Today on the blog tour, I am hosted by Kelly at Big A little a, where I talk about cliches, stepfathers, and Jenna Vaughn’s possible future as an English teacher. Thanks for having me, Kelly! (Thanks also for recent reviews at Crazy for Kids Books, the Deseret News, and Sellers, Library, Teens.)
Speaking of reading, I’m currently halfway through Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. Now, this book has been around a few years and has been very, very popular in contemporary (read: young, I guess?) church circles. So popular, in fact, that I’ve been thinking…how good can it be? Usually mass popularity and acceptance among church goers ends up equaling your Purpose-Driven Lives and your Joel Osteens, which are so not my thing. But someone picked it for a group read so I’m playing along. Once I got over the mental hurdle of its popularity, and in tune with Miller’s approach to the material (he’s doing creative nonfiction on his spiritual life—not theology, not apologetics, not a how-to-live book), I really started to enjoy it. There are actually places that make me laugh out loud, and he articulates so well many of the typical struggles of belief and Christian living. I’ve been folding down a lot of corners to read again later—here’s something I’ve already reread a few times because it states exactly where I am with the public intellectual debate about God (see also: new atheism, intelligent design, demonizing Pullman and Potter, etc. etc. YAWN) which has only intensified since this book was first published:
My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don’t really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn’t exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care. I don’t believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. Who knows anything anyway? If I walk away from Him, and please pray that I never do, I will walk away for social reasons, identity reasons, deep emotional reasons, the same reasons that any of us do anything.
His style and approach remind me a bit of a younger, more concise Frederick Buechner.
Wow, I really need to be packing right now, not blogging, because in 1.5 short hours I’m off to the airport for my Not Your Mother’s Book Club gig and three Bay Area school visits about which I am mildly freaking out because they are a new new thing to me! I hope the students do not noticeably roll their eyes at me or give me too many zombie stares or judge my hair. There’s a lot more humidity in CA than in UT so anythingcould happen, hairwise. If you come tonight and I don’t know you, please come say hi and identify yourself as a blog reader—I’m looking forward to meeting you!
