Well-told if slanted journalistic account of Catholicism, by a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter. Following up his collection of interviews with priests (The Last Priests in America, 1991), Unsworth offers 22 brief vignettes gleaned from his years with the Catholic press and dealing mainly with Catholic laypeople. The title is taken from James Joyce and well expresses Unsworth's conviction that the Church embraces all sorts and conditions of humanity. The format, too, is Joycean: Each chapter serves up a story of local, mainly Chicago-set, life, suggestive of Dubliners. We meet Phil, who buys a gas station and finds himself giving the Church a respectable sum each week, which he makes from a condom machine. We encounter a priest who grapples with the stigma of having benefited from psychiatric help, as well as an ex-prostitute, dying of AIDS, who's at last surrounded by love, in a Catholic hospice. We follow a blow-by-blow account of a man's (successful) petition for the annulment of his marriage by the Church courts. There are stories recording the eccentricities of popular piety and the problems arising from the issues of the lesbian and gay movements, as well as from the role of women in the Church. Unsworth is concerned with unsung heros and ordinary folk, and he writes with compassion and humor, though he doesn't always inspire a reader's confidence.'' Many will query his assumption that ``the American Catholic Church reflects the Church throughout the world,'' especially when America turns out to mean Chicago. Moreover, it's clear that Unsworth has axes to grind, and that these concern things central to Catholicism, such as the priesthood, but he nowhere clearly spells out his position, and thus gives the impression of a dated iconoclasm. Engaging, but of interest and appeal mainly to disaffected Catholics.
Pub Date: Sept. 25, 1993
ISBN: 0-8245-1231-6
Page Count: 226
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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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