Skees weaves together a popular history of Shakerism with an account of her month-long visit to Sabbathday Lake in Maine, the last living community of Shaker sisters and brethren. Skees, a journalist who writes on women’s spirituality, studied comparative religion at Harvard Divinity School—a kindly, open-minded institution whose intersecting currents of academic study, pastoral training, and spiritual probing amply prepared the author for her work. The chapters are structured around themes central to Shaker life—including celibacy, God, communion with spirits, relation with the outside world, prospects for survival—and based on both research in the community’s library and conversations with its eight permanent residents. Skees contrasts the intensities of Shakers past with the wise mellowness of Sabbathday’s current members. There are instructive sections on Shaker dance, music, and ritual observance. Perhaps from a wish for heightened contrast, Skees presents herself, a married woman with three sons, as too grounded in worldliness and sex (“I loved men with abandon”) ever to take up the Shaker path. But the authorial persona, which tends toward exaggeration and sentimentality, intrudes on the discussion. “Lusty phalluses and looming egos” do not, pace Ms. Skees, define men of the world. Card cataloging, a task that the librarian, Sister June, performs, is not an “ancient process.” And people today do not use words like “verily” and “elsetimes,” as the author quaintly insists on doing occasionally in her own speech. Skees’s surprise over the outward ordinariness of deeply religious people, and over the loss of self that sometimes occurs there, seems disingenuous—what else, after all, had she been learning at Harvard Divinity School? The Shaker voices communicate over the author’s annoying obtrusiveness so that despite herself her work fills a gap in the growing genre of reportage on the inner life of modern religious communities.
Pub Date: March 20, 1998
ISBN: 0-7868-6237-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An unfocused harangue that leaves the reader feeling as little sympathy for the author as for the traditional Jewish institution she attacks: the separation of men and women during prayer. When Broner's (The Telling, not reviewed, etc.) father died suddenly in 1987, she chose to mourn his death in a traditional Jewish way: by attending synagogue daily to say the kaddish, the mourner's prayer. For Broner, a feminist who identifies strongly as a Jew but is not particularly learned, this decision was somewhat arbitrary. She had never been to daily services before, but she selected a traditional minyan (the ten men required for prayer), expecting it to accommodate her completely. It didn't. She refused to be curtained off behind the mekhitzah, the divider separating men and women. In turn, not all the members of the minyan were comfortable with her presence, with her need to be seen and heard. Thus began a battle filled with invective, derisiveness, even physical violence. Some of the men began a second service an hour earlier. They opposed the long-established mixed seating at the Conservative Sabbath morning service and spoke out against full membership for women. Eventually Broner gave up. Although she makes indisputably valid points about the second-class status of women within traditional Judaism, those criticisms are unfortunately obscured by her many childish gestures (``Don't call me lady...Call me doctor,'' she yells at one minyan member). The reader wonders why Broner chose this particular forum, an aging group of sad and sometimes disturbed men, in which to grandstand. As one friend told her, ``Your mistake is that you went into a fish store...and asked for chicken.'' Broner's interspersed references to her feminist and artistic activities—with Mary Gordon, Grace Paley, and others—comes off as simple name-dropping. If Broner had focused more on her father, both during her year of mourning and in this book, she might have achieved more. Full of sound and fury, signifying very little.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-061071-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
A proper guide and devotional for the Stations of the Cross.
A concise volume of illuminating selections from the Bible.
This precise and thoughtful prayer book offers itself as an unassuming guidebook to the Stations of the Cross. An introductory contention that the theology and rituals of the Stations have continued to be undervalued and underobserved by many of the faithful gives this unpretentious and carefully constructed book an additional rhetorical and spiritual thrust. Included in this slim volume is an easily grasped how-to section that gives readers interested in observing the Stations clear directions for getting the most out of the book and their time. This book has a very specific market–even among Christians–and so its appeal is limited. However, for those more interested in an easily approachable guide to the subject than in a portable seminary, the well-crafted formula of the book makes for an optimal introduction. The book's chapters are devoted to each particular station and contain an opening prayer, an announcement of the station, the call and response to bless God, a fitting passage from the Bible, a meditation on the particular passage and an optional hymn. The book should be useful for private observance, but it is still presented primarily as a text meant to be used in some form of group religious observance. The passages offered are a powerfully concise version of the New Testament's messianic message, but readers should be advised that there is little theological analysis or ancillary commentary provided by the author. Each station is accompanied by a relevant illustration that distills the essential events of the particular station and should aid in observance and preparation for each station. The book is a markedly utilitarian production, and it is in this capacity that it should serve its users most effectively and movingly.
A proper guide and devotional for the Stations of the Cross.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4415-8964-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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