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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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