Categories for Book Reviews

Like many, I watched the recent anti-racial protests with consternation. My empathy mingles with dubiety. Although America (indeed, the world) is mired in a history of social injustice, freedom and equality have always been our bragging rights. And yet freedom and equality constrict the other. Aristotle says that our nature makes us unequal. Our individuality...

Somewhere in his 50’s, David Brooks, author and social commentator, suffered an existential crisis. He and his wife of 29 years got divorced. In a midst of soul searching in profound loneliness, Brooks wrote two books, “The Road to Character” in 2015 (see review in my website) and “The Second Mountain” in 2019. Between these...

Intermittently, Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist, in “12 Rules For Life,” warns that life is hard and suffering, and that humanity is in existential chaos. We are broken, flawed and prone to do bad things, not only to others but to ourselves. Responding to a newspaper query: what’s wrong with the world today, G.K. Chesterton...

Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, Islam, as religion, culture and geo-politics, enters our public discourses and barges in perfervid sentiments. Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning” poignantly corrals our visceral reactions. We sought answers to questions we didn’t know how to ask. For a short time, there was a spike...

Martin Gross’s “The Psychological Society” excoriated the dominance of psychology in contemporary society. He let on that Freud’s notion of the unconscious has abnegated our conscientious responsibility. For millenniums, we thought being humans was unique. We were the center of the universe. Unlike other life forms, our conscious mind uniquely grants us freedom to make...

They say that nature’s wind blows from west to east but the wind of God blows from east to west. For five hundred years, Protestantism has been blowing from the old world to the new world, and then to third worlds. For better and at times for worst, its influence is indelible. Since a coarse...

Europe’s abandonment of its Christian roots is self-evident when its constitution framers abjectly omit Christianity’s role in its history. Europe not only rejects the Christian church for its future but also excises its significance from its past. The Benedict Option, by Rod Dreher of the “The American Conservative” journal, excoriates that the new world has...

Evangelical reactions to Mariology fall into two main camps – an ignorant silence or an incensed rejection. There are those who know little and say even less about the place of this peasant mother of Jesus in our faith and practice. Then there are those, based on what they see and know, are violently against...

The years that I was teaching, my subway stop was in Tribeca. On top of the stairs I often came across tourists checking their guidebooks or looking for landmarks to get to where they wanted to go. What is the difference between a tourist and a pilgrim? A tourist travels to attraction places he is...

Great thinkers like Aristotle, Cicero and Montaigne in their own cogitation concur that the highest form of human relationships is a friendship between two men. Cicero offers that it is a kind of nobility and Montaigne adds that it is a form of spirituality. Charles Strozier’s study of Abraham Lincoln’s friendship with Joshua Speed speaks...