MacCulloch has bitten off more than most readers will want to chew.
MacCulloch (History of the Church/Oxford Univ.; Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, 2011, etc.) takes on the difficult task of discovering the history of silence in the Christian faith.
The author takes an unusual approach to his topic, allowing it a wide array of definitions and also plumbing both history and the absence of history in crafting his work. He begins as any scholar of the New Testament should, with the Old Testament, and concludes that, overall, the Hebrew Scriptures are not overt advocates of silence. Nevertheless, the religion of Christianity would indeed find great meaning in silence from the very beginning, even in Jesus’ refusal to proclaim his identity with openness or to argue with his accusers before the cross. Silence found its chief expression in the early church through contemplative worship, namely in monasticism. Here, MacCulloch provides an interesting history of the ups and downs of silence in monasticism for the many centuries leading to and through the “three reformations” (iconoclasm, papal reforms and the Protestant Reformation). Quiet medieval Catholicism contrasts tremendously with the noise and din of Protestantism, a wellspring of preaching and music. Yet with Protestantism firmly in place, the author finds yet another type of silence to catalog: silence for the sake of survival. Under this heading, the author examines closet Christian sects and peoples forced into silence in order to survive. Finally, he examines history forgotten and turned into silence, from the forgotten roles of women to clerical sex abuse. MacCulloch covers some intriguing historical ground and raises many points of reflection for Christians. However, he fails to produce a cohesive and convincing history of silence. Discussing everything from strict monastic orders to the rewriting of Holocaust history as being about “silence” stretches the term to a state of near-meaninglessness.
MacCulloch has bitten off more than most readers will want to chew.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-670-02556-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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