Possibly the most slanted, conservative take on American church history to appear in recent memory. Reeves (History/Univ. of Wisconsin, Parkside; A Question of Character: The Life of John F. Kennedy, 1991, etc.) here publicly airs his grievances with dying mainline Protestant churches. He provides mountains of details to demonstrate that they are dying— no news there—and then makes the bold and unsubstantiated leap to the claim that they are failing because they have been overrun by liberal bleeding hearts who are hell-bent on neglecting the gospel, undermining patriotism, and teaching their Sunday school pupils to use condoms. Reeves also assails such predictable targets as multiethnic theological education, the churches' ``aggressive lesbian contingent,'' and homosexual ordination. At bottom, he asserts that mainline churches are ``stuck in the sixties'' in their affinity for social justice and confusion about personal morality. His incessant liberal-bashing is irritating and banal, but that alone does not make it poor history. Reeves accomplishes that by ignoring the larger, more provocative questions that other scholars have posed concerning the mainline's decline. Ultimately, Reeves's singleminded preoccupation with the dangers of liberalism diverts attention from a persistent motif of American history, which is that only religions not associated with power and authority will inevitably flourish, as, for instance, antiestablishment fundamentalist sects are doing today. An even more damning problem is that Reeves utterly ignores the phenomenon of religious pluralism (``Is modern America secular or Christian?'' he asks, as if these were our only options). This is predictable, considering Reeves's insistence that America's founding ``fathers'' intended it to be a Christian nation. A far better choice is Randall Balmer's brilliant ethnography, Grant Us Courage: Travels Along the Mainline of American Protestantism (1995), which sensitively and provocatively explores the real issues underlying contemporary American Protestantism. Mainline churches may be dying, but they deserve a more intelligent eulogy than Reeves can provide.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-82811-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engaging, if sometimes spotty, history of the Jews who resided in the Iberian Peninsula until their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497. A distinguished scholar and author of many books on modern Jewish history (A History of the Jews in America, 1992), Sachar has done little, if any, original research here, but he nicely synthesizes secondary sources. He shows how the late medieval Convivencia—the period of Jewish-Islamic mutual tolerance and cultural cross-fertilization—gave way to the nationwide pogroms of 1391, in which 30,000 Jews were killed (4,000 in Seville alone). Following this violence, the Inquisition that began in the late 15th century, and the expulsions, Sephardic Jews spread throughout the Mediterranean littoral and the Ottoman Empire, as well as to Holland, England, the Western Hemisphere (in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Inquisition's long arm pursued conversos—crypto- Jews who professed to be practicing Christians—to such places as Lima and Mexico City), and beyond. In almost every country where they settled, the Sephardim incorporated their pride in and yearning for Spain in a distinctive Jewish language, Ladino. Sachar's strengths include succinct and informative discussions of Sephardic communal and intellectual history, his excellent unfolding of the Inquisition's complex history, and his many colorful anecdotes of the Sephardic ``rich and famous.'' However, his coverage of the middle class and poor, of Sephardic women, and of the early modern period (16501850) is weak and, occasionally, embarrassingly clichÇd (he claims that ``by the eighteenth century, the Jews of Italy had become superstitious, neurotic, timorous''). Finally, he ``takes a stab'' at discussing the contemporary Sephardic communities of Israel and France (but not, puzzlingly, of the US, where about 200,000 Sephardim live), but this too is so brief as to be greatly inadequate. A more detailed and comprehensive history of Sephardic Jewry waits to be written. For now, Farewell Espa§a provides a quick introduction that, if a little light in terms of scholarship, contains a fluid and often fascinating narrative.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40960-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Lambent prose and a general lack of self-indulgence characterize these essays on the Catholic canon of saints. Each of the 20 contemporary authors whom FSG assistant editor Elie has assembled here centers his or her contribution on a particular holy man or woman—usually a saint for whom they were named or whom they have adopted as a patron. The Catholic experience predominates, but Elie intersperses other perspectives. After a serviceable introduction by Robert Coles, Bruce Bawer sets the pace with a fine essay on St. Francis of Assisi, artfully stitching a biographical account with a personal meditation on the lessons he teaches. Kathryn Harrison follows with a forceful tale of how her namesake, St. Catherine, inspired in her an anorectic self-abnegation. Literary types may be impressed by Richard Bausch's epiphany of Thomas Aquinas as paragon both of faith and of the modern spirit—achieved, Bausch lets us know, through the mediation of his friend Walker Percy. Francine Prose writes about Saint Teresa of vila by focusing on the seemingly unlikely notion of irony; Tobias Wolff, in contrast, presents a most straightforward saint, the adventurous Jean de BrÇbeuf, martyred among the North American Indians. Also in the Americas, Enrique Fern†ndez discusses Cuba's santer°a religion, an Afro-Caribbean form of saint worship that provides an interesting counterpoint to the more traditional Christianity under discussion elsewhere. Editor Elie builds a summa of sainthood around his recent encounter with the figure of Doubting Thomas, in the form of a Renaissance bronze of Thomas with Christ. A critique of the official Church sanction of canonization comes in Martin E. Marty's look at the still unsanctified Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement. Valuable for inspiration, but also for information—the details of the lives and deaths of many saints are here, refracted through 20 idiosyncratic, often powerful points of view.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-100101-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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