Mid-Week Potpourri

It’s been a busy week, so I haven’t had time to sit down and write the fuller posts currently kicking around in my head, but I wanted to throw out a few quick nuggets of note:

• First, my editor, Ben Greenberg, got profiled in Publisher’s Weekly for their “50 Under 40″ series a few weeks back.  PW is the publishing industry’s main trade publication, and being singled out as an up-and-coming talent is a big deal.  Ben, who has been working with me on this book for more than two years, is a great editor and a complete mensch to boot, and his optimistic thoughts on the future of  publishing  are well worth hearing.  Read his interview here.
• Second, I vaguely remember taking a test in my Evangelism 101 class at Liberty about the “spiritual gifts” listed in the Bible, which include “mercy,” “encouragement,” “exhortation,” “discernment,” and half a dozen others.  It was a hard test, and I’m pretty sure I did badly on it, but a new survey released by The Barna Group, an evangelical polling firm, makes me feel a little better.  When asked about their biggest spiritual gifts, one-fifth of the Christians participating in the survey named a gift that isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Bible, like “a job,” “a house,” “a sense of humor,” or oddly enough, “clairvoyance.”  See the ego-boosting Christian Post article about the survey here.
• Third, my column in today’s Brown Daily Herald answers a pressing question on Brown’s campus these days: How are we going to get out $800 million back?  (Brown, for those of you who don’t go there, just released a financial report detailing a probable loss of $800 million from the endowment, give or take.)
• Last but not least, a great review for The Unlikely Disciple came in yesterday, this time from Library Journal, a trade publication for librarians.  At the risk of violating the law of Christian humility, I’ll post it after the jump and pray for forgiveness later tonight.

Review:  The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University, by Kevin Roose (March 26, Grand Central)

This highly readable, entertaining, and thought-provoking narrative offers an insider’s account of fundamentalist Christian culture from an outsider’s secular perspective. When he was a Brown University sophomore (he’ll graduate this year with a degree in English literature but has already had work published in Esquire and Spin), Roose opted to spend a semester “abroad” in Lynchburg, VA, as a student at Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell and now the world’s largest evangelical university.

Working undercover as an amateur journalist/ethnographer, Roose describes Liberty campus life as he experiences it, from faculty course lectures in creationism to abiding by the Liberty Way, a strict code of conduct that forbids “immoral” activities such as R-rated movies, student demonstrations, and physical contact beyond a three-second hug.  As Roose reinvents himself for the role, he forms relationships with the Liberty students and faculty (including meeting and interviewing Falwell, who died in May 2007) that challenge his assumptions about fundamentalist Christian culture. Humorous anecdotes are interspersed with thoughtful analysis.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 6:54 pm .