A challenging, yet respectful, spiritual guidebook to a more peaceful future.
Greenebaum, an interfaith minister, challenges humanity to embrace inclusivity in this nonfiction book.
“The future of the Earth is in question,” the author ominously writes in his introduction, noting a shared fear among many that “there are some dark times ahead.” Our survival, Greenebaum argues, hinges on “a positive, hopeful, action-based spiritual renewal.” The author reports that, more than two decades ago, he received a divine revelation after months of angrily demanding that God answer his pleas. The dictations he made of these revelations form the basis of his multiple books on interfaith spirituality, including his memoir, One Family: Indivisible (2020). The current book picks up where those left off, not only providing the first word-for-word transcription of the revelations, but also contextualizing their meaning upon further study and reflection. Geared toward personal application, the book’s spiritual commentary emphasizes the importance of community, noting that everyone is a “child of the universe,” regardless of their race, religion, sexual orientation, or level of education. “We are one family,” Greenebaum observes. “We must hang on to hope and each other.” The author is the founder of the Living Interfaith Church in Lynnwood, Washington, and has previously directed Jewish, Methodist, and other choirs; as such, he has a firm grasp on world religions, frequently citing holy texts from Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as Taoist and African proverbs. While highlighting shared traditions that unite religions, such as the ubiquity of the Golden Rule, Greenebaum pays careful attention to respecting differences. A discussion on prayer, for instance, highlights the “diversity of revelations,” citing the significance of yarmulkes to Jews, the sign of the cross to Catholics, or facing Mecca to Muslims. Thus, despite the author’s avowed agnosticism and esoteric “interaction with Cosmic Conscience,” the text never belittles the faith of others. Greenebaum may criticize the actions of religious fanatics, but he’s careful to note how their actions (such as in Europe’s religious wars between Catholics and Protestants) contradict the teachings of their faiths. At just under 150 pages, this is an accessible exploration of the values of interfaith cooperation.
A challenging, yet respectful, spiritual guidebook to a more peaceful future.Pub Date: June 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781957354248
Page Count: 162
Publisher: MSI Press
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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