A thought-provoking, but imperfect call to a revolution in Christian thinking.
A debut book offers a reinterpretation of Christian theology.
In an appraisal of virtually the entirety of Christian thinking, Brathwaite argues that the church has spent centuries misleading the faithful into a belief in false and distorted teachings. Chief among these is the existence of hell. The author argues that Scripture clearly teaches that God’s love and mercy cancel out any possibility that souls might be cast into an eternity of suffering in payment for their sins. He builds upon this assertion by also arguing that souls are not formed at conception or birth, but that all souls have existed since the start of creation. This fact, then, would lead to a reevaluation of the soul’s fate after it has lived in a human body. Eventually, Brathwaite comes to his ultimate thesis, that the soul lives more than one life. Rather than label this as reincarnation, he calls it regeneration. Brathwaite declares throughout this work that the established Christian church has knowingly ignored obvious Scriptures on regeneration to control believers with the promise of heaven or hell, earned through a single life. Various discussions stem from the regeneration argument. For instance, the author theorizes that the priest Melchizedek was an early manifestation of Jesus, and that John the Baptist was indeed Elijah the Prophet. Brathwaite also asks how the spirit of sin is supposed to have spread through every generation of the human race, whereas individual spirits are supposedly confined to single lives. Brathwaite’s arguments have the potential to be revolutionary in nature; but his rhetoric toward the established faith is so caustic that it detracts from the strength of his arguments. Speaking throughout of an “impostor God” and theology taught by “bearers of false witness” who act as “pallbearers” for the faith, Braithwaite is strangely harsh toward the basic thinking of the global church, even if he feels it has always been in error. A lack of academic rigor (for instance, little if any use of original Greek and Hebrew) also handicaps this otherwise promising work.
A thought-provoking, but imperfect call to a revolution in Christian thinking.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5355-4995-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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