Belated bus report: "A Year of Living Biblically" and "The Unlikely Disciple"
I went to go post something, and when I did, livejournal asked me, "Do you want to restore from a saved draft?" Surprised, I clicked 'yes', and got the following unfinished post, from maybe a year ago:
So, I just finished reading two books, both with a very similar slant. Somewhat unsurprising, since one is by a New York Jew and the second by his Quaker slave. But let me back up a bit.
A.J. Jacobs is an editor at Esquire magazine, and writes books based on projects that he devotes a large chunk of his life to. His book-before-this-one was one where he read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica alphabetically and wrote about both it and the experience. This time, he looked at fundamentalist Christianity and Judaism, thought, "You know, they *claim* that they're biblical literalists, but I bet if you really followed everything in the Bible to the letter, it'd look a lot different. Hey, I know! I'll try it and show them up!" So he did, for a year, and he tacks on his thought-of-at-the-start moral at the end and on the book jacket, and if that was all it was, it'd basically be a goofy book about a guy acting like a nut for a year, with an obvious conclusion: 'don't be a nut!'
Happily, he was honest enough with himself that he took the job seriously, and the project ('try to follow all the rules in the Bible as literally as possible for one year') took him a lot of interesting places. He followed a lot of interesting rules, got help from a variety of interesting sources, and talked to a lot of interesting people.
Oh, and he's funny, honest, and insightful.
...and that's where my draft ended. There's a lot I've since forgotten about that book, but I do remember several interesting stories from it, and would still recommend it. But I really did feel that the moralizing at the end did not at all flow from the rest of the book, and wished that he had concluded with what he actually learned from his year-long experience, instead of concluding with what he set out to prove at the beginning of his year-long experience.
The second book, 'The Unlikely Disciple', came about because of one of the experiences of the first book: there were a lot of rules in the Bible about how to treat your slaves that A.J. couldn't follow because he didn't have a slave--until Kevin Roose (a freshman at Brown University) contacted him asking if he could be A.J.'s intern. Unpaid labor! The perfect solution! A.J. happily agreed, on the condition that he could call Kevin his slave, and Kevin worked for A.J. for several months, doing research and baking Ezekiel bread.
As part of that work, they visited Liberty University, the very conservative Christian school where Jerry Falwell was president. That bit fascinated Kevin, who decided to transfer to Liberty for a semester and write a book about *that*. And he did!
Like A.J., Kevin (raised a fairly subdued Quaker) approached his cultural immersion with compassion and honesty, and unlike A.J., he didn't have a preconceived moral to his tale, which really strengthened his book. He had a lot of interesting experiences, and talks about them with insight and humility.
In brief: Oh, yeah! Those were pretty interesting books! You should check them out if you're interested in the borderlands between secularism and Christianity.
So, I just finished reading two books, both with a very similar slant. Somewhat unsurprising, since one is by a New York Jew and the second by his Quaker slave. But let me back up a bit.
A.J. Jacobs is an editor at Esquire magazine, and writes books based on projects that he devotes a large chunk of his life to. His book-before-this-one was one where he read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica alphabetically and wrote about both it and the experience. This time, he looked at fundamentalist Christianity and Judaism, thought, "You know, they *claim* that they're biblical literalists, but I bet if you really followed everything in the Bible to the letter, it'd look a lot different. Hey, I know! I'll try it and show them up!" So he did, for a year, and he tacks on his thought-of-at-the-start moral at the end and on the book jacket, and if that was all it was, it'd basically be a goofy book about a guy acting like a nut for a year, with an obvious conclusion: 'don't be a nut!'
Happily, he was honest enough with himself that he took the job seriously, and the project ('try to follow all the rules in the Bible as literally as possible for one year') took him a lot of interesting places. He followed a lot of interesting rules, got help from a variety of interesting sources, and talked to a lot of interesting people.
Oh, and he's funny, honest, and insightful.
...and that's where my draft ended. There's a lot I've since forgotten about that book, but I do remember several interesting stories from it, and would still recommend it. But I really did feel that the moralizing at the end did not at all flow from the rest of the book, and wished that he had concluded with what he actually learned from his year-long experience, instead of concluding with what he set out to prove at the beginning of his year-long experience.
The second book, 'The Unlikely Disciple', came about because of one of the experiences of the first book: there were a lot of rules in the Bible about how to treat your slaves that A.J. couldn't follow because he didn't have a slave--until Kevin Roose (a freshman at Brown University) contacted him asking if he could be A.J.'s intern. Unpaid labor! The perfect solution! A.J. happily agreed, on the condition that he could call Kevin his slave, and Kevin worked for A.J. for several months, doing research and baking Ezekiel bread.
As part of that work, they visited Liberty University, the very conservative Christian school where Jerry Falwell was president. That bit fascinated Kevin, who decided to transfer to Liberty for a semester and write a book about *that*. And he did!
Like A.J., Kevin (raised a fairly subdued Quaker) approached his cultural immersion with compassion and honesty, and unlike A.J., he didn't have a preconceived moral to his tale, which really strengthened his book. He had a lot of interesting experiences, and talks about them with insight and humility.
In brief: Oh, yeah! Those were pretty interesting books! You should check them out if you're interested in the borderlands between secularism and Christianity.