A refreshingly balanced perspective often missing from both conservative (Michael Rose’s Goodbye, Good Men) and liberal...
Taking the pulse of American Catholicism after its annus horribilis, the New York Times’ veteran religion correspondent offers a diagnosis of how the Church wound up in intensive care.
Though sex-abuse scandals have dominated the headlines, problems in the Church run deeper, as indicated by falling “Catholic indicators” such as church attendance rates, knowledge of faith, and ratio of priests to parishioners. “If the sex abuse scandal had never occurred, the Catholic Church in the United States would still face a crisis,” comments Steinfels (Neoconservatism, 1979, etc.), former editor of the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal. Many of the Church’s difficulties, he observes, stem from two transitions occurring simultaneously: the passage from a pre– to a post–Vatican Council generation and from clerical to lay leadership. With great subtlety, the author traces how these transitions will affect worship, spiritual life, religious education and formation, leadership, and the Church’s vast network of hospitals and social services. Men ordained during John Paul II’s papacy, he suggests, might be more involved with priestly roles than with organizational and administrative tasks that would require lay participation. Moreover, the declining number of parochial schools requires greater stress on “catechetical programs” (the new phrase for religious instruction) that often add little to children’s understanding of their faith. The author’s mastery of material enables him to provide unexpected insights. For instance, he warns like many others that without large-scale changes in vowed or religious life, the Church will never have enough priests or nuns to keep up with population growth. But he offers a different reason than most: Vatican II’s recent recognition that the call to holiness in marriage and the family is as rewarding as the life of the celibate—a change that not even John Paul II is prepared to reverse.
A refreshingly balanced perspective often missing from both conservative (Michael Rose’s Goodbye, Good Men) and liberal (Garry Wills’s Papal Sin) jeremiads about the troubles in this venerable institution.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-684-83663-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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