An invigorating search for the human Jesus.
Malone, in her debut, provocatively maps Jesus Christ’s stages of human development, using the Gospels as a guide.
In this well-researched, thought-provoking exegetical work, Malone proposes that although traditional religious dogma holds that Jesus is eternally unchanging, both the canonical Gospels and the Synoptics “show him as a human being who—like other human beings do—changed, grew and matured throughout his life until his death.” In this account, readers follow Jesus through as many of the stages of childhood and young adulthood as the evidence allows, as he intellectually matures along the lines of famous peacemakers, such as Martin Luther King Jr. As such, it emphasizes Jesus’ pacifism, taking in stride, for example, his violent attack on the moneylenders in the Gospel of Matthew. In very clear prose, Malone deploys her considerable textual knowledge to examine Jesus’ claims of divinity—represented in terms such as “Son of God” or “Son of Man”—and makes the radical suggestion that such labels may obscure one’s appreciation of Jesus the man: “Might it have been better for humanity if Jesus had never been worshipped as the divine Son of God, but rather his teaching and example simply followed?...Does calling Jesus God’s Son make it far too easy to excuse our failure to emulate him?” Her extrapolation of Jesus’ psychological development is narratively supple, authoritative and ultimately convincing. Her line-readings of the Gospels yield a bounty of insights, even for readers well-versed in Scripture. This is a very skillful exegesis, and her focus on Jesus’ secular philosophy will open her inquiry to non-Christians as well.
An invigorating search for the human Jesus.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1492964360
Page Count: 197
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2014
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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