A comprehensive history and analysis of attitudes within Christianity.
A veteran Catholic scholar explores the historical tension within the Church between authoritarianism and grace.
Eighty years ago, at his First Holy Communion, Clarke recalls sitting in a gym with fellow 7-year-olds when a nun demanded to know if anyone had eaten or drank anything as part of their obligatory fast before mass. When one guilty girl attempted to hide behind her classmates, a group of nuns “reached down and picked her up by her hands and legs,” and threw her out of the ceremony. “Theocracy crushed that little bride of Christ,” the author writes; rather than seeing “Holy Communion as a celebration of the grace that liberates humans,” he says, the nuns prioritized authoritarian obedience and fear. This tension between hierarchical authoritarianism and democratized grace, argues Clarke, has been at the center of Catholic Church history since its inception. Focusing on the papacy, with myriad historical examples at his disposal, the author asserts that because the Church has “focused on being theocratic rulers,” it has left Christians with a “confusing…lack of clarity about grace,” despite its central place in the teachings of Jesus and the early apostles. Even Pope Francis, whom the author praises for his “affinity for the democratic dimensions of the Christian faith,” has “not totally abandoned” Church teachings on “divine punishment”—a doctrine, the author says, that has historically been used to justify authoritarianism.
As a former Catholic priest and a professor emeritus of history and religious studies at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, the author brings a lifetime of study into this magnum opus of more than 700 pages. With over 900 footnotes and a 17-page bibliography, this is a well-researched book with a firm command over both contemporary scholarship and historical church writings. Perhaps most impressive is Clarke’s ability to distill complex doctrine into an accessible format that blends history, theology, and psychology. In addition to a doctorate in the history of ideas from Brandeis University, Clarke is a licensed clinical psychologist with a doctorate from the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology (now William James College); as such, he often connects theological ideas to psychological theories. Although some of the book’s psychoanalysis feels dated, such as its use of Jacques Lacan's seduction fantasy concept, it excels at analyzing what the author sees as the Catholic Church’s obsessions with celibacy, homosexuality, birth control, and abortion. In the context of contemporary America, the book argues, the Church’s failure to embody and institutionalize grace has left a void within the faith that has, in part, been filled by authoritarian Christian Nationalists who “spread QAnon nonsense” and “perpetuate concocted election delusions.” Clarke challenges the Catholic Church to embrace “a faith that depends on human experience and human creativity” that does not dilute the biblical message that “God is love.” In a book that focuses on injustices of the Church, it would be easy to reduce Catholicism to its long lineup of bad actors; Clarke doesn’t shy away from grotesque history, but he also emphasizes that Christian theology is historically nuanced and “rigorously critical.”
A comprehensive history and analysis of attitudes within Christianity.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 704
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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