Don Everts 3

This series on Don Everts is by Chris Ridgeway, a friend and seminary student. His review is more of a critical interaction with the book.

Everts, Don. The Dirty Beggar Living in My Head: One Guy’s Musings About Evil & Hell. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007. In Don Evert’s head, ideas walk around like people. The happy ones wear bright clothes and chat with others in the living room. But the more depressing ones sulk in the corner, and don’t come out to talk very much. The third of the InterVarsity Press’ One Guy’s Head series is a profile of the latter kind – the sullen idea Everts’ calls “The Dirty Beggar.”
Evert’s concept is clever – thinking involves a discussion between ideas with strong personalities like the smooth-talking It’s All Okay or British accented Psychological Determinism. Though the scenario hardly navigates a third way between modern and postmodern epistemology (as he claims in the opening to each booklet), it’s instantly accessible and helpfully promotes a brand of cerebral self-awareness.
And The Dirty Beggar is the best of the bunch. His story is one of pain – he starts with a scream and good cry – and it’s not benign. A child ridiculed, a wife betrayed, a daughter raped – the Beggar has us feel all the anger that goes with protecting the innocent from harm – and then uses the emotion to explain God’s wrath against sin. His story re-couches judgment as the oppressed Hebrew people may have thought of it: justice at last!
But it’s not until the final chapter that Everts makes it ring true. While his other booklets let us visit his head – his heart seemed far away. Not so here. Using the Beggar’s voice, Everts narrates the true story of realizing his brother was a convicted child molester. Bringing us to the emotional point where they stare at each other across bullet-proof glass is the key to grasping our universal status as beggars, and is Everts’ way forward if he continues giving mental tours.
~ Chris Ridgeway