A refined jeremiad sure to shake up the Christian establishment.
A piercing critique of heresy in a country where “traditional Christian teachings have been warped into justifications for solipsism and anti-intellectualism, jingoism and utopianism, selfishness and greed.”
New York Times columnist and National Review film critic Douthat (Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, 2005, etc.), a practicing Catholic, takes aim at the forces, on both the left and the right, that are corrupting American Christianity from within. From its glory days after World War II, when preachers were respected as legitimate moral arbiters and theologians had huge followings, Christianity has fallen on hard times. The traditional pillars of American religion—the once-omnipresent Protestant mainline exemplified by Reinhold Niebuhr, the nuanced and self-confident Catholicism of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, the evangelical revival led by Billy Graham and the beleaguered but transcendent black church of Martin Luther King Jr.—have all ceded their place in the public imagination, writes the author, as hundreds of dubious upstart doctrines claim converts in droves. The mushy universalism embraced by Protestant churches has caused believers to lose interest, the Catholic Church has been riven by dissension and scandal and the evangelical and historically black churches have given way to the creepy prosperity gospel of Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar and others. While some of the particulars of Douthat’s arguments will be controversial—e.g., his portrayal of the academics involved in the Jesus Seminar as being as unconcerned with the facts as are fabulists like Dan Brown—his full-throated defense of Christian orthodoxy deserves to be heard in an age when theology, if not spirituality, has become something of a niche interest. For Douthat, the beauty of Christianity lies in the “paradoxical character” of Jesus, who “sets impossible standards and then forgives the worst of sinners.” When churches focus on only one aspect of Jesus’ nature and profess to offer easy answers to all of life’s problems, he writes, they hold up a false idol for worship.
A refined jeremiad sure to shake up the Christian establishment.Pub Date: April 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7830-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.
The Book of Genesis as imagined by a veteran voice of underground comics.
R. Crumb’s pass at the opening chapters of the Bible isn’t nearly the act of heresy the comic artist’s reputation might suggest. In fact, the creator of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural is fastidiously respectful. Crumb took pains to preserve every word of Genesis—drawing from numerous source texts, but mainly Robert Alter’s translation, The Five Books of Moses (2004)—and he clearly did his homework on the clothing, shelter and landscapes that surrounded Noah, Abraham and Isaac. This dedication to faithful representation makes the book, as Crumb writes in his introduction, a “straight illustration job, with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes.” But his efforts are in their own way irreverent, and Crumb feels no particular need to deify even the most divine characters. God Himself is not much taller than Adam and Eve, and instead of omnisciently imparting orders and judgment He stands beside them in Eden, speaking to them directly. Jacob wrestles not with an angel, as is so often depicted in paintings, but with a man who looks not much different from himself. The women are uniformly Crumbian, voluptuous Earth goddesses who are both sexualized and strong-willed. (The endnotes offer a close study of the kinds of power women wielded in Genesis.) The downside of fitting all the text in is that many pages are packed tight with small panels, and too rarely—as with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—does Crumb expand his lens and treat signature events dramatically. Even the Flood is fairly restrained, though the exodus of the animals from the Ark is beautifully detailed. The author’s respect for Genesis is admirable, but it may leave readers wishing he had taken a few more chances with his interpretation, as when he draws the serpent in the Garden of Eden as a provocative half-man/half-lizard. On the whole, though, the book is largely a tribute to Crumb’s immense talents as a draftsman and stubborn adherence to the script.
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06102-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The name of C.S. Lewis will no doubt attract many readers to this volume, for he has won a splendid reputation by his brilliant writing. These sermons, however, are so abstruse, so involved and so dull that few of those who pick up the volume will finish it. There is none of the satire of the Screw Tape Letters, none of the practicality of some of his later radio addresses, none of the directness of some of his earlier theological books.
Pub Date: June 15, 1949
ISBN: 0060653205
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1949
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