Reviews for Sermons Alive!

The average rating for Sermons Alive! based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-28 00:00:00 Carlos Fuentes An Ideal Husband is an 1895 play by Oscar Wilde, his third most popular work after The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray. In it Wilde explores hypocrisy, corruption, forgiveness and other themes with his trademark epigrammatic humor. Sir Robert Chiltern, a moral, upstanding politician (pause while I take a moment to ponder whether there is such a thing), has a lovely young wife who idealizes him. But Sir Robert turns out to have a major skeleton in his closet: Many years ago, at the start of his political career, he sold a state secret about the Suez Canal in an insider trading sort of deal, and used that money to make his fortune and jumpstart his career. Now Mrs. Cheveley, an old classmate of his wife (who his wife detests), turns up at a party the Chilterns are hosting, blackmailing Sir Robert into publicly supporting a fraudulent scheme to build a canal in Argentina. It's one canal for another, she tells him. Meanwhile the Chilterns' bachelor friend, Lord Goring, is flirting with Mabel Chiltern, Sir Robert's sister. Luckily for the frantic Sir Robert and his morally inflexible wife, Lord Goring also has some wise advice to dispense to all and sundry, along with a few other tricks up his sleeve. An Ideal Husband isn't as hilariously witty as The Importance of Being Earnest, but it has a little more meat to it. There's a lesson here about how imperfect people still deserve love. You can almost hear Wilde pleading for people to have more tolerance and forgiveness for his own still-hidden-but-beginning-to-fray gay lifestyle. But he makes his moral lesson go down easily, with lots of very funny and very quotable lines. A few sample quotes:I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself. Talks more and says less than anybody I ever met. She is made to be a public speaker. You see, it is a very dangerous thing to listen. If one listens one may be convinced; and a man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person. Lord Goring: I am going to give you some good advice. Mrs. Cheveley: Oh! pray don't. One should never give a woman anything that she can't wear in the evening. I don't like principles, father. I prefer prejudices.There are a few eyebrow-raisingly dated lines here as well (the worst is: "A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. A women's life revolves around curves of emotions."). It's pretty infrequent, and is probably just a reflection of Victorian times, though I have to wonder whether Oscar Wilde was just playing with his audience's expectations. But other than those couple of needle-scratch moments, this is a very amusing play that gives us some great food for thought about relationships and forgiveness.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-03-23 00:00:00 Paul I Price jr This was my first Oscar Wild read and I immediately fell in love with him. So began my Oscar Wild journey. It was a great read when I first read it. But when I returned to it three years later I realized that "great" is an understatement. It is simply brilliant. There is ample wit, sarcasm, and humor. But underneath the message conveyed is thought-provoking. Oscar Wild is realistic in his observance of humans and his exposure of human follies in the face of power and wealth. He exposes both black and white sides of ambition, showing to what extent one would be driven under its spell. Wild mocks the society for strictly categorizing men and women as good or bad and proceeding to idolize them as perfect or shun them as wicked. He is sarcastic about this strict division imposed by the upper-class society of his day. Wild shows through his words of wisdom that no human is without fault. None is perfect. There are both black and white in us humans. It is the degree which either makes us good or bad. Wild also proceeds to show the importance of accepting the faults and forgiving, probably in reference to himself. This second reading showed me how amazingly Oscar Wild has made this straightforward idea into a complex play. The plot is quite simple but it undergoes a couple of intense plot twists, keeping the reader full of suspense. The read is very engaging from its first dialogue and hard to put down. I was determined to read it slow this time allowing myself enough time to delve into it more fully, but it was a painfully hard job. To say a few words on the characters, while enjoyed the serious, the gossiping, the mocking, I loved the satire of Lord Goring and youthful, careless energy of Mabel Chiltern and their light banter. It made the play even more interesting. This is so far the best Oscar Wild play that I've read and probably my favourite one. I recently read Lady Winderemere's Fan (which I really liked) and felt that it is my favourite, but after this reread I'm very sure that this is my favourite play of Oscar Wild.