Highlights an interesting aspect of the world’s smallest sovereign entity.
Former New York Times Rome bureau chief Hofmann (Umbria, 1999, etc.) portrays influential women in the papacy’s history, culture, and work force.
About one-tenth of current Vatican employees are female, and the author speaks with more than 40 of them, including nuns, housekeepers, lawyers, and art curators. But before delving into contemporary life, Hofmann details the history of women in church legend. Among those featured are “Popess Joan,” a ninth-century German who, disguised as a man, so impressed the papal city with her learning that she was made a cardinal and eventually elected pope, until an untimely pregnancy revealed her true gender; and Saint Catherine of Siena (1347–80), who convinced Pope Gregory XI to move the government of the church back to Rome. The present-day church, many women feel, has a strong antifemale bias and a “purple ceiling” beyond which they can’t advance. “The great number of sainted virgins and matrons, as well as female martyrs, attests to the conspicuous role of pious women in early Christianity,” the author notes. “Yet Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians that ‘women must keep silent in the church.’ ” Judging from the profiles here, Paul’s admonition is still in force. Even though Sister Johanna is a highly qualified nurse, she works as housekeeper to an elderly cardinal who requested her services (without consulting Johanna herself) for six months, a “temporary” position that has lasted more than four years. A translator of papal addresses and other documents who declines to give her name expected to be promoted after her superior retired—after all, she had 12 years experience in the department, was multilingual, and cheerfully worked overtime. Instead, the position was given to a man with limited Italian-language skills. The future seems to hold more promise; some Vatican insiders predict that the continuing scarcity of priests will lead to women’s admittance to the priesthood, as well as forcing the church to drop the rule of clerical celibacy.
Highlights an interesting aspect of the world’s smallest sovereign entity.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-27490-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 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.
