A thoughtful, temperate call for Muslims and Christians to recognize their overlapping religious heritages.
A scholarly analysis of the deeply shared common ground of two faiths.
Messier (co-author: The Last Civilized Place, 2015, etc.), a professor emeritus of history at Middle Tennessee State University, meticulously investigates the points of intersection between the Christian and Islamic traditions. He chooses Jesus, a prominent figure in both faiths, to demonstrate that profound spiritual affinities outweigh scriptural variations between the two. First, Messier tackles the thorny question of whether the Bible and the Quran are competing scriptures that convey mutually exclusive teachings. This involves a philosophically searching reflection on what it means for any scripture to be canonical and “revealed.” Then the author carefully compares the treatment of Jesus in both religions, assessing his public ministry, the different accounts of his birth, and variable understandings of Jesus’ Crucifixion and Resurrection. Messier also uses the figure of Jesus to contrast the faiths’ doctrines on the nature of sin and atonement. Although the author certainly acknowledges disagreement between the two religions’ teachings, he continually uncovers points of harmony. In fact, he contends that even the differences are ultimately more complementary than contradictory. He offers a provocative but exegetically rigorous examination of the role of human interpretation, emphasizing its potential fallibility in distinguishing the canonical from the heretical. Although a scholarly work, the book clearly desires to replace endless debate with fruitful conversation: “Praying together would carry with it a willingness to dialogue, to dialogue with self, to dialogue with the other, and possibly to dialogue with the Spirit of God.” Messier’s writing will be impressively accessible to the layperson and tries to illuminate a theologically defensible path to détente between two rival faiths. (This second edition helpfully includes more material on Judaism, as well.)
A thoughtful, temperate call for Muslims and Christians to recognize their overlapping religious heritages.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9844354-3-2
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Twin Oaks Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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