A bracingly enthusiastic example of modern-day Christology.
A writer offers a celebration of the life and teachings of Jesus set against a contemporary backdrop.
Bohlen opens his well-designed nonfiction debut with an acknowledgement of an increasingly studied new reality. The heavy use of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter almost invariably leads to a lessening of personal happiness. People, particularly the young, who view these apps excessively end up wasting time, feeling jealousy, and becoming impatient with media and books that demand longer concentration. Bohlen asserts that this “murky collection” of platforms makes people worse: “We become prideful, self-centered, and think we know better than God.” But, as the author lays out in his eloquent and inviting prose, the solution to this problem has been readily handy for 2,000 years: Christianity. “Once envisioned—no, experienced—the story of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ cannot be erased,” he writes. “Why? Because Jesus Christ adds the dimension of eternal light. In a tender, deeply satisfying way, it blows any IMAX movie experience out of the water.” In a narrative move that’s possibly quite wise considering the unprecedented rates at which young people of the “Twitter generation” are abandoning traditional religions, Bohlen largely sidelines the opening antagonist of social media and instead concentrates on celebrating the Jesus story, bringing to it a sense of passionate immediacy that makes all the elements of that narrative feel fresh. Focusing on the Nativity, he relates: “The Christ, born tonight? Generations have waited for this moment, and here it is, tonight?” In the book—which features beautiful, uncredited photographs—the author intersperses his recapitulations of New Testament stories with pedagogical insets (“Doctrinal Points to Ponder”) and explicitly instructional ones (“How It Applies to Me”). Bohlen takes readers through the famous moments of the New Testament because, as he puts it, “Jesus is the gold standard by which we can know what is good, what is wise, and what is truly important.” His Christian readers should love how he treats that gold standard.
A bracingly enthusiastic example of modern-day Christology.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-949572-00-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Carpenter's Son Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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