A thoughtful, detailed exploration of three small but growing fundamentalist groups within postVatican II American Catholicism. The sweeping changes instituted by the Church in the 1960s were not greeted with equal enthusiasm by all American Catholics: A small but highly vocal minority felt the Church had impulsively abandoned its defining precepts. Cuneo (Sociology and Anthropology/Fordham Univ.) examines several distinct groups that have emerged from the ``crisis of identity'' caused by change: moral conservatives, including the militant late-20th-century crusaders against abortion; Catholic separatists, who have withdrawn from the Church and created their own isolationist communities; and Marianists, who seek guidance from the apocalyptic messages of the Blessed Virgin's miraculous appearances. Of these, the last two are perhaps the least understood. The conspiracy theories of separatists—who believe that John Paul II is a false pope, selected by communist forces intent on infiltration—are fodder for ridicule, but Cuneo never mocks his subjects. Rather, he seeks to understand separatism's origins in the seeming vacuum of authority created by Vatican II, which liberalized the priesthood, granted power to the laity, and acknowledged nonpapal sources of truth. Similarly, the author places the Marianists in a context of the demythologization of Catholicism after the Council. Marianism explicitly rejects the deep-sixing of miracles, affirming a divine control of human history. In neglecting to note that many mainstream Catholics have also rejected some of Vatican II's sweeping reforms, albeit in smaller ways, Cuneo runs the risk of missing the larger picture of Catholics' ongoing negotiations with the legacy of Vatican II. Still, this is a winning ethnography of some unusual religious sects.
Pub Date: June 5, 1997
ISBN: 0-19-511350-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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