A challenging contribution to the debate over the separation of church and state.
A philosophically sophisticated argument that American democracy has roots in Christian ideals.
Mammoser (co-author, Dealing with Media for the Church, 1999) swims against contemporary currents to make a case that the principles of our country’s democracy derive from evangelical concepts and that this works to its historical benefit. The scope of his analysis is ambitiously broad, investigating the remote origins of Christian thought in philosophers such as St. Augustine, Cicero and St. Thomas Aquinas and in the Enlightenment; he then gauges the collective impact of these meditations on the Founding Fathers. His argument runs contrary to the view that the U.S. government is based on a strict segregation of religious and public life, which is enshrined in several Supreme Court decisions. He says that the distinction between church and state was meant to mutually strengthen both—a view based on a controversial reading of the meaning of the First Amendment, although not one without powerful precedent. The book is at its best when it explores the intersection of early Christian philosophers and democratic theory, locating a common theme in the irreducible dignity of each person. Mammoser is to be commended for shifting the debate beyond appeals to scriptural authority, instead excavating the reasoning, or natural law, that underpins Christian doctrine. Sometimes he overlooks the possibility that some of the Founding Fathers weren’t very strongly Christian, or even religious, as when he says that “[James] Madison believed the Christian faith strong enough doctrinally, theologically, morally, and intellectually that it did not need the support of civil government.” Other sources have noted that Madison was, at heart, deeply skeptical about all theological claims. Also, although the author draws some powerful links, he doesn’t entirely clarify why evangelical thought, in particular, has a special claim to influencing democracy. As a whole, however, the book does a creditable job of articulating an often overlooked perspective.
A challenging contribution to the debate over the separation of church and state.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493517435
Page Count: 234
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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