Kent’s Recommended Read:
Donald Miller:
Blue Like Jazz
Kerry was off rafting today, so while I had a few hours free I read her new book, Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller.
She’s likely going to tell me in a day or so, “You really ought to read this book,” and then I’ll have to confess that I read it Sunday afternoon, and that’ll just annoy her. ’Cause I didn’t just browse through it, I read it. The whole thing. That’s how quickly I go through books. This book will take her days to get through. So this annoys her a lot.
…Which makes no sense to me. I’m not annoyed that she knows more about music than I do. I expect her to; she has a B.A. in music education, for crying out loud. I expect her to excel in the things she has a knack for. As for me, my knack is reading an entire book in an afternoon. (Especially one that only has 256 pages, and several of them had one-panel cartoons on them. To be fair, it’s pretty slim compared to what I usually read. But it’s dense thinking.)
Since I read it, I may as well plug it a little.
The book’s title is misleading. He prefers the term “Christian spirituality” to Christianity because non-Christians don’t know what “Christianity” means (and, to be fair, neither do many Christians—and it’s supposed to mean Christian spirituality) and he calls his observations “nonreligious” even though they are. They aren’t couched in Christian-ese; maybe that’s what he means by nonreligious. The book is quite definitely Miller’s religious thoughts about Christianity; but what makes it unique is that he’s a member of the Christian Left rather than the Christian Right, and he’s a really good writer.
More stuff is available on his website.