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THE PREACHER KING

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. AND THE WORD THAT MOVED AMERICA

A thorough, textured analysis of the sources and strategies of Martin Luther King's preaching and rhetoric. Lischer (Homiletics/Duke Univ. Divinity School) argues that focusing on King's thought as expressed in his ``derivative'' academic work scants the ``stunning creativity'' of his achievement in articulating the values and aspirations of the civil rights movement. Thus, in trying to locate King's true voice, Lischer relies on sources that he says many biographers overlook: audiotapes and unedited transcripts of King's sermons and speeches. He traces King's development as a ``preacher's kid,'' inheriting the Baptist Church's mixed heritage of resistance and faith in otherworldly relief. At Morehouse College, King found another influence in the intellectual idiom of the school's president Benjamin Mays; later, at Crozer Seminary and Boston University, he drew on broader religious traditions but never lost his grounding in the black community and church. Thrust into prominence at 26 as a Montgomery, Ala., church leader, King responded with his rich intellectual and spiritual resources; in one of several insightful critiques, Lischer shows how the preacher galvanized his audience by using repetition of the word ``tired'' to connect historical black grievances with contemporary humiliations. The author demonstrates how King drew on an enormous range of material—poems, gospel formulas, paragraphs from speeches of popular white preachers—and inserted them ``like numbers on a jukebox'' for maximum effect. Lischer also shows how King was able to speak authentically to blacks, yet also reach the larger society by linking social reform with the country's dominant Christianity. He concludes with analyses of King's choices of biblical preaching texts, his ``first draft'' style of preaching, and, fascinatingly, his powerful voice at mass organizing meetings. Lischer argues that King was able to frame a broadly based rationale for racial equality in a historical moment that has since passed. Worthy stuff, but more detail than most readers will want.

Pub Date: March 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-19-508779-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995

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THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

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

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THE ART OF SOLITUDE

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

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