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
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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