(This weblog creates, for us all, a chance to meet at the intersection of Life and the New Spirituality. It is written by the author of Conversations with God, the worldwide best-selling series of books. The “New Spirituality” is defined by the author as “a new way to experience our natural impulse toward the Divine, which does not make others wrong for the way in which they are doing it.”)
Friday is Book Day on the blog, when we take a look at books – old and new — that I highly recommend you not miss. This week’s recommended reading: Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality, Donald Miller.
If you haven’t heard about this book, you are going to. Donald Miller lives in my home state of Oregon. I live in Ashland, at the southern end, and Donald lives in Portland, at the northern end. I have not met Donald, but I sure want to.
This book by Donald Miller says huge things about God, about Christianity, about life and love — things that have needed to be said for a very long time.
Donald is not happy with the way he sees Christianity being practiced in our world today. Not everywhere. Not all the time. But a lot of places. And often. He almost stopped going to church a few years ago without becoming angry. So he sat down and wrote a book about his own personal experience of God.
(Hmmmm….I seem to know someone else who did that….)
What Donald saw as he observed the Christian community in many places was the politics of blind conservatism, what he has in newspaper interviews called “suburban consumerism”, and an “insensitivity to people who aren’t like us.”
This book moved to No. 18 on The New York Times Best Seller List back in November. It has caught the attention of Christians and non-Christians alike. In it, Miller says that God — surprise, surprise — in not a Republican. This is probably not unexpected coming from a man who, in the same book, admits to have smoked pot and discussed living in a commune.
In his book, Miller describes an “underlying hostility for homosexuals and Democrats and, well, hippie types.”
“I cannot tell you how much I did not want liberal or gay people to be my enemies. I liked them,” he wrote. “The real issue in the Christian community was that (love) was conditional …You were loved in word, but there was, without question, a social commodity that was being withheld from you until you shaped up.”
Many Christians dislike Miller’s book intensely. Said one critic in a recent published review in 9Marks (described in the press as an organization designed to help local churches re-establish their biblical bearings): “Miller presents Jesus as a nice fellow who meets one at the campfire and swaps stories. He forgets to remind readers that Jesus is also a judge and avenger who wants to save you from his just wrath.”
I am so disappointed when I hear people expressing this point of view about Jesus and about God. In my book What God Wants I do all I can to debunk such notions. Miller does a wonderful job in his own text, and I am happy to recommend it to your reading.
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You’ve been exposed to the concepts and principles from the Conversations with God material. Now the time has come to integrate this New Spirituality into our daily lives.
Come to Portland, Oregon tonight, February 1 and be the first to experience how to turn these spiritual truths into a functional reality! Join me on this special evening as I speak from my new book, Happier Than God, and engage in a lively dialogue with audience members in a “Q&A” session, followed by a book signing.
That’s tonight in Portland, Oregon.
You may pre-register at:
www.regonline.com/SNSTakesFlight