Reviewed Elsewhere [Vol. 1, #47]
Jesus Manifesto Reviews RE-JESUS
by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch
http://www.jesusmanifesto.com/2008/12/04/rejesus-revisioning-christology/
ReJesus is the latest offering from the dynamic duo of Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch.
Let me say up front: I love these guys and their passion. I hope I’m not expecting perfection from them. They are contributing to a learning conversation. Their stated intention in this work is to declutter Jesus: to free him from the baggage and cultural accretions of centuries. Some of those accretions involve the imposition of philosophical baggage, and of course even the council of Nicea was working with a certain philosophical perspective when they articulated the Christological formulations that they did. I understand that Frost and Hirsch are attempting a correction; but I wonder if they have pushed too hard.
ReJesus is Soul Survivor meets Wild at Heart. The motivation is sound; others like Amos Yong and Clark Pinnock have affirmed that evangelical Christology is anemic, either academic on one hand or bumper-sticker best-buddy on the other.
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Read the full review:
http://www.jesusmanifesto.com/2008/12/04/rejesus-revisioning-christology/
RE-JESUS
Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch.
Paperback: Hendrickson, 2008.
Buy Now: [ Amazon ]
The Washington Post review of
Paul Mariani’s GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS: A LIFEhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/30/AR2008103003614.html
Excepting his juvenilia and various fragments, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844- 1889) wrote only about 50 poems, most of them “counter, original, spare, strange.” As Paul Mariani tells us in his new critical biography, nobody wanted to publish these angst-ridden, prayerful cries from the heart, and so Hopkins was reduced to sharing his work, via letter, with a handful of friends. Even the most sophisticated of these, the future poet laureate Robert Bridges, confessed to finding “The Wreck of the Deutschland” — Hopkins’s first masterpiece — unsympathetic and incomprehensible. After all, its themes were nothing if not seriously theological: God, Nature, salvation, providence, human despair and spiritual exultation.
In themselves such religious subjects, which were to remain central to Hopkins’s poetry, would have been attractive to the morally earnest Victorians. But Hopkins eschewed the gentlemanly observance of an Anglican curate. His faith burned hot and strong. As a young Oxford undergraduate, he had converted to Catholicism — being received into the church by Cardinal Newman himself — and had then, to his family’s shock and sorrow, become a Jesuit.
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Read the full review:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/30/AR2008103003614.html
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS: A LIFE
Paul Mariani
Hardcover: Viking, 2008.
Buy Now: [ Doulos Christou Books $28 ] [ Amazon ]
Powell’s reviews
A PASSION FOR NATURE: THE LIFE OF JOHN MUIR
by Donald Worsterhttp://www.powells.com/review/2008_11_23.html
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A Passion for Nature helps correct a number of distortions and omissions that are perennial in popular representations of Muir’s life. For example, we have generally preferred to envision Muir as a solitary rambler, alone in the mountain tabernacle of the high Sierra. Worster’s account, if less dramatic, makes clear that although Muir was often a solo wilderness adventurer, he was also a remarkably sociable man who nurtured and enjoyed his relationships with family and friends.
Likewise, Muir has often been depicted as an inspired pauper who renounced commercial activity in favor of the unsullied wilderness, a distortion that has caused us to elide the long chapter of his adult life that was devoted to profit-generating agricultural enterprise. Worster brings Muir’s Martinez, California, fruit-growing business into focus. He also shows that Muir was close friends with many of the wealthiest and most powerful men of his day (including Theodore Roosevelt and the railroad magnate E. H. Harriman), and that the adult Muir was rather well off for an inspired tramp.
Worster is also more honest than many previous commentators in acknowledging that Muir was, despite his generally egalitarian views of human and nonhuman beings alike, deeply ambivalent about Native Americans and also about Chinese immigrants, a number of whom worked as laborers on his ranch. If A Passion for Nature is biography rather than hagiography, however, it is far from being an expose; on the contrary, Worster remains respectful of Muir’s vision and accomplishments throughout.
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Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2008_11_23.html
A PASSION FOR NATURE: THE LIFE OF JOHN MUIR
Donald Worster.
Hardcover: Oxford UP, 2008.
Buy Now: [ Doulos Christou Books $28 ] [ Amazon ]
The Burnside Writers’ Collective Review of
Malcolm Gladwell’s OUTLIERShttp://www.burnsidewriterscollective.com/reviews/books/g/outliers_by_malcolm_gladwell1208.php
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Outliers is about a very narrow definition of success, one separate from morality or kindness. The question arises most often during Gladwell’s analysis of child-raising, particularly in the question of concerted cultivation versus natural growth. Concerted cultivation, Gladwell claims, instills a sense of entitlement, which he argues is not a bad thing. Concerted cultivation is more likely to develop a child’s ability to negotiate and deal with adults, while natural growth children will be more submissive and less-likely to challenge their elders. The children raised with a sense of entitlement, then, are more likely to succeed as adults, because they are more likely to stand up for themselves.
That’s all well and good, but there’s a reason a healthy sense of entitlement is looked down upon in our culture. Gladwell admits children raised by natural growth methods are “better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their time and had a better sense of independence”. But, you know, they aren’t becoming CEOs or anything.
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Read the full review:
http://www.burnsidewriterscollective.com/reviews/books/g/outliers_by_malcolm_gladwell1208.php
OUTLIERS: WHY SOME PEOPLE SUCCEED AND SOME DON’T
Malcolm Gladwell.
Hardcover: Little, Brown, and Co., 2008.
Buy Now: [ Doulos Christou Books $23 ] [ Amazon ]
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