A readable traditionalist appraisal.
The history and legacy of the Second Vatican Council.
In his latest, Catholic scholar Weigel, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of Letters to a Young Catholic, examines the ecumenical council that took place between 1962 and 1965. The author begins with a detailed yet concise exploration of the many global changes that led to the council. Though Pope John XXIII, “an essentially conservative and traditional pope,” shocked the church by calling for a council, which hadn’t taken place since 1870, it should have been clear that modern society—punctuated by world wars, the rise of communism, decolonization, and countless other factors—had changed the landscape so thoroughly that a fresh approach was vital for Catholic survival. Weigel writes that the ultimate purpose of the council was to “empower a revitalized Church to offer the modern world a path beyond incoherence—or, worse, self-destruction—through an encounter with Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God.” Once it began, institutionalists lost their bid to steer the council’s work toward less important matters of rules and administration. Instead, the council took a decidedly theological turn in order to answer the pressing question of “how God made his purposes known to humanity in a binding way that was authoritative for the Church over time.” The council would be thoroughly Christocentric in nature and explore the church’s role in a modern world through a Christian viewpoint. Weigel thoroughly analyzes the major documents that resulted from the council’s decisions. He then discusses its lasting legacy, especially through the lens of two of its participants: popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Finally, he notes that a 1985 synod most clearly affirmed the meaning of Vatican II as a great gift of grace until “the Church lived fully the truth about itself as a communion of disciples in mission.”
A readable traditionalist appraisal.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-465-09431-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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