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3.9 AVERAGE
3.9 AVERAGE
To say I loved this book would be trite and understated. FINALLY, an author captures some of my own frustrations with wanting to be a follower of Christ and wanting to bring others to a relationship with Christ, but not wanting to be taken for one of the intolerant, gay-fearing, closed-minded Christians that abound everywhere in our society. His honesty is like jumping in the pool after sitting in a hot tub for a while...it just wakes you up in a new way.
I think he and Anne Lamott would be friends, if based on nothing more than a love of words and desiring to be like Jesus in spite of our own human failings.
I think he and Anne Lamott would be friends, if based on nothing more than a love of words and desiring to be like Jesus in spite of our own human failings.
Super, super weird. I don't like his writing style but the message is positive, at least.
I just couldn't finish this book (I made it to page 154!). I felt like most of what he wrote was untruthful or just too good to be true. Most of the time I was just waiting for something to happen...some profound thought. Maybe I'm just not in the mood for spirituality...Christian or not.
The book is basically a how-to be a progressive Christian guide. I think Miller is a little sexist and doesn't really understand how not to be, and he criticizes authors who write about spirituality to appear "cool," when he is in fact doing the same thing in his writing a lot of the time. I really like the use of simplicity and cartoons in his writing, though. The movie is a totally new spin on the book, and tells the story completely differently, but it is completely worth seeing. It's one of my favorite films to date.
Book Riot Read Harder Challenge 2016: Read a book about religion (fiction or non-fiction). So...TL;DR: this was not the book for me.
I think a lot of my difficulty with it had to do with disliking the audiobook narrator, whose delivery came off as snide, disaffected, and self-important. I think much of this tone came from the text itself, which also bothered me. But I'd be willing to give the print version a chance to see if it puts me off as strongly. I have had strong vocal aversions before. And I've thought almost as long as the 7 hours of audio about how to review this book, which got high marks from some of my most respected colleagues.
I appreciated that Donald Miller struggled with many of the same things as me regarding Christianity (conditional love, sin nature, war metaphors, political alignment, believing with one's words but not with one's actions, living a shallow life). His discussion of his issues was comforting, because I, like him, acknowledge a frequent bias against Christianity as being intolerant and oppressive in some of its forms, and look to see its better nature, its core of kindness. That is why I chose this book.
But it was a long haul for me. I'm thinking of the jazz metaphor and a blurb on the back that said Don's writing was like "a good improv solo." This is apropos to me because I don't like jazz. As with jazz, I found the book meandering, unresolved, and full of unnecessary bits. (Like the parts where he includes other pieces of his own writing, such as the Buddhist girlfriend whom he leaves weeping and "rubbing her Buddha's belly"? Is that...supposed to represent what Buddhists do? Or what he fantasizes a breakup with him would be like? The whole book had me saying "what you don't know about women is a LOT." And he admits his fear of intimacy, but then includes a chunk of a play he's writing about a man talking to his sleeping wife, which was almost intolerably long and seemed to have no place in the narrative.)
And though the subtitle says it is "non-religious," this is a Christian book about Christianity. The message is consistent. There are many stories of people coming to Jesus...of Don speaking to people of his conviction and them "getting tears in their eyes." His close friend who is an atheist converts, to his delight. Don expresses amazement for pages that the "hippies" and "fruit-nuts" he meets can be kind and good without following God. Most of the struggles that I felt I shared with Don were resolved for him (but not for me) with another issue I have with Christianity: reverse-engineering every struggle to have been God's will -- especially once it all turns out OK. The book concludes with an invitation and hope that the reader, too, is a follower of Jesus.
These are a few of my thoughts, many of which are tied closely into my own personal, evolving feelings about religion. I feel like this book would be incredibly comforting to someone who already follows the faith. For me, these aspects only made it harder for me to identify with the book.
I think a lot of my difficulty with it had to do with disliking the audiobook narrator, whose delivery came off as snide, disaffected, and self-important. I think much of this tone came from the text itself, which also bothered me. But I'd be willing to give the print version a chance to see if it puts me off as strongly. I have had strong vocal aversions before. And I've thought almost as long as the 7 hours of audio about how to review this book, which got high marks from some of my most respected colleagues.
I appreciated that Donald Miller struggled with many of the same things as me regarding Christianity (conditional love, sin nature, war metaphors, political alignment, believing with one's words but not with one's actions, living a shallow life). His discussion of his issues was comforting, because I, like him, acknowledge a frequent bias against Christianity as being intolerant and oppressive in some of its forms, and look to see its better nature, its core of kindness. That is why I chose this book.
But it was a long haul for me. I'm thinking of the jazz metaphor and a blurb on the back that said Don's writing was like "a good improv solo." This is apropos to me because I don't like jazz. As with jazz, I found the book meandering, unresolved, and full of unnecessary bits. (Like the parts where he includes other pieces of his own writing, such as the Buddhist girlfriend whom he leaves weeping and "rubbing her Buddha's belly"? Is that...supposed to represent what Buddhists do? Or what he fantasizes a breakup with him would be like? The whole book had me saying "what you don't know about women is a LOT." And he admits his fear of intimacy, but then includes a chunk of a play he's writing about a man talking to his sleeping wife, which was almost intolerably long and seemed to have no place in the narrative.)
And though the subtitle says it is "non-religious," this is a Christian book about Christianity. The message is consistent. There are many stories of people coming to Jesus...of Don speaking to people of his conviction and them "getting tears in their eyes." His close friend who is an atheist converts, to his delight. Don expresses amazement for pages that the "hippies" and "fruit-nuts" he meets can be kind and good without following God. Most of the struggles that I felt I shared with Don were resolved for him (but not for me) with another issue I have with Christianity: reverse-engineering every struggle to have been God's will -- especially once it all turns out OK. The book concludes with an invitation and hope that the reader, too, is a follower of Jesus.
These are a few of my thoughts, many of which are tied closely into my own personal, evolving feelings about religion. I feel like this book would be incredibly comforting to someone who already follows the faith. For me, these aspects only made it harder for me to identify with the book.
I just can't recommend you read this book. Miller has some good ideas, not new ones, but good nonetheless. My real complaint is with the writing style. At times I felt like I was reading the ramblings of a high school student. Maybe he's trying to be "cool" and "in-touch" with his audience, but I found it annoyingly simple.
After having friend after friend insist that I read this book, I finally broke down and read it. When I was done, I thought "what's so great about it?" It was full of stuff I'd already thought before.
Then I realized that was the beauty of it. Don Miller was expressing thought after thought I'd already had, and sharing in the same struggles and frustrations and confusions I've experienced.
The book didn't change my life, it didn't alter my mind.. however it provided encouragement for me and provoked some great dialogue between myself and my friends.
Then I realized that was the beauty of it. Don Miller was expressing thought after thought I'd already had, and sharing in the same struggles and frustrations and confusions I've experienced.
The book didn't change my life, it didn't alter my mind.. however it provided encouragement for me and provoked some great dialogue between myself and my friends.
There's a lot of good stuff in here that is especially timely for issues the American church is facing. There are also quite a few examples of Miller getting in his own way, adding unnecessary tangents to otherwise-good points that seem to be there primarily to shock the reader -- there's a blurry line in this book between humble honesty about Miller's own faults and borderline-pride at being different from other Christians by not being so strict about things like the appropriateness of joking about sex or swearing.
Much of what's in here could and should convict American Christians who are steeped in "sanitized church culture": the need to actually go out into the world and show the love of Christ to the "unlovables" of the world who need His redemption most ("My friend Andrew the Protestor believes things. Andrew goes to protests where he gets pepper-sprayed, and he does it because he believes in being a voice of change. My Republican friends get frustrated when I paint Andrew as a hero, but I like Andrew because he actually believes things that cost him something. Even if I disagree with Andrew, I love that he is willing to sacrifice for what he believes. And I love that his beliefs are about social causes. Andrew says that it is not enough to be politically active. He says legislation will not save the world. On Saturday mornings Andrew feeds the homeless. He sets up a makeshift kitchen on a sidewalk and makes breakfast for people who live on the streets. He served coffee and sits with his homeless friends and talks and laughs, and if they want to pray he will pray with them. He's a flaming liberal, really. The thing about it is, though, Andrew believes this is what Jesus wants him to do. Andrew does not believe in empty passion...Andrew doesn't cloak his altruism within a trickle-down economic theory that allows him to spend fifty dollars on a round of golf to feed the economy and provide jobs for the poor. He actually believes that when Jesus says feed the poor, He means you should do this directly. Andrew is the one who taught me that what I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do."), or the need to break the American Church of being inexplicably joined at the hip to the Republican party (a human organization that Miller correctly identifies as one that "doesn't give a crap about the causes of Christ"), and the need to re-evaluate how we look at the lost not as "enemy combatants" who must be conquered and put down, but as hostages of sin ("The churches I attended would embrace war metaphor. They would talk about how we are in a battle, and I agreed with them, only they wouldn't clarify that we are battling poverty and hate and injustice and pride and the powers of darkness. They left us thinking that our war was against liberals and homosexuals. Their teaching would have me believe I was the good person in the world and the liberals were the bad people in the world. Jesus taught that we are all bad and He is good, and He wants to rescue us because there is a war going on and we are hostages in that war. The truth is we are supposed to love the hippies, the liberals, and even the Democrats, and that God wants us to think of them as more important than ourselves. Anything short of this is not true to the teachings of Jesus.")
The American Church in the 2020s needs to hear these things desperately, because it's fallen prone to a thirst for political power and control that's led it away from the true gospel of Jesus Christ and towards the false gospel of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell. (As the book puts it, "Tony the Beat Poet says the church is like a wounded animal these days. He says we used to have power and influence, but now we don't, and so many of our leaders are upset about this and acting like spoiled children, mad because they can't have their way. They disguise their actions to look as though they are standing on principle, but it isn't that, Tony says, it's bitterness. They want to take their ball and go home because they have to sit on the bench. Tony and I agreed that what God wants us to do is sit on the bench in humility and turn the other cheek like Gandhi, like Jesus. We decided that the correct place to share our faith was from a place of humility and love, not from a desire for power.")
So there's much that's good in here. There's also quite a bit that could have made the book better if it was left out entirely -- like Miller's seeming endorsement of profanity as somehow "liberated" rather than unbiblical, or his apparent view of sexual promiscuity not as sinful but as just empty, as evidenced by the casual way he brings it up frequently as though it were a normal part of life.
Miller also plays a bit of a shell game with terminology that, if he examined it himself a bit more honestly, he might find to be disingenuous, or at least inaccurate: specifically, he takes many of the things he dislikes about how Christianity is practiced in America today -- most of them legitimate faults that are attributable to American culture rather than to Christianity itself -- and labels them as either "the Christian religion" or "Christianity", instead taking all the "good parts" out and labeling them "Christian spirituality", mixing in quite a bit of disdain for any sort of mandates for personal holiness as part of just "religion" rather than the sort of "essence" of Christianity (his "Christian spirituality").
This behavior takes a bit of the wind out of the sails of a theme throughout the book of pursuing Christ and imitating Christ without putting cultural preferences in the way of actually practicing Christianity, and of showing grace and love to sinners and seeing the person through their sin. Miller's willing to extend that grace to those the American church has typically treated as lepers, even when they're unrepentant (homeless people, mentally-ill people, politically-liberal academics, homosexual people), but seems less willing to do the same for the sinful people who comprise the church (yes, even the "big Christianity" churches that embody much of Miller's often-legitimate complaints).
On the whole, it's a good book to read with a grain of salt, because it provides plenty of opportunities to react to it strongly, and then to test our reactions against the Bible to "shake out" which of our adverse reactions are Biblical and which are merely a product of cultural comfort zones. Such an exercise is needed by the American Church in the 2020s, at a time when the marriage between American Evangelicalism and the Republican Party has led to much of the church clinging to a political gospel-of-Republican-power (with Trump as its golden calf), which is in nearly all ways opposed to the true gospel of Christ Jesus.
Much of what's in here could and should convict American Christians who are steeped in "sanitized church culture": the need to actually go out into the world and show the love of Christ to the "unlovables" of the world who need His redemption most ("My friend Andrew the Protestor believes things. Andrew goes to protests where he gets pepper-sprayed, and he does it because he believes in being a voice of change. My Republican friends get frustrated when I paint Andrew as a hero, but I like Andrew because he actually believes things that cost him something. Even if I disagree with Andrew, I love that he is willing to sacrifice for what he believes. And I love that his beliefs are about social causes. Andrew says that it is not enough to be politically active. He says legislation will not save the world. On Saturday mornings Andrew feeds the homeless. He sets up a makeshift kitchen on a sidewalk and makes breakfast for people who live on the streets. He served coffee and sits with his homeless friends and talks and laughs, and if they want to pray he will pray with them. He's a flaming liberal, really. The thing about it is, though, Andrew believes this is what Jesus wants him to do. Andrew does not believe in empty passion...Andrew doesn't cloak his altruism within a trickle-down economic theory that allows him to spend fifty dollars on a round of golf to feed the economy and provide jobs for the poor. He actually believes that when Jesus says feed the poor, He means you should do this directly. Andrew is the one who taught me that what I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do."), or the need to break the American Church of being inexplicably joined at the hip to the Republican party (a human organization that Miller correctly identifies as one that "doesn't give a crap about the causes of Christ"), and the need to re-evaluate how we look at the lost not as "enemy combatants" who must be conquered and put down, but as hostages of sin ("The churches I attended would embrace war metaphor. They would talk about how we are in a battle, and I agreed with them, only they wouldn't clarify that we are battling poverty and hate and injustice and pride and the powers of darkness. They left us thinking that our war was against liberals and homosexuals. Their teaching would have me believe I was the good person in the world and the liberals were the bad people in the world. Jesus taught that we are all bad and He is good, and He wants to rescue us because there is a war going on and we are hostages in that war. The truth is we are supposed to love the hippies, the liberals, and even the Democrats, and that God wants us to think of them as more important than ourselves. Anything short of this is not true to the teachings of Jesus.")
The American Church in the 2020s needs to hear these things desperately, because it's fallen prone to a thirst for political power and control that's led it away from the true gospel of Jesus Christ and towards the false gospel of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell. (As the book puts it, "Tony the Beat Poet says the church is like a wounded animal these days. He says we used to have power and influence, but now we don't, and so many of our leaders are upset about this and acting like spoiled children, mad because they can't have their way. They disguise their actions to look as though they are standing on principle, but it isn't that, Tony says, it's bitterness. They want to take their ball and go home because they have to sit on the bench. Tony and I agreed that what God wants us to do is sit on the bench in humility and turn the other cheek like Gandhi, like Jesus. We decided that the correct place to share our faith was from a place of humility and love, not from a desire for power.")
So there's much that's good in here. There's also quite a bit that could have made the book better if it was left out entirely -- like Miller's seeming endorsement of profanity as somehow "liberated" rather than unbiblical, or his apparent view of sexual promiscuity not as sinful but as just empty, as evidenced by the casual way he brings it up frequently as though it were a normal part of life.
Miller also plays a bit of a shell game with terminology that, if he examined it himself a bit more honestly, he might find to be disingenuous, or at least inaccurate: specifically, he takes many of the things he dislikes about how Christianity is practiced in America today -- most of them legitimate faults that are attributable to American culture rather than to Christianity itself -- and labels them as either "the Christian religion" or "Christianity", instead taking all the "good parts" out and labeling them "Christian spirituality", mixing in quite a bit of disdain for any sort of mandates for personal holiness as part of just "religion" rather than the sort of "essence" of Christianity (his "Christian spirituality").
This behavior takes a bit of the wind out of the sails of a theme throughout the book of pursuing Christ and imitating Christ without putting cultural preferences in the way of actually practicing Christianity, and of showing grace and love to sinners and seeing the person through their sin. Miller's willing to extend that grace to those the American church has typically treated as lepers, even when they're unrepentant (homeless people, mentally-ill people, politically-liberal academics, homosexual people), but seems less willing to do the same for the sinful people who comprise the church (yes, even the "big Christianity" churches that embody much of Miller's often-legitimate complaints).
On the whole, it's a good book to read with a grain of salt, because it provides plenty of opportunities to react to it strongly, and then to test our reactions against the Bible to "shake out" which of our adverse reactions are Biblical and which are merely a product of cultural comfort zones. Such an exercise is needed by the American Church in the 2020s, at a time when the marriage between American Evangelicalism and the Republican Party has led to much of the church clinging to a political gospel-of-Republican-power (with Trump as its golden calf), which is in nearly all ways opposed to the true gospel of Christ Jesus.
This book had an occasional valid, thought-provoking point, but seemed to me to meander through most of its pages. The author seemed like he was trying to create false depth by being melodramatically self-effacing. His thoughts were unorganized, and often Miller seemed less interested in making a point or analyzing things than in telling random stories from his life. I'm sure those stories have meaning and were life-changing to him, but he failed to expound on them in a way that meant much to me.