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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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