Reading report

I finished two books this week.

I appreciated Living Faith While Holding Doubts because the author doesn't dismiss doubt with the easy platitudes you so often hear. He recognizes the ineffectiveness of the commonly suggested solutions. I'm not sure I agree with him on all points, but I appreciated his perspective. Here are two quotes:

Jesus did say that unless we become like children will we never enter the 'kingdom of heaven.' Perhaps no passage of scripture has been victim to so many sentimental--and misleading--interpretations. According to such interpretations, Jesus praises children for their wide-eyed trust and simple belief, for their complete freedom from doubt. What needs to be noted is that at every other point Jesus encourages his listeners to grow into new understandings of God's ways and expectations. When we set Jesus' words of praise for children in the context of his other teachings, it becomes clear that he was not encouraging his hearers to remain childish in their beliefs. Rather he was encouraging them to be childlike, that is, eager to grow up. (Have you ever known a child who was not eager to grow up?) He was praising the child's teachable spirit, a mind that is open to new truth and a heart that is open to new loyalties. page 23

it was those who could not doubt their firmly held religious convictions who crucified Jesus. If this son of a carpenter who talks to God in the untutored accents of his backwater hometown is actually God's Chosen One, then they must call into question all that they had firmly held about God's ways. By contrast, it was only those who could doubt their ideas and cherished traditions about how God would act in the world who were prepared to receive Jesus as the promised Messiah. pages 26-27

The Eyre Affair is a fun read, especially for a former English major. It's set in 1985 in an alternate England where people have cloned dodos as pets and can travel through time and yet the airplane hasn't been invented. It's a world that places an extremely high value on literature. The door-to-door missionaries aren't promoting religion, they're trying to convince you that Francis Bacon wrote the Shakespearean plays. I enjoyed the book and will probably pick up the sequels, but not before I do some other reading. If you want to read it, I highly recommend you read Jane Eyre first, if you haven't already. It's been decades since I've read it, and I ended up borrowing a copy from the library so I could refresh my memory of certain scenes.

I'm currently reading Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama. It seemed like an appropriate book for this week.