This week at the Patheos Book Club, we’re featuring Greg Garrett’s The Other Jesus: Rejecting a Religion of Fear for the God of Love. Greg Garrett is one of my favorite columnists at Patheos. His insightful, honest explorations of faith and culture delve deep into the waters of some of the most controversial and divisive issues of our day, and we manage to re-surface renewed and refreshed, with clearer Christian goggles to see our world and our call to it. Whether’s he considering our relationship to wealth (or how much is enough), what Jesus would cut (from our national budget), Christians and guns, American individualism and faithful community, the Arizona tragedy or hate-speech, Professor (and Episcopal Lay Preacher) Garrett is a generous and wise guide to living as a faithful citizen in today’s complex world.
His new book, The Other Jesus, serves as a terrific companion to his column and current writings, as he shares his experience of re-discovering a vital, viable faith after the disintegration of the Christianity of his youth. “Personal and moving,” reads the back cover, “this book relates the author’s personal experience of growing up in – and leaving – a disapproving conservative church and then finding his way back into a different kind of Christian community, which is communal, missional, just and loving.”
I’ll be reading through this book over the next couple of weeks and posting reflections here at the blog. We’ll also share some guest posts on the book. (If you’ve read it and would like to offer a brief review, let me know!) We’ve also just published an exclusive interview — really a conversation — with Garrett and Brian McLaren (A New Kind of Christianity) about their respective new books on authentic faith and practice HERE. You’ll want to check out this intimate conversation between two friends and followers of the other Jesus, and join the conversation about what makes a living faith and a faith worth living.
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