A vigorously thought-provoking, if slow-moving, reexamination of Christian divorce.
A writer offers a paradigm-challenging Christian look at divorce—and what comes after.
The vexed subjects of divorce and remarriage are the focus of William’s nonfiction book. The work unfolds in the sharp awareness of how many Christian denominations not only frown on divorce, but also scorn the very idea of remarriage, citing scriptural injunctions that essentially equate these unions with adultery. The author views this a bit sardonically, since, as he puts it, churches every Sunday are “filled to the rafters with divorced people.” In his book, he seeks not to distort Christian law but to find nuances and readings that shed new and more forgiving light on divorce and remarriage in the religion’s tradition. He takes his readers on an exhaustively detailed tour through the whole of the Judeo-Christian scriptural canon, including apocryphal works like the book of Jasher. He examines a wide array of sexual issues in light of Scripture: biblical bigamy, unfaithfulness, and uncleanliness. He discusses with frank explicitness what the church typically views as sexual transgressions. Several of these discussions will strike some of William’s readers—Christian and non-Christian alike—as wincingly impolitic in the 21st century (“One of the primary reasons a man gets married is to have sex available 24/7”). And many readers may become impatient with the leisurely, highly allusive road the author takes to get to the point of his topic. But his generous approach —every chapter is buttressed by copious quotations from Scripture—charts an intriguing path through the thickets of what church dogma has generally considered unclean fornication. He deftly attempts to justify remarriage after divorce in a way that makes life livable for the many divorced Christians in the church today. “Nowhere does the Messiah instruct His followers to isolate themselves from sinners,” William points out, and this kind of stern insight fills his book.
A vigorously thought-provoking, if slow-moving, reexamination of Christian divorce.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-2288-3729-9
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Tellwell Talent
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An informative, nostalgic evocation of a special urban dining experience.
An account of once-popular New York restaurants that had a rich social and cultural history.
“Since, by choice or historical necessity, exile and travel were defining aspects of Jewish life, somewhere a Jew was always eating out,” observes cartoonist and MacArthur fellow Katchor (Illustration/Parsons, the New School; Hand-Drying in America, 2013, etc.) in his exhaustively researched, entertaining, and profusely illustrated history of Jewish dining preferences and practices. The Garden of Eden, he notes wryly, was “the first private eating place open to the public,” serving as a model for all the restaurants that came after: cafes, cafeterias, buffets, milk halls, lunch counters, diners, delicatessens, and, especially, dairy restaurants, a favorite destination among New York Jews, which Katchor remembers from his wanderings around the city as a young adult. Dairy restaurants, because they served no meat, attracted diners who observed kosher laws; many boasted a long menu that included items such as mushroom cutlet, blintzes, broiled fish, vegetarian liver, and fried eggplant steak. Attracted by the homey appearance and “forlorn” atmosphere of these restaurants, Katchor set out to uncover their history, engaging in years of “aimless reading in the libraries of New York and on the pages of the internet,” where he found menus, memoirs, telephone directories, newspaper ads, fiction, and food histories that fill the pages of his book with colorful anecdotes, trivia, and food lore. Although dairy restaurants were popular with Jewish immigrants, their advent in the U.S. predated immigrants’ demand for Eastern European meatless dishes. The milk hall, often located in parks, resorts, or spas, gained popularity throughout 19th-century Europe. Franz Kafka, for example, treated himself to a glass of sour milk from a milk pavilion after a day in a Prague park. Jews were not alone in embracing vegetarianism. In Europe and America, shunning meat was inspired by several causes, including utopian socialism, which sought to distance itself from “the beef-eating aristocracy”; ethical preferences; and health concerns. A meatless diet relieved digestive problems, many sufferers found.
An informative, nostalgic evocation of a special urban dining experience.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4219-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. . . . In the meantime, in between time, we can see. . . we can work at making sense of (what) we see. . . to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. It's common sense; when you-move in, you try to learn the neighborhood." Dillard's "neighborhood" is hilly Virginia country where she lived alone, but essentially it is all those "shreds of creation" with which every human is surrounded, which she is trying to learn, to know — from finite variations to infinite possibilities of being and meaning. A tall order and Dillard doesn't quite fill it. She is too impatient to get about the soul's adventures to stay long with an egg-laying grasshopper, or other bits of flora and fauna, and her snatches from physics and biological/metaphysical studies are this side of frivolous. However, Ms. Dillard has a great deal going for her — in spite of some repetition of words and concepts, her prose is bright, fresh and occasionally emulates (not imitates) the Walden Master in a contemporary context: "Trees. . . extend impressively in both directions, . . . shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach." She has set herself no less a task than understanding emotionally, spiritually and intellectually the force of the creative extravagance of the universe in all its beauty and horhor ("There is a terrible innocence in the benumbed world of the lower animals, reducing life to a universal chomp.") Experience can be focused, and awareness sharpened, by a kind of meditative high. Thus this becomes somewhat exhausting reading, if taken in toto, but even if Dillard's reach exceeds her grasp, her sights are leagues higher than that of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, regretfully (re her sex), the inevitable comparison.
Pub Date: March 13, 1974
ISBN: 0061233323
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper's Magazine Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1974
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