An earnest call for inclusivity that packs an emotional punch.
Taylor (Enabling the Disabled in the Body of Christ, 2016), a Christian pastor who’s blind and partially deaf, instructs churches on how to better attract and serve the disabled members of their community in this spiritual guide.
As someone with lifelong disabilities, the author has had both good and bad experiences with churches; one welcomed her into its supportive family, she says, and another rejected her by refusing to accommodate her needs. Now a pastor herself, Taylor offers this book as an “olive branch from the disabled side” to church administrators seeking to do a better job of ministering to their disabled flock. She outlines what the current landscape looks like for Christians with disabilities—from inaccessible buildings to congregations that exclude people whose conditions cause them to make too much noise. Many churches that attempt to accommodate the disabled, Taylor notes, only end up replicating the wider society’s tendencies toward “pity and paternalism.” In addition to preaching the benefits of welcoming parishioners with disabilities—such as spreading Jesus Christ’s teachings and fostering a more loving environment—Taylor shares her own experiences as a disability advocate to highlight the many ways that church leaders can care for all their congregants. Along the way, her prose is cordial and wise: “The biggest and most important strategy for successfully including the disabled is for you and your church to look at the disabled through God’s eyes rather than through the world’s.” The practical tips, such as listing disability accommodations on a church’s website, are specific and valuable, but the biggest revelation is that so much of the advice is applicable to any outsider group: Accept them, listen to them, and love them. Although this book is rooted specifically in Christianity, Taylor’s words will resonate with all able-bodied members of society.
An earnest call for inclusivity that packs an emotional punch.Pub Date: Dec. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-973642-85-5
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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