If you’re inclined to Orthodox fundamentalism, then this is your book. If not, not.
An admittedly “strange book” about religious faith and its necessary willing suspension of disbelief.
It’s one thing to believe in an invisible sky deity. It’s quite another to believe in demons that require exorcism in UFOs, whose extraterrestrial occupants, one religious scholar believes, “are likely to be at the bottom of a new religion that will arrive in the future.” For the moment, Dreher writes, Christianity will have to do—and not just any Christianity, but its Eastern Orthodox variant, which retains the ecstatic and the mystical in place of more rational, less awestruck Western strands. Dreher is committed to bringing his reader to adopt this extrarational way of being in the world, his or her every breath devoted to religious practice. (Toward the end of the book, he prescribes the “Jesus Prayer,” its four simple lines punctuated by breath and spoken as if a mantra.) Dreher is capable of stirring exaltations, as when he likens humans to fish at the bottom of a pond: “Sometimes we catch a flash of light reflected in a piece of matter drifting down from on high, and our attraction to it causes us to rise toward the light beyond the surface,” he writes, going on to say that the beauty brought to humans by the arts fuels that gracious light. Regrettably, he also punctuates his argument with flashes of rightist thought, as when he describes American teenagers who convinced an Eastern European pal that she “might be genderqueer”—and so she might have been—and says that “witchcraft and paganism typically track with progressive political commitments, especially around feminism, environmentalism, and queer activism.” Such moments make it clear that Dreher’s “confident belief that there is deep meaning to life” doesn’t tolerate much wiggle room.
If you’re inclined to Orthodox fundamentalism, then this is your book. If not, not.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9780310369127
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Zondervan
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
Progressive Christians and secular activists alike will find this a useful handbook in battling the religious right.
A lawyer and religious activist squares off against Christian nationalism and its far-right-wing tenets.
“A large and diverse community of people is eager to challenge the political ideology of Christian nationalism,” writes Tyler. This community comprises many faith traditions. In the case of her former Southern Baptist alignment, one argument against nationalism holds that “every person must have the freedom to respond to God and that no governmental authority should interfere with that relationship.” Speaking from that tradition, Tyler argues that the conflation of Christianity and government is idolatrous, and in its us-against-them stances, with “us” being able to tell “them” how to live their lives, it violates what Tyler holds to be the most important tenet of Christianity: that one should love one’s neighbor as oneself. Tyler depicts Christian nationalism as an effort to impose state-backed theocratic authority on the entire nation; nationalists, she holds, believe a range of propositions from the sanctity of the Second Amendment to the relegation of women to subservient positions, to say nothing of suppressing religious minorities. Tyler holds that these views have come as part of a package that has dogged Americans from the earliest days but has gathered force in the past few decades, including white supremacist assumptions and the insistence that God favors the United States above all other nations—more idolatry, that. With each prose narrative chapter closing with biblical readings and workbooklike exercises, Tyler’s book offers both good news and bad. The good news is that “large and diverse community.” The bad news, she allows, is that it will take generations to entirely root out Christian nationalism, beginning with one central task: “to directly confront a persistent myth: that the United States is a Christian nation.”
Progressive Christians and secular activists alike will find this a useful handbook in battling the religious right.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781506498287
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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