Though speculative at turns, followers of Pauline will find this account illuminating.
“Jesus is Christianity’s founder,” writes Chilton, “but Paul is its maker.”
No news there: the Pauline contribution to Christianity has been well documented. But Chilton (Religion/Bard College; Rabbi Jesus, 2000) capably complicates the story, teasing out the elements of Paul’s making as they grew from his knowledge of many religious and philosophical practices. Peter and James and other of the disciples saw their faith as an extension of Judaism, so that “non-Jews who wished to be baptized in Jesus’ name . . . had to submit to the Torah as God-fearers—remaining Gentiles but acknowledging the Law of Moses.” But Paul—a native of Tarsus, that center of Greco-Roman stoic philosophy, and early inclined against mysticism by virtue of his training as a Pharisee and in all events a onetime persecutor of Christians—conceived of a universal church that would allow Gentiles to “inherit the sonship that was Israel’s gift to the world without accepting the Law.” That view bordered on heretical, and Paul “managed to scandalize both Jews and Gentiles with exactly the same message.” Other Pauline messages continue to cause controversy; notes Chilton, “He wrote that women in Corinth should shut up in church,” and “he despised homosexuality.” For all those “parochial prejudices,” Chilton observes, many of the ideas that make Paul “the apostle . . . many contemporary Christians—and non-Christians—love to hate,” are post-Pauline, even if Paul may well have endorsed them. Paul’s triumph, Chilton suggests, and the summation of his intellectual quest was the discovery of spirit, the notion that the truer self lay beyond the material and the physical; in doing so, he shifted the emphasis of Christianity from the realization of the kingdom of God on earth to the discovery of “the Christ within one’s being.”
Though speculative at turns, followers of Pauline will find this account illuminating.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-50862-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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