Summary of Jeff Sharlet's The Family

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Zeke was a man who had been called to witness the ruins of secularism in New York. He went around talking to people he took to be Muslims, praying with an imam, and visiting mosques. He got as close to Ground Zero as possible.
#2 When he met Jesus, he stopped struggling and his pallor left him. He took a job in finance and he met a woman as bright as he was and much happier, but the questions of his youth still bothered him. He drank too much and his eye wandered.
#3 I had never thought of myself as a religious seeker, but at Ivanwald I became one. I had lived with Cowboy Christians in Texas, and with Baba lovers, America’s most benign cultists, in South Carolina.
#4 The Family is an invisible association that has always been organized around public men. They are known to have helped elect Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, who is chair of the Values Action Team, and Representative Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania, who chairs the House version of the VAT.

Sujets

• Religion
• Political Ideologies
• Political Science
• Liberalism
• Conservatism
• Jésus de Nazareth
• Jesus
• Jesús de Nazaret

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 10 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822503427
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Jeff Sharlet's The Family
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12 Insights from Chapter 13 Insights from Chapter 14 Insights from Chapter 15
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Zeke was a man who had been called to witness the ruins of secularism in New York. He went around talking to people he took to be Muslims, praying with an imam, and visiting mosques. He got as close to Ground Zero as possible.

#2

When he met Jesus, he stopped struggling and his pallor left him. He took a job in finance and he met a woman as bright as he was and much happier, but the questions of his youth still bothered him. He drank too much and his eye wandered.

#3

I had never thought of myself as a religious seeker, but at Ivanwald I became one. I had lived with Cowboy Christians in Texas, and with Baba lovers, America’s most benign cultists, in South Carolina.

#4

The Family is an invisible association that has always been organized around public men. They are known to have helped elect Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, who is chair of the Values Action Team, and Representative Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania, who chairs the House version of the VAT.

#5

The Family’s mission is to bring leaders of all levels of society who direct projects as they are led by the spirit. They have a close relationship with oil and aerospace businessmen, and they typically foster strong ties with Republican lawmakers.

#6

The Family’s political activities have always been misunderstood by outsiders. As a result, they have learned to never commit anything to paper. The more you can make your organization invisible, the more influence it will have.

#7

The Family operates under many names, and has done so for many years. It has helped launch Christian conservative powerhouses such as Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship, a worldwide ministry that has declared civil war on secularism.

#8

The Family uses the Prayer Breakfast to bring leaders together, away from the media spotlight. The president always speaks last, and it is usually an outsider to Christian conservatism who delivers the main address.

#9

The Family has used the National Prayer Breakfast to recruit powerful people into smaller, more frequent prayer meetings, where they can meet Jesus man to man. They have also forged relationships between the US government and some of the most oppressive regimes in the world.

#10

The Cedars is named after the trees, but Family members speak of it as a person. It is a refuge for the poor in spirit: the senators, generals, and prime ministers who coast to the end of 24th Street in Arlington in black limousines and town cars to meet one another and Jesus.

#11

At Ivanwald, men are trained to be leaders by loving their leaders. We were the caretakers of the Cedars, cleaning its gutters, mowing its lawns, and blowing weeds. We were also called to serve on Tuesday mornings, when the Cedars hosted a prayer breakfast.

#12

The Family also has meetings with members of Congress, where they share stories about how prayer has helped them overcome political opposition, personal pride, and dull policy briefings. They don’t mean Democrats, but the enemy, broadly defined.

#13

The Regimen at Ivanwald was so precise that it was relaxing: no swearing, no drinking, no sex, no self. The brothers there would read the Bible and pray to be humble.

#14

The one man at Ivanwald who believed that Jesus had a complex message was Riley, a son of a Republican businessman from Wisconsin who sounded like a Spaniard who’d learned his English in Sweden.

#15

The brothers had a prayer meeting the night of the demonstration, and prayed for Riley, who had been arrested at the demonstration. They prayed that the stratagems of evil and wickedness would be washed away by God’s rain.

#16

The brothers were of one mind and thirteen bodies, crushing Christ into me, and there was nothing I could do but to give in to their love. They wanted to welcome me to brotherhood, to Jesus, and to the Family.

#17

At Ivanwald, the students were taught how to rule the world. David explained that the Old Testament was full of bad guys, but that God liked them. He said that he wasn’t here to judge the students, but to help them learn how to rule the world.

#18

The idea of being a toy for God’s pleasure blossomed in Beau’s mind. Jesus. he said. We’re not really spacemen. We’re just toys. Created for God. For His pleasure, nothing else. Just a toy. Period.

#19

I was out for a run the next morning when I ran into Jeff C. , a house leader, who was also a student at the University of North Carolina. I asked him why his Bible was a King James. He said he liked the passion of the language. Which part of Jesus is that. I asked. He smiled fully and nodded.

#20

At Ivanwald, we were taught the fundamentals of the Family, not the fancy plays. We were there to soften our hearts to authority, and to be nothing but Competence.

#21

The spiritual bonds among Family members were expressions of love, though the term was not used merely to denote affection. Love in the Family was the love that conquers and consumes. It was the love without which one was a nothing, a minus, or a zero.

#22

The Family is Protestant, but it also has Catholic members. It believes in a subtler evangelism than many pre-millennialists, and it hews to Calvin’s belief that worldly power can help shape a holy community.

#23

The Family is a group of people who pledge to follow Jesus’s teachings. They do not ask their members to stop seeking power or raking in profits, but they want them to believe that they do so not for their own gain but for God’s.

#24

The Ivanwald program is a highly dedicated group of individuals who are united together having a total commitment to use their lives to daily seek to mature into people who talk like Jesus, act like Jesus, and think like Jesus.

#25

After I had done some editing, we sat down to discuss the essay. The story followed the typical fundamentalist arc of lost and found: every man and woman a sinner, but nonetheless redeemed. Yet Bengt’s sins were not of the flesh but of the mind.

#26

I had heard this before from mainstream Christians, but I suspected Bengt meant it differently. He believed that the absence of doubt was the absence of self-awareness, and thus the absence of an understanding of his thoughts as distinct from God’s.

#27

The Family’s faith and practice seemed closer to a perverted sort of Buddhism, with Christ nowhere in sight. They wanted power, worldly power, with which Christ’s kingdom could be built cell by cell.

#28

The president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, was a friend of the Family. He had met Jesus, and his name was now known worldwide because of it.

#29

One of my last nights at Ivanwald, the neighborhood boys asked me to play flashlight tag. I was lying on a hillside, tracking movement in the shadows and smelling the mint leaves planted in the garden. A figure approached. I sprang up and ran, down the sidewalk and up through the garden, over a wall that my pursuer, a small boy, could hardly climb.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

I became It, the reporter, after I left Ivanwald. That is, I’ve been chasing the story of the religious practice I encountered there ever since. I tried to fit the religion onto a spectrum of belief where it seems to have no place.