for communion with God at perhaps its most extreme.Pub Date: March 30, 2006
ISBN: 1-58648-327-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
Well-crafted and thought-provoking.
Intriguing examination of the life-and-death difference between morality and ethics.
Gustafson contends that readers will be used to thinking of the terms “morality” and “ethics” as largely interchangeable. At the very least, most see both terms in a positive light. The author argues, however, that morality has been a misused and deadly social construct throughout the ages. “Morality and ethics differ,” says the author, “because morality supports civilization and ethics supports life.” Morality, according to Gustafson, is a civilization’s way of determining good and evil. Since morality changes from one civilization to another (and differs within civilizations), it is subject to abuse. Morality, he explains further, supports the “dominator system,” whereby everyone and everything is rated and valued according to a civilization’s arbitrary sense of good and bad. Hence “morality,” as the differentiation between good and evil, has been used throughout the centuries to condone everything from slavery, to racism in America, to the Nazi campaign against the Jews. Quite the contrary, writes Gustafson–ethics supports not a particular civilization, but life itself. Mercy and humility are examples of ethical behavior and thinking, which seek to serve those marginalized by society. The author points toward Native-American cultures as examples of ethical ones, in that they served the community as a whole as well as the natural world. Moreover, he holds up Jesus Christ as a foremost exemplar of ethics–“Jesus was not moral. He was ethical...because he rejected morality’s death-dealing function and supported life instead.” Overall, the book is well-written and pulls in a wide array of authors and thinkers. Gustafson’s work is not meant to be a treatise countering every argument, but instead introduces the concept of this morality-ethics dichotomy. In the end the author calls upon readers to be aware of the dominator system they live in, and how morality is used to support it, not life.
Well-crafted and thought-provoking.Pub Date: July 31, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7414-5404-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Boyd (Mystics, Magicians, and Medicine People, 1989) serves as traveling secretary and appreciative witness to the actions of Mad Bear, a Tuscarora medicine man, in this pedantic account of their travels in the late 1970s. The pair take a spiritual and geographical journey across the United States, attending lectures and conferences devoted to healing, spirituality, and ecological and political awareness in the company of swamis, rabbis, Tibetan lamas, holistic practitioners, Japanese monks, and a panoply of other equally ethereal characters. They even appear as guests of honor at Bob Dylan's ``Rolling Thunder Review''; later, Mad Bear's tribe fetes the entire cast on the Tuscarora reservation, where Dylan is assaulted by a mousetrap and huffily leaves. If at first it is not clear to the reader that the white man has despoiled the earth and has ``assured the end of contemporary civilization,'' Boyd and his mentor deliver enough homilies and polemicize so thoroughly that the point is soon made in spades. In this New Age-y document, the reader learns that spaceships, recorded in a petroglyph on a rock wall in Arizona, brought to earth the first Native Americans; that a miniature race of beings whom Mad Bear calls ``The Little People'' has evolved side by side with humans (he has a skull the size of a Ping-Pong ball to prove it); and that Mad Bear is unceasingly clairvoyant, forever reading Boyd's thoughts—conveyed, like the dialogue, in trashy prose. As a character, Mad Bear is something of a self-promoter, although before his death in 1985 he apparently earned widespread recognition in the Native American community for his political mediating powers and his font of traditional spiritual knowledge. With a more lucid tone, this account of a medicine man's unusual life might have attracted a readership beyond fans of Boyd's previous works.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-75945-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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