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This Dark World: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost

This Dark World: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost

List Price: $14.95
Your Price: $10.47
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Brave and initially interesting, but sadly shallow
Review: First of all: Carolyn Briggs has chosen to share her story with the world, a story which might anger some, and she should be admired for having the courage to do so. It's because this is her personal story that I've given this two stars instead of one - she deserves credit for examining her experiences and trying to come to terms with them, and for opening her soul up to the world in this way.

That said, this is a frustrating, disappointing and ultimately sad book. Briggs' early days as a confused pregnant teenager are portrayed well, and her eventual drift into a radical Pentecostal church is understandable and moving. However, it is here that the book begins to go wrong. Briggs' intellectually stifling experiences in the church are contrasted with her growing personal desire to explore and question her life and her religion; however, this conflict is presented with surprisingly little insight into her motivations and actions. Did Briggs do any research into or exploring of Christianity on her own? Did she try, but was prevented? How did she square these new feelings with the feelings of her conversion? Questions like these abound, but are too often glossed over or ignored. Briggs seems unwilling to look too deeply at her loss of faith and the possible alternatives that she chose not to explore. As a result, her eventual apparent conversion to atheism is baffling - was there nothing about her faith she thought salvageable? If not, why? Has she considered that if it was so easy to throw it away, it may not have been faith that she had in the first place? As it stands, the book reads like she simply decided that religion was too hard and tossed it.

This is another problem with her account - much of her troubles seem based on a desire for the easy way out, for liberation, in the current hedonistic sense of the word. Her marital troubles therefore come across as largely her own fault - essentially, she was bored and blamed it on her husband for not being more exciting or sophisticated. As a result, she abandons her family without looking back and takes off to Europe to find herself. This is not a picture of a serious seeker, but a rather shallow, self-centered woman. In fairness to Briggs, this may not be what actually happened, but it certainly read that way to me, especially when I got to the florid romantic prose at the end of the book (a section, by the way, that reads like nothing so much as a teenager's account of an infatuation, not a mature woman discovering real love). Meanwhile, we hear next to nothing of her abandoned husband and children, as if they are irrelevant to her new life. I ended up suspicious that the same will eventually happen to her new husband, as Briggs does not seem to understand that passion cannot be the foundation of a lasting relationship.

In the end, one wonders what it is Briggs has actually accomplished. She has disposed of one religion and family, but she doesn't seem to have replaced them with anything substantial - she apparently did no serious intellectual searching, and she never acknowledges or deals directly with the implications of her loss of faith and her new lifestyle. When I closed the book, the portrait I had of Briggs was that of a woman who splashed around in the shallow end of Christianity, decided she wanted deeper waters, and instead of learning to swim, jumped into another shallow pool and pretended that it was deep. As one who has faced that dark night of the soul, and who subsequently spent years researching and testing my faith, this came across as inadequate, to say the least.

As a novel, this would be an interesting character study; as a real woman's experiences, the predominant emotion I felt after finishing this book was pity. I would welcome a sequel, but only if it shows more insight and understanding, both of faith and of herself, than "This Dark World" displays. I'm not sorry I read it, but I can't recommend it.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good Read, but ...
Review: I found the book an interesting read because it relates well to the things I went through as a Jehovah's Witness. Like the author, higher education became my conduit during exile from "the Truth."

I think the book ended abruptly, and left some issues dangling. However, it's a memoir of where the author is at the time she wrote the story. I hope she writes another memoir in a few years so readers can follow her next spiritual and life stages.

John Shelby Spong has an insightful book that goes beyond the stage of exiting a spiritual path, to discovering God anew. It's a great follow up after reading, "This Dark World." Spong's new book is called, "A New Christianity for a New World."

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Disappointing
Review: If I had known how anticlimactically this book would end, I wouldn't have wasted any time on reading it. I was hoping to learn how the author discovered that her religion was based on a false foundation and what effects that discovery had on her. Instead it turns out that she ran out of passion for her hardworking and apparently very decent husband and decided to divorce him, after letting him put her through seven years of school. In order to reconcile this decision with her conscience, she had to dump "God" too. A more feeble reason for giving up a religion that has been the framework of one's life for twenty years can hardly be imagined.

My other sentiments concerning this book have already been ably expressed by other reviewers, and I should perhaps add that I am an atheist.


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