An unusual take on contemporary Christianity grounded in a remarkable life story and told with exceptional prose.
A memoir offers the experiences of a progressive minister and her radical ideas to reshape Christianity.
Pearce’s (No One in I Land, 2015) latest work is not just a retelling of her life, but also an exploration of the origins of the concepts that have molded her efforts as a pastor and humanitarian. As a child attending a Presbyterian church in Denver, the author showed remarkable conviction from an early age. But it was after studying abroad in Germany and then working with the Peace Corps in Ecuador that she began to truly see the world—and herself— differently. Upon her return, Pearce became uneasy with a typical middle-class lifestyle, noticed incredible pride within contemporary churches, and felt a strong call to become engaged politically. These thoughts eventually led her to a seminary in San Francisco, where she met her lifelong friend Tricia and opened her eyes to sexism and imperialism. The author then moved to Philadelphia and became the pastor of Tabernacle United Church, where she discovered a strong, like-minded community. But over the years, she grew more experimental and courageous in both her actions and thoughts; eventually she even served prison time for nonviolent civil disobedience and began to examine the ideas of Eastern and Wiccan religions to totally redesign her view of Jesus. “When we focus our spiritual journey on Jesus himself…we fail to see what he was showing us about our own nature,” the author writes, deftly elaborating her thesis that the Christian church’s fixation on Jesus actually works against his most important teachings. It’s a progressive stance and an idea that could be difficult for more traditional readers to embrace, especially with her tendency to throw in New Age–style lingo about “Ultimate Reality” and “the quantum void.” But the narration of her life and reflections moves with swift efficiency, and her passionate voice helps sell even the strangest of notions: Her eloquent passages on life in South America and her own experiences with sexism are particularly moving and convincing. By the time she reaches her most unconventional arguments, it will be hard for readers not to agree.
An unusual take on contemporary Christianity grounded in a remarkable life story and told with exceptional prose.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-359-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
