Book Review
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Blue Like Jazz - Nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality.Most compelling thought:Christianity is like jazz because jazz was created by the first generation out of slavery. Buy this book for: Young adults, especially those that wonder about Christianity whether from a believing or non-believing point of view. The Aristotelian entertainment value of this book and its disarming anti-heroism makes it an excellent tool for any evangelist or youth minister. There's stuff in Blue Like Jazz - some brilliantly clever, some quite controversial - that'll keep you talking for weeks. |
Don Miller
Don Miller is a writer and a speaker. He started The Belmont Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation which partners with local churches to create mentoring programs for young men growing up without fathers.
"I want my spirituality to rid me of hate, not give me reason for it."
"If loving people is a bit of heaven then certainly isolation is a bit of hell."
- Don Miller.
"If loving people is a bit of heaven then certainly isolation is a bit of hell."
- Don Miller.
A brief review of:
Blue Like Jazz
Don Miller possesses the amazing talent of carrying on like a nut and then saying something so profound that you wished you had paid more attention to what brought forth all that profundity.Don writes about himself and the world he inhabits, which is filled with wonderful people who are very easy to love because they all say deeply profound things. I have a friend like that. His name is Rene and he is a writer too. But I have only one friend like that; Don has many. And they live in the woods with him, they go to Reed College with him, they talk to him on the phone for hours and they share his Christianity which, like a miracle, seems to exist all by itself and feed off the air. There is as good as no talk about the Bible in Don's book, but no page swishes by upon which Don doesn't treat us with his insights on Bible-based (we hopefully assume) Christianity. And that's why it's a bit difficult to believe Don all the time. As a matter of fact, Don is probably a lot more serious and contemplative than he lets on.
Blue like Jazz is a journey across planet Don, where the government is comfortably corrupt, the US is all that exists and people lovingly smoke dope, lovingly cuss and lovingly radiate a warmth that reminds of sitting on a bar stool that someone just got off of. On Planet Don nobody dies of cancer; nobody gets stabbed; nobody gets raped. Don's world is teaming with effortless adolescents that crowd a readily available army of wise men and one lesbian in churches and other arenas. I wish my world was like that. I wish I could talk to Rene more (but he's in the Netherlands and I'm afloat on the Pacific with a bunch of promiscuous drunks). I wish I had wise men and lesbians galore to listen to. But I don't. Instead I have 240 pages of Planet Don, which I devoured in frenzy because it reminded me that there are enclaves of people that cherish the profundity of every day's most quiet need and are perpetually amazed by both the world around them and their own response to it.
Blue like Jazz is an important book, especially for the younger crowd that ask the questions that Don tangos with. And for old farts like me it's important too, if only just to be endeared by Don's strange velvet world and his strange velvet mind. Nothing scholarly but all campfire quality storytelling and baffling honesty, Blue Like Jazz is a darling book. I wish the world was such that it could only bring forth books like Don's.
If every book were an academic masterpiece, most people would not read.
