An uplifting, relevant devotional for finding hope in darkness.
A pastor compiles his daily writings to his Brooklyn parishioners during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic in this work.
Though retired from full-time ministry, Gram agreed to serve as the interim pastor of St. John’s Reformed Church in Red Hook. The church’s full-time minister had suffered a medical emergency. Soon, what was supposed to be a brief stint in a waterfront neighborhood turned into a complicated endeavor, as the author dealt with the most tumultuous moments in the church’s history. The New York region was one of the first places in America seriously affected by a wave of Covid-19 infections. As church doors closed and home and hospital visits became impossible, the author shifted to daily meditations written for his parishioners. This timely book features minimally edited versions of those daily devotions written during the pandemic. In nearly 50 pieces, ranging from short paragraphs to lengthy essays, Gram provides readers with inspirational notes. Some of them address the holy season’s transition from a somber Lent to the hope promised by Jesus’ resurrection at Easter. There are also Covid-19 specific messages; for example, the author delivers a reminder that loving one’s neighbor includes staying indoors to limit the spread of the virus. Written just prior to George Floyd’s death, which Gram laments in his introduction, his daily musings sometimes discuss racism, particularly anti-Asian violence and rhetoric. A final essay concludes with the author’s vivid story of overcoming a genetic blood-clotting disorder. After the diagnosis, he became a prolific mountain climber and rode his bicycle from California to New Hampshire at the age of 68. Each devotion follows a predictable pattern of a relevant Scripture reference, a reflective vignette, and a prayer. Gram’s lucid writing style is that of a seasoned and intellectual yet nurturing pastor. Though the author is a mainline Protestant, he intentionally includes other faith traditions in his remarks, from Roman Catholicism to Buddhism. While the heartfelt book ends abruptly without a satisfying narrative conclusion, it will nevertheless be of great use to Christians struggling to make spiritual sense of the Covid-19 pandemic.
An uplifting, relevant devotional for finding hope in darkness.Pub Date: July 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-951937-44-7
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Epigraph Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
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