A must-read book for Catholics and devotees of religious history.
A fascinating look at the Catholic Church’s encounter with modernity.
Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Weigel (The Fragility of Order: Catholic Reflections on Turbulent Times, 2018, etc.) dives into the past two centuries of Catholic history to explore how the church has rejected, explored, and finally embraced modernity. In a work that will appeal to anyone with a genuine interest in church history, the author reintroduces readers to the embattled, and sometimes embittered, pre–Vatican II popes before exploring the more familiar church of today. Weigel uses a five-act format to explain the history of Catholicism in modernity, with each act covering a specific era in the church: against, exploring, embracing, critiquing, and, finally, converting modernity. The author fully examines the irony that the modernism feared and rejected by 19th-century popes and clerics would eventually come to shape, and even be shaped by, Catholicism. After some background, Weigel’s history begins in earnest with Pope Pius IX, whose anti-modern stance is best remembered via the Syllabus of Errors, which flatly rejects “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” The author then moves on to Leo XIII, “the man who would set the Church on the road to a sometimes skeptical, sometimes intrigued exploration of modernity, which would lead to developments in this drama that could not have been foreseen in Leo’s time.” This Leonine revolution would impact the papacy and the church throughout the 20th century, culminating in the years of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Harkening back to his 2013 book Evangelical Catholicism, Weigel concludes with the church’s “converting” modernism in the 21st century, embodied by “the challenging, puzzling, and, to some minds, deconstructive pontificate of Pope Francis.” Weigel is at once highly intellectual and thoroughly accessible as a writer as well as balanced and opinionated.
A must-read book for Catholics and devotees of religious history.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-465-09433-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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