by Peter McDonough ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1991
Intriguing study by McDonough (Political Science/Arizona State) of the growth and collapse of the most powerful branch of the most powerful order of modern Catholicism. The Society of Jesus occupies a special place in the history of post-Reformation Christianity. Founded in the 16th century by Ignatius of Loyola, it rapidly became the most powerful agent of proselytism the Church had ever known. Jesuit missionaries penetrated every corner of the globe and for many years effectively ruled large portions of South America—while their schools gained such a high reputation that the Society soon had a near-monopoly on educating the upper classes of Catholic Europe. The particular strength of the order was its ability to adapt the rigid forms of Counter-Reformation Catholicism to changing circumstances and audiences. In the US, as McDonough observes, this strength eventually became the order's undoing. The pluralistic cast of American society made the sharp credal distinctions by which the Jesuits measured the world seem meaningless (or, at best, esoteric), and forced American Catholics into a siege mentality wherein traditional faith was preserved at the cost of a self- imposed segregation from the main currents of American intellectual and social life. This alienation was especially enervating for the Jesuits, who always and everywhere had made a point of immersing themselves in local customs and attitudes. McDonough shows the great lengths to which American Jesuits went in attempting to cultivate Catholicism in a largely unfriendly environment, and their relief in finding (through the liberalizing pronouncements of Vatican II) the possibility of a compromise. He implies, though, that this compromise was a Pyrrhic victory, since the burden of adaptation and fidelity that the Society had shouldered for so long had, in fact, become their raison d'etre, without which they were to drift into confusion and aimlessness. A very timely report: McDonough's examination of the Jesuits serves nicely as microcosm of the American Catholic experience as a whole.
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1991
ISBN: 0-02-920527-1
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1991
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by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
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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by Albert Camus ; translated by Justin O'Brien & Sandra Smith
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by Albert Camus ; translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy & Justin O'Brien
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by Albert Camus translated by Arthur Goldhammer edited by Alice Kaplan
by Stephen Batchelor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020
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
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