A deep look at group dynamics from a Christian perspective.
A guide to improving group interactions mixes Scripture and faith-based psychology.
Christianity’s global Charismatic Movement is, according to the author, on the cusp of a great revival, but many of the groups within that wing are suffering from internal feelings of resentment, division, and suspicion. These fellowships, congregations, and study groups are stricken by the same flaw that afflicts so many marriages: infidelity. Sagoe-Nkansah (The Law of Manifestation, 2017) maintains that church fidelity—the eponymous fidelity factor—is necessary for the functioning of any spiritual community: “It is an active, innate human sense that binds an individual’s action in devotion to another person, group, agreements, contracts, institutions, or code of ethics….When the fidelity factor is highly developed, groups hold together, and when it is not, they fall apart.” Using passages from the Bible and stories from his own experience as a member of a somewhat tumultuous campus Christian organization, the author illustrates how infidelity to the group leads to tension within it and offers advice on how to overcome this defect for the benefit of all. With Scripture at the center of every chapter, Sagoe-Nkansah demonstrates how the optimal methods for interpersonal behavior are right there for all Christians to make use of. The author writes in a simple, confident prose, with his personal tales infused with a parable-like quality that allows them to sit comfortably beside the Bible stories: “This arrangement worked out quite well until the pastors he had left behind rebelled against further financing his ministry. They disregarded his instructions and despised his authority.” The topic of healthy dynamics within faith communities is perhaps an underexplored area of modern Christianity, and while the book could probably use a few secular insights into what makes a successful group function, Sagoe-Nkansah has produced a comprehensive and approachable manual on the subject. The book will likely only be of interest to those of a certain religious persuasion—the foreword claims that the second coming of Jesus will occur later this century—but those readers looking for a sincere, Scripture-based work on fostering a strong community should appreciate the guide’s insights.
A deep look at group dynamics from a Christian perspective.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-2811-3
Page Count: 290
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2018
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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