An important, if flawed, reminder of the role of women in the history of Christianity.
A midwife reflects on the role of women in the nascent Christian church in this spiritual book.
As a seminary student, Lombardo was intrigued with biblical accounts of how women “had been instrumental in guarding the fledging church.” Moreover, drawing on her career as a doula and midwife, she began to make connections between the countless mothers whom she guided during childbirth and those who joined the early Christian church. “Women,” both past and present, she notes, “are determined, intentional, and brave.” This book argues that Luke deliberately provided readers with parallel birth stories—the first being the birth of Jesus in his Gospel, and the second being the birth of the church in the book of Acts. Just as a woman, Mary, gave birth to and raised Jesus in Luke’s first book, so too did women help create and protect the church in his second. While some of the volume’s “Seven Brave Women” are well known, particularly Mary and Mary Magdalene, others are traditionally marginalized figures who receive only passing references in the New Testament. Through convincing biblical exegesis, Lombardo highlights the roles of lesser-known figures such as Priscilla and Chloe of Corinth, Lydia of Macedonia, and other “trailblazers” who were “brave apostles.” Some, like Junia and Phoebe, traveled “great distances” from Asia Minor to Rome in their evangelism. At under 100 pages, this work is not designed to be an encyclopedic, scholarly history but rather a devotional that encourages Christian women to meditate on the actions and follow in the footsteps of their foremothers. Discussion questions centered on “how do these stories apply to me” complement this endeavor. Though the volume’s extended metaphor that links contemporary women and midwives to Christians in the early church is a bit forced at times, this is nevertheless a charming read that sheds light on the role of women in the history of early Christianity. But Roman Catholic and Orthodox readers will be disappointed in the distinctly Protestant book’s exclusion of centuries of Christian prayer and veneration toward Mary and other female saints.
An important, if flawed, reminder of the role of women in the history of Christianity.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66-421370-8
Page Count: 78
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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