ERB, Vol 1 , #18
The
Vol. 1, No. 18 -
Diving for pearls in the endless stream of books (Eccles. 12:12B)
Chris Smith, editor
“Absolute Honesty”
A Review of Pete Gall’s
My Beautiful Idol.
By Michael Cline.
If fourth century saint Augustine ever met up in a dark alley with twenty-first century author Donald Miller… and then instead of coming to blows, they skipped hand in hand to the nearest pub…and then it was decided upon to sit down over a pint and share their stories with one another…and then somehow they self-published their collaborative journey only to see it picked up by Zondervan and spread to eager bloggers—the result would be awkwardly similar to Pete Gall’s spiritual memoir My Beautiful Idol.
And if you think my intro was a bit scattered, just wait till you get your hands on a copy of the book, where the journey goes from the tempting delicacies of the corporate Chicago landscape to the spiritual violence done at a half-way house in Colorado. Gall has a knack for robbing any sense of control from the reader without taking it so far that the pages stop being turned. His prose shoves the reader forward, even when the first paragraph of the next chapter seems to hardly connect with the last. You’re just along for the ride, manning shotgun with Gall as he encounters a populace he couldn’t possibly make up such as Critter; “the thirty-year old Cajun grade school dropout pedophile” and Hungarian Vince; “whose second-biggest disability is that he doesn’t quite look retarded.” But the last thing you would want on this ride is for the safety locks to be disengaged because somewhere along the voyage, Gall has begun to read your mail. You see a glimmer of yourself in his tale of idolatry and being the “nice guy” for all the wrong reasons and you must read on to find some sense of hope for your own self constructed hiding place.
But back to original metaphor…
It’s Pete Gall’s absolute honesty that brings Augustine into the frame. At times he’s self-deprecating. Like Augustine’s Confessions, much of My Beautiful Idol is the journey of one man who desperately wants to be all God’s, but enjoys the few toes and fingers still reserved for the self. The symptoms are different, but the disease is the same. For Augustine, the pleasures of sex and lust were a little too fun to give up just yet. For Gall, it was faking the part of being the “tremendous man of God.” He’s that “nice guy” who manipulatively, yet secretly, wants everyone to notice how pleasant he really is. Both as a successful brand strategist and as an inauspicious non-profit engineer, Gall was merely looking to be defined by how much love he could suck from those around him. He was wading through life, attaching little trinkets to his shell like the collector crab (a metaphor that encompasses the entire book). God becomes our own personal brand that we slap on to hide from the “squids” in our lives. “And so long as we remain uneaten, it feels like it’s working.”(19) The problem with these hiding places is that “they’re more like prisons than protection.”(43)
In Donald Miller fashion, the offhand and imaginative writing style of My Beautiful Idol is sure to agitate its fair share. In the process of deconstructing a false sense of self before an all loving God, Pete Gall also deconstructs some camouflage that many Christians will cling to such as the local church—“I’d feel better about selling motherhood to a teenager than church to a person looking for God.”(33) and the suburbs— “Zionsville…is proof to me that there was a reason we were kicked out of the garden.”(53) Being currently enrolled at Bethel Seminary, the author’s critique of seminaries as places that are more likely to mold salespeople than witnesses was hard to read. And it will only be a matter of time before Christian watchdogs will be all over Gall for comparing a genuine experience of God with his early days of smoking pot. But the readers need to heed the end of the story before jumping to conclusions. Gall comes to embrace the church as the terribly flawed, but finest alternative God has at His disposal. He treks back to Zionsville to live with his suburban family who demonstrates the real meaning of love at the moment he needed it most. After roasting seminary, it is Gall who states that seminary professors are some of the most submitted people to God that he’s ever encountered. But many will find it just as easy to pick on the parts of Beautiful Idol that upset our worldviews while disregarding the counsel that we “don’t get to decide who Jesus is.” (120)
Pete Gall was seeking a faith… “the sort that can flex and grow and be beautiful without needing me to shine it up and pose it just so.” (11) It is the style of his writing, while leaving numerous questions unanswered, that best captures such a dynamic faith. This reviewer can only hope that he too comes to the place where “success in life is not measured by what we achieve, but by what we admit.” (267)
[ This review first appeared on the Jesus Manifesto site ( www.jesusmanifesto.com ) and is re-printed here with the kind permission of its author ]
Michael Cline is a co-editor of the Jesus Manifesto. He considers himself a freelance pastor and over-employed learner who currently attends Bethel Seminary in
My Beautiful Idol.
Pete Gall. Paperback. Zondervan. 2008.
Buy now from: [ Amazon.com ]
[ A note on buying books: We offer you the opportunity to buy the books listed here, either directly from our little independent bookstore (Doulos Christou Books), or through amazon.com. The prices listed for our bookstore do not include shipping or
Used Book Finds
The bread-n-butter of our bookstore business is the sale of used books, and we do a fair amount of scouting around for used books each week. In this section we will feature some of the interesting books that we have found in the past week. Generally, we will only have a single copy of these books, so if you want one (or more) of them, you’ll need to respond quickly.
Culture is our Business.
Marshall McLuhan. Hardcover. McGraw Hill. 1970.
Good Condition. Sturdy, x-library copy. Clean pages, moderate wear.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $8 ]
Man in Black.
Johnny Cash. Paperback. Zondervan. 1976 printing.
Good condition. Clean pages. Moderate wear.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $8 ]
Christianity and the World Religions:
Paths to Dialogue with Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.
Hans Küng, et al. Hardcover. 1986.
Very Good Condition. Clean Pages / Minimal wear.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $10 ]
Reviewed Elsewhere
Books and Culture reviews Ron Hansen’s new book Exiles,
a novel involving the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/bookwk/080505.html
“Let me put my cards on the table right off the bat: I’ll take Gerard Manley Hopkins anyway that I can get him. I am thus appropriately grateful for Ron Hansen’s new novel Exiles, a deliberately simple, fact-based story of a shipwreck in 1875 which took the lives of five young nuns, exiled by
Are you thinking what I’m thinking? That the Deutschland’s deck is a potentially brilliant, albeit perilously tilting, planking on which the plight of these nuns whose histories Hansen must imagine, and the poem they inspire, and the priest and poet Hopkins, these three together, (the invented, the poetic, and the real-life faith, work, play, and sorrow of a man), may interplay and so inform some intimations of the soul of things. The nuns’ plight is mythic, the poem is a flat-out treasure, and Gerard Manley Hopkins is—thanks be to God for not just dappled things—Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The possibilities are delicious. We want to know about a man who gives his heart, but more, his art, his drudgery, to God in daft devotion. We want to get inside and see just where his poems come from, inching closer to a God who gives these poems to a man. And every writer on the planet wants to understand
Read the full review:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/bookwk/080505.html
Ron Hansen.
Exiles.
Hardback. F, S & G. 2008.
Pre-order from: [ Doulos Christou Books $18 ] [ Amazon.com ]
(Ships May 13).
Craig Carter offers a thorough review of
Michael Hanby’s Augustine and Modernity.
http://politicsofthecross.blogspot.com/2008/05/review-of-augustine-and-modernity-by.html
“‘Since Augustine is the father of the Western church par excellence, the discrediting of this tradition as intrinsically nihilistic is thought, by those inclined toward such unmaskings, to expose the intrinsic nihilism of Christianity.’ (107)
Hanby’s point is nothing less than the contention that the nihilism of modernity originates, not in Augustine or Christianity, but in the revival of ancient paganism in modernity. He does this by recasting the story in theological terms; that is, by contrasting Augustine’s Trinitarian account of salvation with the stoic conception of will that informs Cartesianism.
This argument has enormous and far-reaching implications for how we understand what John Paul the Great labelled in his encyclical The Gospel of Life the “culture of death.” That is John Paul’s term for modern nihilism and his genius as a thinker was to place in the sharpest contrast this nihilism and its fruits with the Gospel and the fruit of the Spirit. Hanby’s book serves many purposes, not the least important of which is to undergird and extend by means of believing scholarship the point John Paul was making.
So, to summarize: Hanby offers us a new reading of Augustine (which is really old, but new to many moderns), a new understanding of the origins of modernity (in ancient Stoicism, not in Augustine) and a new proposal for healing the crises of modernity by returning to the Trinitarian theology of Augustine (and although Hanby does not say so explicitly, the pro-Nicene theology of 4th and 5th centuries in general). Hanby recovers Augustine the theologian and rescues him from those who have treated him as if he were just another philosopher of late antiquity whose theological and biblical convictions were just so much decoration and quaint embriodery compared to the (suppposedly) much more significant philosophical convictions he held in common with Stoicism and Platonism. It turns out that Augustine was really a Christian. Who knew!”
Read the full review:
http://politicsofthecross.blogspot.com/2008/05/review-of-augustine-and-modernity-by.html
Michael Hanby.
Augustine and Modernity.
Paperback. Routledge. 2003.
Buy now from: [ Amazon.com ]
The Treehugger blog reviews Doug Fine’s
Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/05/review-farewell-subaru.php
“… By the end of Farewell, My Subaru, it’s clear Fine has accomplished his goal: proving that, yes, it is possible to live sustainably–while still enjoying many of life’s comforts, including
Fine’s own experience is, if anything, a vote of confidence in favor of sustainable living: Having completed his one-year ‘experiment,’ he decided to soldier on and remains, to this day, a faithful resident of the Funky Butte Ranch. He puts it best here:
‘Living local and green was not an all-or-nothing proposition. Each day I had another chance to make good choices, to move toward a healthy, independent, sustainable life. My first year’s effort was just an initial step.
I was going to stay with it. Whether the green fad faded or gas got cheap again. And not just for planetary reasons, but for personal ones . . . Rather because it made life infinitely more joyful. Because it gave that crucial concept of home its depth. It gave me something manageable that I tangibly wanted to nurture into future generations. And I thought that’s the greatest good I could do.’”
Read the full review:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/05/review-farewell-subaru.php
Doug Fine. Farewell, My Subaru.
Hardcover. Villard. March 2008.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $20 ] [ Amazon.com ]
