Over the last couple months, the latest fad in fiction among American evangelicals has been William Young’s recent novel The Shack. There has been quite a bit of discussion that has resulted from the supposedly dubious theology that the book espouses. As always seems to be the case, the discussions (to a certain extent, anyway) seem to be between people who have read the book, like it, and are inclined to overlook the theological imprecision, as we’ll charitably call it, and those who haven’t read the book but have heard that it is bad.
Actually, I first heard about The Shack when a friend of mine who works at Lifeway told me that there was quite the fracas there because enough people had complained that they didn’t think a Christian bookstore should be stocking it that management pulled it off of the shelves. Then even more people complained because they were trying to buy a copy of the book and it wasn’t in stock. (Somehow - perhaps understandably - people don’t like to be told that a book that they want to buy has been pulled off of the shelves because it is full of bad theology.) I’m still not sure if they restocked it or not. In any case, the whole thing reminded me of the frantic reactions to all the Harry Potter books and Pullman’s The Golden Compass, so I did what I did when people told me about those: I immediately bought a copy and read it.
Shortly after I read it, someone - actually, a couple different someones - sent me a link to the boundless.org review of the book by Tim Challies. (Tim Challies is - in addition to writing occasional columns for boundless.org - the editor of The Discerning Reader, a website of book reviews written from a Christian perspective. More about that later.)
Since then, I’ve been involved in numerous discussions about the book, and this column is based on observations of the book, reflections on Challies’s column, and those discussions that happened around various lunch tables. Hopefully, you don’t have to have read the book for any of this to make sense, but it will be helpful if you read Challies’s review of the book.
Let’s start with a few observations:
>> In the discussions that I’ve had about this book, many of the people who like the book have told me it’s a bad idea to take the theology that the book presents seriously. The underlying assumption, here, is that because the book is fiction, it doesn’t make sense to hold the book to any exacting standard in terms of the worldview that the book advocates. I do not think this is a good idea, frankly - I like to take fiction seriously and I suspect that fiction, as a genre, impacts the way that people think much more than we realize that it does. If the book has changed people’s lives to the extent that the fans of the book indicate, treating fiction as something that can’t have an impact in the real world is an extremely bad idea. It’s worth noting that this is probably true even if we’re not conscious of all the effects. Fiction can be good or evil: for more on this, see Orson Scott Card’s essay on how fiction can be evil.
If we’re going to take fiction seriously, then let’s be willing to carefully analyze the worldview that it presents. This idea must be held in tension with the opposite idea that fiction is not the best vehicle for laying out a systematic view of looking at the world. Just because we’re analyzing it seriously doesn’t mean that we should analyze it as if it were a textbook of systematic theology. Still, any work of fiction makes assumptions - however implicit - about the way the world works. A book like The Shack that presents its main character as having a conversation with various members of the trinity displays its worldview in a much more explicit way, and the worldview that it presents is worth discussing. If we can’t take fiction seriously, then there’s not much point in writing about it, or even reading it in the first place, so let’s not insult Young by shrugging off his theological statements as “just fiction.”
>> Most of the theological discussion surrounding the book has to do with the representation of God that Young espouses in his novel. Putting aside (for now) the issue of whether or not Young is right, it’s important to note that this is a question that shouldn’t be dismissed as something that isn’t worth analyzing. If theology is the study of God, then misrepresenting who God is is probably the most harmful theological error that it is possible to make. To most evangelicals, though, this error seems less grievous than it actually is because of the priorities of the average American church: abstract theological discussions of the Trinity, for example, don’t seem to take place in churches with the same frequency as other, less abstract topics such as when, specifically, the rapture will occur or for which political candidate Jesus would vote. That the accuracy of our representation of God is of vital importance would be easier to see if the priorities of the American church were more organized more coherently.
Priorities of the Christian subculture aside, it’s easy to see that people don’t like being inaccurately represented. Odds are good that it makes a difference to God, as well. This is worth analyzing and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
>> It’s difficult for me to discuss any sort of fiction, though, as “Christian fiction” when this is distinguished in any way from fiction in general. “Christian fiction” is a term that doesn’t really mean anything to me - either the book is fiction, or it’s not; either it’s well-written, or it’s not. Rob Bell sums up this point beautifully in his book Velvet Elvis, and it’s worth quoting the passage at length:
“It is dangerous to label things “Christian”. The word Christian first appears in the Bible as a noun. The first followers of Jesus were called Christians because they had devoted themselves to living the way of the Messiah, who they believed was Jesus.
Noun. A person. A person who follows Jesus. A person living in tune with ultimate reality, God. A way of life centered around a person who lives.
The problem with turning the noun into an adjective and then tacking it onto words is that it can create categories that limit the truth. … This happens in all sorts of areas. It is possible for music to be labeled Christian and be terrible music. It could lack creativity and inspiration. The lyrics could be recycled cliches. That “Christian” band could actually be giving Jesus a bad name because they aren’t a great band. It is possible for a movie to be a “Christian” movie and to be a terrible movie. It may actually desecrate the art form in its quality and storytelling and craft. Just because it is a Christian book, by a Christian author and it was purchased in a Christian bookstore doesn’t mean it is all true or good or beautiful. A Christian political group puts me in an awkward position: What if I disagree with them? Am I less of a Christian? What if I am convinced the “Christian” thing to do is to vote the exact opposite?
Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective.”
The first rule of fiction is to be good fiction, whether or not you find said fiction in your local Christian bookstore (there’s that adjective again!) or your local Barnes and Noble. It’s a bit odd to me that in all the discussions I’ve seen about this, most people are far more interested in discussing the theology in the book than they are the literary merits of the book. Take, for example, the boundless.org review of the book and note how much time is devoted to discussing whether or not it’s good literature, and compare this to the amount of time devoted to discussing the theology presented in the book. (It’s also interesting to note that in the review of the same book that Challies writes for his own website, there’s more time devoted to discussing the literary value of the book: this observation is much more a critique of the editors of boundless.org, not of Challies.)
In any case, it seems to me that The Shack, alas, is not that great from a literary point of view. The way that Young writes dialogue seems a bit stilted, and the overall flow of the book doesn’t flow as well as it could - there could have been some better editing in there, perhaps. Worst of all, there’s a rather unnatural wrapping up of everything by the end of the book - the sort of plot device that you seem to run across in badly written Star Trek episodes when the writers come to the sudden realization that everything has to be neatly wrapped up by the end of the hour.
To most conservative evangelicals, the literary value of a novel may seem like a trivial thing to discuss when the rest of the discussion about the book centers on whether or not Young’s view of the trinity is heretical, but I do not think that this is the case. Here are a couple observations as to why this is at least as important:
Culture, as a general rule, flows downhill. Changes in philosophy generally cause and are followed by changes in music, novels, and the visual arts. The average person doesn’t read the latest essays that come out of university philosophy department, but the cultural and artistic elite that actually produce what the average person reads, watches, and listens to are more likely to be plugged into the intellectual life that would expose them to new philosophical ideas. Artwork that was produced during the age of enlightenment, for example, was a reflection of the philosophy that was being developed at around the same time.
Because culture doesn’t flow in the other direction, it’s unlikely that The Shack is going to impact many philosophy departments. The ideas in it may be popular, but because culture flows downhill, they’re unlikely to be enshrined in any theology courses in seminaries. Church history seems to tell us that unless ideas are institutionalized, they’re unlikely to have any long-term impact, no matter how popular they are at the moment.
In addition, if our “culture flows downhill” observation is true in this case, then any theological presented in a novel will likely have roots in theological concepts that already have been discussed by theologians. This is in fact the case - the novel doesn’t systematically describe a theological system. Still, as Challies notes, Young seems to assume that the persons of the trinity (a) have equal of roles as well as importance - i.e., there are no distinct roles, and (b) God and Jesus are not distinct persons of the trinity (Papa, at one point, says “I am truly human in Jesus” which is an idea - nearly as old as Christian orthodoxy itself - known as modalism). It’s difficult to tell exactly what Young is advocating, here, but discussions of the trinity aren’t really Young’s purpose in the book. The main idea that he’s dealing with is why painful things happen - to discuss the book as a theological treatise on the trinity is to analyze a novel as if it were a theological textbook: everyone’s going to be frustrated by the end of the discussion.
This is why, I suppose, I have difficulty categorizing this as “heresy.” An illustration to explain: a few weeks ago I heard an interview with Madeline Albright wherein she mentioned that she didn’t like the term “War on Terror.” When we use this term to describe what America is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, we’re implicitly granting that the people that we’re fighting are warriors. They’re not. They’re terrorists. You can’t have a war if there are no warriors on the other side. Whatever you have at that point may be a mess, and it may have cost three trillion dollars, but whatever it is, it’s not really a war.
Whether or not you agree with Albright’s assessment of American foreign policy, I think the point transfers nicely to a discussion of theology in The Shack. It’s hard to describe this book as heresy because heresy is usually presented in a more coherent and systematic way. This isn’t an attempt at a snide insult - the idea is that most novels - even good ones - don’t make very good textbooks of systematic theology. Narratives aren’t typically designed to construct a new theological framework. If that’s really what Young wanted to do, he probably wouldn’t have written a novel.
All that to say that the theology (or the theological assumptions, if you prefer) that is advocated in just about any novel are not likely to be far enough uphill, culturally, to make a lasting impact. Modalism isn’t being advocated elsewhere, and I don’t see it as being likely that The Shack is going to result in modalism classes being taught in seminaries. Or, to look at it another way - in Christian circles - if we’re discussing the amount of books that, 100 years after they were written, still impact the way that we think about theology, it’s not surprising that the number of theology textbooks that fall into this category is much larger than the number of novels that fall into the same category.
Related to this is the idea is the observation that Christian orthodoxy has survived, as far as I can tell, for about 2000 years. Teachings like modalism, for example, crop up every once in awhile and some interesting (to some people) theological debate results. If it falls outside of what is perceived as orthodoxy, it spins off into its own thing and eventually either goes away or sets up shop outside of the orthodox Christian church. Throughout this entire process, some people are pulled away from the church - this is tragic and I don’t want to minimize this - but this doesn’t really threaten the church. The church stays the same, and as a result, the central tenants of orthodox Christian theology - although they have been clarified - have stayed more or less the same for the last 2000 years.
This pattern is not likely to be changed by The Shack. The average reader of the book, it seems to me, is either going to be theologically adept enough to pick up on the modalism - in which case they’re likely to dismiss it - or, if they’re not as theologically versed, they’re likely to miss it entirely. (This is less of a critique than it sounds like: after all, the trinity is not what The Shack is about, and expecting everyone to read theology textbooks - so they have the right background to correctly analyze The Shack - isn’t entirely realistic.)
Just by way of personal observation - I’ve found, just by discussing the book with people that have read it and enjoyed it, that most of the theological errors that crop up in the book are either caught or ignored. I don’t know anyone that has become a modalist as a result of reading this novel, and the presentation of God the Father as a large African-American woman is designed, on a fundamental level, to be an extreme example that Young uses to shake up the reader’s (and his protagonist’s) view of God. I’m not entirely sure that I agree with Mark Driscoll’s take on it, in which he explains that representing God the Father as anything - even the stereotypical old man - is a violation of the second commandment. Most people (especially those of us that were raised on Lewis’s Narnia books don’t see that as a problem, for better or for worse.) Young uses this is a literary device, and not as a theological construct. I’m not sure that Driscoll is analyzing the book in entirely the correct way.
In any case, it’s telling to ask people that have enjoyed the book what they have gotten out of it. Very little of what you’ll get - in my experience - is anything close to heresy. The vast majority of it seems to be an attempt to convey a fuzzy warm happy feeling that has helped people resolve - on a heart level only - why bad things happen when God is good. The reason - at least as far as I can tell - that the answers are so difficult to articulate and are so spread all over the board, as it were, is that this sort of thing is difficult to describe because it’s much more of an appeal to emotion than it is to logic. Good literature holds these two ideas in balance, and one of the reasons that The Shack a book that has deeply moved so many people is that it demands much more of our hearts than it does our heads.
I don’t think that this is a theological problem, but a literary one; and this brings us back the original point: what may be more of a problem for the American church today is that The Shack isn’t very good literature . . . along with most of the other Christian fiction that’s out there today. As Dick Staub observes in The Culturally Savvy Christian, the problem isn’t that Christians have created their own subculture. The problem is that they’ve created a subculture that’s so bad.
Now, this isn’t to say that the book isn’t enjoyable to read (I couldn’t put it down and read the entire thing in practically one sitting) or that it isn’t an intensely moving book. These do not, however, qualify it as being good literature. This isn’t immediately obvious, however, because so many people have not yet made a distinction between the subjective of “what I like” and the objective of “good literature.” Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
An illustration, to explain: If someone gives me a bag of McDonald’s french fries, I will (alas!) always do my best to eat the entire thing in one sitting, but I’m not going to tell anyone that this qualifies it as gourmet food. It’s easier for most people (myself included) to enjoy whatever teeny-bopper pop music flavor of the month than it is to sit down and put the time and energy into listening to and appreciating a Beethoven symphony or a Puccini opera. And it’s quite a bit easier to read The Shack in one sitting than it is to plow through and analyze Lord of the Rings or A Tale of Two Cities.
If we’re coming at this from a truly Christian perspective on the arts, we’re going to take the arts - including literature - seriously. The Christian worldview also affirms that work is inherently a good thing, in which case the fact that we have to work to appreciate something that’s truly worthwhile shouldn’t exactly take us by surprise. If we’re willing to put in the work that’s necessary to appreciate the culture, not only do we get to appreciate the culture, but by the time we’ve gotten there, we’ve learned the self-discipline that was necessary to appreciate the culture in the first place. Given the (again, from the Christian perspective) the fallenness of humanity, it shouldn’t surprise us that the majority of worthwhile tastes are the ones that we have to work to acquire.
Most people, on some level, know this already, but to actually work to appreciate literature (or any art) is to go against the grain of what the majority of culture - in the form of pop culture, anyway - tells us. To actually want to read good literature or appreciate good music seems to mark you, among many people, as an elitist weirdo, not to put too fine a point on it. Even if this is your goal, though, there’s precious little help: how many of you learned - in your high school English classes - how to appreciate good literature? I didn’t, and I’m sure I’m not alone. Most of us walked away with the mistaken impression that literature was boring and wasn’t really important when you were dealing with the real world.
An otherwise good website like Challies’s The Discerning Reader doesn’t offer much help - if you’re looking for a discussion of, say, The Brothers Karamazov, you’re not going to find it there. The vast majority of books that Challies reviews are books that are - as he puts it - “of interest to Christians,” which tends to mean books like The Shack, books about theology and/or Christian living, and books like The Da Vinci Code. On some level, this isn’t surprising, and it’s not really a critique of Challies, per se: he’s going to review what people are reading, and since they aren’t reading The Brothers Karamazov, for example, there’s not a compelling motivation for him to discuss it. Still, this is a sort of a chicken-and-egg problem to which there is no immediately obvious solution: how do more Christians, as a demographic, get more plugged into literary culture? Are evangelical protestant Christians - as a demographic - cut off from good literature so much that we don’t even know what it is?
Yeah, probably.
I didn’t realize how much this was a problem until I was discussing The Shack with a friend of mine, and I mentioned that I thought it wasn’t very good literature. He then asked me for (a) a good definition of good literature and (b) a good way to start reading good literature - a list of it, and I didn’t immediately have a coherent answer for the first part of his question. I sort of sputtered around, and was unhappy to find that after some contemplation, I still didn’t have a good answer. So I’ll quote someone else’s answer. Here’s Orson Scott Card’s answer, which is quoted from his weekly (sort of) column here:
There are real standards of literary value, though, that apply to all fiction that aspires to greatness — standards that transcend genre. There isn’t room for me to elaborate on them in this column (nor are there more than a half-dozen readers of this column who would really want to read my full-bore explication!), so let’s just say that such very different novels as Pride and Prejudice, Robinson Crusoe, Moby-Dick, Great Expectations, Little Women, Huckleberry Finn, Ben-Hur, Jude the Obscure, All Quiet on the Western Front, Gone with the Wind, Lord of the Rings, Light in August, and Shogun all have common features that are involved in their greatness.
Here are just a few of them:
1. The writing is so clear that the novel retains almost all of its power across decades and generations, and through translation into other languages.
2. The characters and their relationships are memorable and powerful; they invite the audience to care deeply about the story.
3. The story involves pivotal moral and philosophical issues of universal concern.
4. The novel creates such a thorough experience of the culture in which it is set that readers experience and comprehend it as reality, regardless of how far removed from it in space and time they might be.Most novels don’t even aspire to this kind of greatness. Often the writer aspires to be admired, by writing in such a way as to call attention to his own cleverness. Most writers take for granted whatever moral universe they live in, and their fiction merely affirms it rather than exploring it.
Likewise, no matter when or where the story is set, most writers merely reflect into the book the assumptions and shared values of the culture they live in. Nothing is doubted or questioned or, for that matter, even understood.
And we don’t even count these lacks as flaws. The writer simply isn’t writing a great book. He’s only trying to write a good book. Even an excellent book. But it is for its time, for its audience. It does not aspire to contain an entire civilization and philosophy and moral worldview within itself. There is nothing wrong with writing non-great books. You win Nobel and Pulitzer and Booker and other literary prizes for them — almost never are such awards given to the great ones.
Greatness is hard to test for, anyway. Even those writers who aspire to it are rarely capable of it. And sometimes writers who did not know they were reaching for greatness achieve it in spite of themselves.
Great books can be massive bestsellers in their own time — or relatively obscure, their value only being discovered by later generations or other countries. It took French critics to notice that hack writer Mark Twain was actually achieving greatness. Melville was long dead before his magnum opus, Moby-Dick, was resurrected, Beowulf-like, to become a staple of American literature.
I would make the case - and I think that Card would agree with me - that while it’s not a necessity for everyone to be well versed in the great books, it’s certainly a good goal to be reading good ones. I suspect that Card would put Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in the category of good (as opposed to great) literature - it’s very much a book of a book that is written for an audience that knows something about racism in the South. Because I’ve grown up in the South, it seems to me to be to qualify to be a great book, but I have no idea if it has the same sort of universal appeal that Card says is required for a book to be truly great. Since I’m not outside of the culture for which the book was written, I’m simply unqualified to say.
Whether or not it is, though, isn’t the important question. It’s one of my favorite novels even after multiple readings, and I’ll probably continue reading it at least once every few years for quite a bit longer. I feel the same way about Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I do not - and this is the point, really - feel the same way about The Shack.
All that to say that I think that it’s important to be reading novels that - even if they don’t qualify as great on every level - are still good. If we can borrow an observation from C. S. Lewis - originally made with regards to philosophy - and apply it to literature, here’s what we get: good literature needs to exist, if for no other reason than to drive bad literature out. The solution isn’t to ignore literature and read no novels at all. If we want to read good literature, where would we start?
This brings us nicely into the second question which has to do with where you start, if you’re interested in trying to appreciate these sorts of things - a question that has been answered nicely by, among others, R. Kent Hughes. Hughes, a few years back, wrote a men’s devotional book called Disciplines of a Godly Man that is unfortunately becoming more and more difficult to find. One of the disciplines that Hughes discusses is the discipline of developing the mind, and as such, he encourages his readers to start reading good books. As an appendix to the book, he provides the results of a survey that he sent to quite a few Christian leaders asking them what books (both Christian books and novels) were their favorite. The answers to his survey are a pleasant surprise. Lewis’s Mere Christianity shows up on a regular basis, as does Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. When Hughes starts listing novels, though, things really get interesting: there is nothing that is mentioned in this section that you would find in your Christian bookstore. I am pretty sure (though I’m not looking at a copy of the book right now) that the novels that are cited the most are Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Dickens’s Great Expectations, and Melville’s Moby Dick.
This isn’t what I expected. On a certain level, though, it makes sense. Although none of these are explicitly “Christian” stories, the topics and themes throughout the novel are based on observations of human nature that have resonated with readers and critics for a long time. All of them - while not advocating a specific theological system - contain observations about the world that are undoubtedly true - if there was no truth in these books at all, they wouldn’t resonate with people on the level that they do. (I discuss this more thoroughly in a post that I wrote last Christmas.)
Still, going from The Shack to Dostoevsky is a bit of a jump, and may not be entirely realistic. With that in mind - and to (finally!) answer the question of my friend - I offer several suggestions of novels that are good, but are a bit less challenging than starting with Moby Dick - which I have still, I must confess, not been able to finish.
>> The previously mentioned To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.
>> Any of the short stories of Flannery O’Connor.
>> The novels of Walker Percy. Love in the Ruins is a great place to start.
>> Death be Not Proud by John Gunther.
>> A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines.
>> The fiction of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, or the fiction that influenced both of them most heavily - the novels of George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton.
It’s worth noting that Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor - who are both Catholic - are widely regarded, even outside of Christian circles, as important American writers of the Twentieth Century. C. S. Lewis - who was Anglican - also falls into the corresponding category for British authors, as do both G. K. Chesterton and J. R. R. Tolkien. I can think of no better remedy to mediocre “Christian fiction” than what will be achieved by connecting evangelicals to the deep literary traditions that already exist within the church.
I would imagine those who read this expecting to find a well-reasoned answer to the question of whether their like or dislike of The Shack makes baby Jesus cry are feeling somewhat disappointed right now.
Just a few things I was reminded of while reading that may be somewhat relevant:
People don’t make choices and develop worldviews based on rational thinking and assessment, but rather on storytelling - what story they accept and what roles in the story they see themselves playing. Marketing people understand this foundationally; beer commercials don’t present the health benefits or technical merits of a particular brew, but rather just tell the story of sexy people having fun with other sexy people while drinking brand XXX. Cultures that have been much longer-lived than our own understand this as well, and pass down their values through stories that invite hearers to take up the hero’s role and virtues.
I don’t think it’s easy to either condemn or acquit some of these controversial novels, as many seem to wish to do. It may not even always be necessary. I think it’s more important to evaluate the story the author of such a novel wants readers to buy into rather than to scrutinize the facts of his theology (although the two may be related). Then, the Church needs to produce powerful storytellers of its own. Where “Christian” art has often failed is when it has tried to just co-opt the stories the secular world is telling and clean them up with characters and verbiage that doesn’t fit them.
I’ve not personally read The Shack, only a few third-party reviews/plot summaries, and so I’m not able to evaluate it at all. If I had, I would be asking what affect its narrative has with regard to Truth. Does it clarify/solidify/ease acceptance of real Truth, or does it offer counterfeits, deception, or confusion? (I try to stay away from loaded words and phrases like “dangerous ideas” and “heresy.”) I think it’s quite possible for a novel to do either, whether the theological premises are precisely correct or not. You mentioned the Chronicles of Narnia, and I would submit that most Christians I’ve encountered find reinforcement of Truth in that story without feeling they must accept Jesus as a talking lion or Satan as a bitch from an alternate dimension.
Thanks, Garrett - I enjoyed the essay and appreciated the encouragement toward better literature in general. Hope you had a good Thanksgiving.
So many good points here.
I haven’t read The Shack. I think I will now that you’ve confessed that you couldn’t put it down. (I have begun — slowly — to read Twilight for many of the reasons you give. Painful.)
What is good literature and why does it matter? Orson Scott Card’s comments are astute and practical. I would add that like the justice who defined pornography with “I know it when I see it,” once we have trained our senses with an eye toward criticism of whatever the culture presents, and when we eat the good often enough so as to acquire the “taste,” we’ll know it when we read it. And as Hopkins says, “And know why.”
Why does literary/art criticism matter? Without being too Lewis-like, if we believe that the world is a place where the forces of good and evil are actually in conflict, and if we want to subdue evil and influence for good whatever circles we occupy, we have to include culture outside our churches. I may not fight an actual demon today (so far so good) but I may encounter a discussion on what good literature is and so on. So I need to be equipped to do what is required as I have opportunity. Education and training in cultural criticism are essential for this and (sadly as in your case) most neglected skills.
Quality fiction is a source of pleasure that lasts a lifetime and is relatively cheap as pleasures go. But you have to “get it.” One problem in the educational system today is that we give great literature to unprepared students who aren’t mature enough to appreciate what is happening in the text. Were sixteen to eighteen year olds more capable of reading higher order material a century or two ago? I suspect so. I don’t know how to fix this, as studies show that many adults don’t read “classics” after high school if they ever did.
On the other hand, junk food (fries) literature is not always a bad thing either. But the more gourmet our tastes, the less enticing will be the paper bag of oil-soaked, salty potatoes given that one has other options. True in so many areas. (One of my journalism students on a field trip where we had stopped to eat at a place which offered “gourmet fresh French fries” exclaimed in despair, “Hey, these fries taste like potatoes!”
What to read? I’ve written a few syllabi and am doing so now. It’s one of my favorite occupations. So many good choices! Lists abound. Good ones include the Great Books program, college syllabi and reading lists, “most influential” lists, and of course, the recommendations of our fellows, family, and friends like you.
Sinatra sang “that’s why the lady is a tramp.” She didn’t like some of the things her friends did. As we discuss art, we identify the worldview and remark on merits and establish value, but then we have to allow for individual taste and preference. I like spicy food, you don’t, etc. Doesn’t mean it isn’t “good as a food.”
So your bookshelf need not look like mine. In fact, I know it doesn’t based on your list. But those you list are Great Books to be sure.
We shouldn’t feel dispirited when we read a good (highly regarded) book and don’t like it: there are plenty more out there as varied as the authors themselves.
I have to get back to the story of the teenage vampire and the girl he makes out with but stops short of sex. Hurrah!It’s being called a “Christian” novel, I hear.
Thanks for the links to good sites to visit — all new ones to me.
[...] Garrett has written worthwhile commentary on The Shack and, in addition, on literary criticism. He also includes links to sites that also review the novel or critique literature in general. I’ve posted my comments for him here. [...]
[...] I feel remiss in not keeping up with my friend Garrett’s blog, and so I’d like to jot down a few comments on his last entry. He talks about a [...]
I was set not to like the book, The Shack but after reading it, I thought it was really good and thought provoking. All the time I read it, I kept thinking it needs a study to go along with it. I finally decided God was urging me to write a study which I did. If anyone would like it, email me at prayerdigm.bookstudy@yahoo.com. I would be glad to send you the study. You are welcome to use it and copy it for others.
Trish Pickard