A thoughtful, accessible, and useful religious study guide.
A study guide about the famous biblical story of the Samaritan woman at the well.
In this slim work, the author explores the Gospel passage of John 4:4-26. In it, Jesus meets a woman and asks her for water and uses the moment to teach her about God’s unconditional love and salvation. Mills, in turn, uses this tale as a metaphor for finding wholeness in times of struggle, accepting God’s love, and having patience regarding his plans. The author imaginatively brings the passage to life, reflecting on what the two actors in the story might have thought and felt and drawing out lessons for readers’ own lives. The book also provides context for readers unfamiliar with biblical history, explaining the relationship between the Jews and the Samaritans and unpacking how such details may enhance and enrich the biblical story. Mills also weaves in personal anecdotes, finding religious lessons in mundane occurrences; for example, she uses her own father’s rehabilitation of an underfed horse as a metaphor for God’s ability to make people whole again and to love them despite their flaws. Similarly, she provides engaging “Food for Thought” discussion questions, which range from the simple (“What’s your typical reaction toward having to wait for someone to show up?”) to the lofty (“In what ways do we use what imprisons us to define our freedom?”). Overall, she aims to help readers access the spiritual promise in the biblical tale, which she says is about Jesus accepting people in their “brokenness” and sin. She ends with an exhortation to the reader to “go to the well…empty…thirsty…[and] exhausted of ourselves.” Throughout, the prose is simple, clean, and readable. Study groups may find particular value in the book, both as a jumping-off point for discussion and as a gentle introduction to Bible study. It would also work well for individuals, as there’s room in the text for solitary readers to write in answers to the discussion questions.
A thoughtful, accessible, and useful religious study guide.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490856377
Page Count: 72
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The ever-popular and highly readable C.S. Lewis has "done it again." This time with a book beginning with the premise "God is Love" and analyzing the four loves man knows well, but often understands little, Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity, exploring along the way the threads of Need-Love and Gift-Love that run through all. It is written with a deep perception of human beings and a background of excellent scholarship. Lewis proposes that all loves are a search for, perhaps a conflict with, and sometimes a denial of, love of God. "Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?" To relate the human activities called loves to the Love which is God, Lewis cites three graces as parts of Charity: Divine Gift-Love, a supernatural Need-love of Himself and a supernatural Need-love of one another, to which God gives a third, "He can awake in man, towards Himself a supernatural Appreciative love. This of all gifts is the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true center of all human and angelic life. With this all things are possible." From a reading of this book laymen and clergy alike will reap great rewards: a deeper knowledge of an insight into human loves, and, indeed, humans, offered with beauty and humor and a soaring description of man's search for God through Love.
Pub Date: July 27, 1960
ISBN: 0156329301
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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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