Rating: Summary: A Quality Read Review: This short work is well worth the time of any Christian. What exactly is our claim? Has the church complacently allowed a post-modern relativism to separate us from the great doctrines of the creeds? Why is modern Christianity so diverse and perverse? These are the critical questions Sayers attempts to answer. Her uncompromising passion for objective truth is refreshing and she conveys that righteous passion with eloquence. Again, this short work is well worth the time. The only caveat I will make to my enthusiastic approval of her book is it seems to end after the fourth chapter. Chapters five through seven are dedicated to things outside the primary concern of the work, embodied in the first four chapters. While the later are of some value as well, the first four chapters are the heart of the work and they are what I enthusiastically praise.
Rating: Summary: Dorothy Sayers was Anglican Review: What a treat to find this book to enjoy right along with Sayers' fiction. While Sayers was not Roman Catholic, there's not a thing here a Catholic could complain about. In fact, it made clear for me some of the recent teaching of John Paul II, and this from a book written at the beginning of World War II. I read the first several chapters with great enjoyment, savoing Sayers' beautiful use of the language, and finding myself lifted in prayer. Then the last two chapters, I found myself reading with a growing conviction that I need to retool some of my thinking. Warning: this book may shock some who think capitalism is unadulteratedly Christian!
Rating: Summary: Disappointing Review: While Sayers is clearly a gifted writer and thinker, this book comes across as something less than it could have been. I found it to be more of a curiosity than a theological or doctrinal heavyweight.First off, the entire work is fairly well encapsulated in its time. While Sayers was certainly prescient with regard to the new age mysticism that permeates the West, one cannot help but receive "Creed or Chaos" in its temporal setting; stiff & palsied nobility embracing meaningless nothingness vs. staunch but outnumbered traditionalists warning of the perils of neopaganism. Secondly, there are unfortunate diversions into the doctrine of War and Economics that flaw the work. Sayers begins well enough with exegesis, and transitions into some interesting apologetics, but as she deeper into her discourse she seems to lose her way, making a disconcerting leap from Augustine to Britain-At-War that is thoroughly unconvincing. Her revulsion for the industrialized state leads to various equations of capitalism with the deadly sins, which is common enough for social-justice types. This cursory economics is, however, dragged stillborn into her simplistic analysis of War, particularly with regard to the temporal context of the book: "...the root causes of conflict are usually to be found in some wrong way of life in which all parties have acquiesed, and for which everybody must, to some extent, bear the blame." Sadly, Sayers gets ever more unreasonable as she launches into a strange diatribe to justify this statement. Doctrinally, Sayers stays pretty well in bounds, but utlizes a social justice perspective that falls somewhere between Teddy Kennedy and Phil Donahue. Nevertheless, she is adept in her denunciations of relativism and her defense of absolutism in the realm of Christian reality. Overall, the work is an intriguing, and entertaining ramble. Sayer's vehemence in defense of her positions is commendable, and the book is checkered with unique insights that still resonate more than half a century after its publication. But in the final analysis the book serves neither as apologetics nor as theology, but only as "Dorothy Sayers."
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