God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time
- Book Review,
by Desmond Tutu
From Publishers Weekly
Reading this book is like having a long, and somewhat homiletical, afternoon tea with former Archbishop of Cape Town and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Tutu. Four years after No Future Without Forgiveness, Tutu's reflection on his role as Chairman of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, comes this deeply personal book that Tutu calls "a cumulative expression of my life's work." Each chapter begins "Dear Child of God," and goes on to reflect on vulnerability, transfiguration and the human condition with winding anecdotes from Tutu's personal and public life, stories he delivers with his trademark humor and a deceptive simplicity. For example, when Tutu says we are all one family, what emerges is not some churchy optimism, but a highly developed theology of relationship, what Tutu has earlier called ubuntu ("a person is a person through other people"), with political as well as interpersonal implications. This book is highly readable, perhaps because, like other Tutu books, it is culled in large part from lectures and sermons delivered in Tutu's very public life. That this book aims for more than an afternoon tea becomes clear at its close: we are God's partners, Tutu exhorts. We are humanized or dehumanized in and through our actions toward others. Tutu grounds this appeal most concretely, ending with a list of Web sites from organizations that need more partners for their outreach. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From AudioFile
Generalizing from his political journey since apartheid fell in South Africa, the Nobel-winning religious leader invites us to confront injustice with forgiveness, humility, generosity, and courage. The gentleness of this message will startle those who withhold or need love because the author shows how loving his political adversaries moved his country beyond the tinderbox of anger it was for a time. Tutu's sincere and heartfelt delivery is a perfect match for the message of hope embedded in his writing. The most energizing parts of Tutu's message are his respect for each person's right to choose how to love others--even whether to love them at all--and his personal example of how to live a life that expresses Christian ideals. T.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
Admired throughout the world for grace, generosity of spirit, honesty, and humility, Archbishop Tutu has witnessed much evil, particularly in his native South Africa, and has been threatened with death. He has also seen much good, and here he emphasizes that. Many find his dream that the world's people will realize they are all members of one family--God's family--rather utopian, but he heartily disagrees. He believes in the genuine possibility of his dream, and he uses the Feast of the Transfiguration to express the goodness--the power of God's transformation--that undergirds the world and that has already made the cross, once an instrument of death, the source, for Christians, of eternal life. No one is beyond God's love and grace, the archbishop assures. He also discusses the nature of evil and goodness (one cannot exist without the other), free will, moral responsibility, individualism, capitalist culture, sexism, racism, forgiveness, suffering, and mortality. Goodness will prevail, he believes, and his small, inspiring, empowering book will make others believe that, too. June Sawyers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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