A well-researched undermining of SDA belief that should stir interest and outrage in the SDA fold.
A scholarly self-help book for those who feel trapped in the Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) church, a booming Protestant denomination with roughly 15 million members worldwide.
Think Y2K was anticlimactic? Consider the year 1844, when tens of thousands of believers in prophet William Miller’s prediction that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent on October 22 witnessed that date come and go without so much as a peep from Jesus. After wonderfully capturing this frenzied historical context and end-times hysteria, the Beems introduce prophetess Ellen White, a key figure in the founding of the SDA church in 1863 and an eccentric visionary who believed that Miller wasn’t necessarily wrong in his end-times calculations, he just didn’t realize that Jesus was starting His judgment in heaven instead of on earth. Nice spin. The authors pick apart White’s life and writings to destabilize the historical, scriptural and doctrinal pillars of the SDA organization. Exposure to mercury vapors and a violent head injury as a schoolgirl, for instance, are posited as possible causes of White’s visions. And White’s recommended diet, including the prohibition of alcoholic beverages and tobacco, are unveiled as unoriginal ideas. The Beems continue to shake the other pillars of the church, specifically the Three Angels’ Message in the book of Revelations and the near obsession of honoring the Sabbath on the seventh day, Saturday; the closing chapter, a step-by-step exit guide for SDAs, rounds out the book nicely. On the whole, the Beems put forth a strong argument that White and the SDA church can’t see the forest for the trees, focusing intently on despair-inducing, doom-and-gloom scenarios instead of rejoicing in the good news that one need only believe in Jesus to be saved. But the evidence is laid on thick–perhaps too thick at times–and one can’t help but wonder if the Beems would have benefited more from publishing a pared-down manifesto and softening their criticisms with a little more subtlety to avoid inevitable accusations of the book being a retaliatory strike at their former church.
A well-researched undermining of SDA belief that should stir interest and outrage in the SDA fold.Pub Date: July 24, 2008
ISBN: 978-1419654671
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.
The Book of Genesis as imagined by a veteran voice of underground comics.
R. Crumb’s pass at the opening chapters of the Bible isn’t nearly the act of heresy the comic artist’s reputation might suggest. In fact, the creator of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural is fastidiously respectful. Crumb took pains to preserve every word of Genesis—drawing from numerous source texts, but mainly Robert Alter’s translation, The Five Books of Moses (2004)—and he clearly did his homework on the clothing, shelter and landscapes that surrounded Noah, Abraham and Isaac. This dedication to faithful representation makes the book, as Crumb writes in his introduction, a “straight illustration job, with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes.” But his efforts are in their own way irreverent, and Crumb feels no particular need to deify even the most divine characters. God Himself is not much taller than Adam and Eve, and instead of omnisciently imparting orders and judgment He stands beside them in Eden, speaking to them directly. Jacob wrestles not with an angel, as is so often depicted in paintings, but with a man who looks not much different from himself. The women are uniformly Crumbian, voluptuous Earth goddesses who are both sexualized and strong-willed. (The endnotes offer a close study of the kinds of power women wielded in Genesis.) The downside of fitting all the text in is that many pages are packed tight with small panels, and too rarely—as with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—does Crumb expand his lens and treat signature events dramatically. Even the Flood is fairly restrained, though the exodus of the animals from the Ark is beautifully detailed. The author’s respect for Genesis is admirable, but it may leave readers wishing he had taken a few more chances with his interpretation, as when he draws the serpent in the Garden of Eden as a provocative half-man/half-lizard. On the whole, though, the book is largely a tribute to Crumb’s immense talents as a draftsman and stubborn adherence to the script.
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06102-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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