A warm and highly readable discussion of the uneasy relationship many American Catholics today have with their Church. Unsworth (Here Comes Everybody!, 1993), a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, offers 16 vignettes about contemporary Catholics who—because of their beliefs, actions, or merely their gender—exist on the margin of the official Roman Catholic Church. Despite disaffection, they choose to remain in the Church and struggle. Barbara Blaine, a law student who also works with people who have been abused by priests, sums up the feelings of many when she declares that she could no more cease to be a Catholic than she could stop being a member of her own family—this despite having been sexually molested herself by a priest. Based on interviews, Unsworth's retellings of others' stories are equally compelling. Margaret Traxler, a nun, believes that any relation today between the teachings of Jesus and the pronouncements of the Vatican (which she feels ``traffics in money making'') is purely coincidental; nevertheless she continues to work in a parish on Chicago's South Side. The female students at the Catholic Theological Union continue their studies even though they cannot be ordained; the irony is that many may end up later teaching their male counterparts. Even bishops can be pushed to the ``edge.'' They are often ignored by the Church hierarchy until they run afoul of it and live their lives in fear of what the Vatican might think of their public actions; many do not have the courage to stand up for what they believe. The issues of abortion, birth control, and sexual orientation come up throughout the volume, forming a thread that links the lives of many chronicled. Compelling, though it will probably appeal primarily to American Catholics who feel in some way abandoned by a Church that they will nonetheless not desert.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8245-1463-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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