The Zaleskis may have bitten off more than they can chew. Still, at their best, they rival Karen Armstrong in their lucid...
What do the Jewish blessing over cheese, the Islamic dhikr and the Japanese tea ceremony have in common? In each, the human meets the divine in prayer.
The Zaleskis, who have individually and jointly edited several anthologies with spiritual themes (The Book of Heaven, 2000, etc.), begin this rich study by examining the “prehistory” of prayer. They suggest that its origins lie somewhere in human impulses toward magic and sacrifice. Most prayer, they find, falls into four categories: petitionary, liturgical, ecstatic or contemplative. Because they believe it’s impossible to understand prayer if you discuss it “in the abstract . . . as a generic category,” the authors feature a “portrait gallery” of expert pray-ers, from Teresa of Avila to AA founder Bill W., and examine prayer’s place in pop culture and politics. The chapter on “Prayer and the Public Square” is especially relevant in our current political clime. Americans, write the authors, are unsure when, if ever, it’s legitimate to pray in public; though our feelings about it may be reshaped by forces as divergent as international migration and the Internet, our ambivalence about, say, prayer in school, is likely to continue. Throughout, the authors are careful to offer a cross-cultural survey: Along with Christian prayer there is discussion of Hasidic prayer, Islamic salat and even Buddhist haiku. But their eagerness to be all-encompassing can feel forced. Emphasizing commonalities and almost never remarking on the differences among traditions results in a certain superficiality.
The Zaleskis may have bitten off more than they can chew. Still, at their best, they rival Karen Armstrong in their lucid prose and expansive vision.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-15288-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The ever-popular and highly readable C.S. Lewis has "done it again." This time with a book beginning with the premise "God is Love" and analyzing the four loves man knows well, but often understands little, Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity, exploring along the way the threads of Need-Love and Gift-Love that run through all. It is written with a deep perception of human beings and a background of excellent scholarship. Lewis proposes that all loves are a search for, perhaps a conflict with, and sometimes a denial of, love of God. "Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?" To relate the human activities called loves to the Love which is God, Lewis cites three graces as parts of Charity: Divine Gift-Love, a supernatural Need-love of Himself and a supernatural Need-love of one another, to which God gives a third, "He can awake in man, towards Himself a supernatural Appreciative love. This of all gifts is the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true center of all human and angelic life. With this all things are possible." From a reading of this book laymen and clergy alike will reap great rewards: a deeper knowledge of an insight into human loves, and, indeed, humans, offered with beauty and humor and a soaring description of man's search for God through Love.
Pub Date: July 27, 1960
ISBN: 0156329301
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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