Book Review: Tweeting with God

I will be honest, when I got Tweeting With God  in the mail I didn’t really know what to think about it. I really don’t care much for Twitter, mostly because I don’t know how to use it. Twitter and Facebook are a lot like Algebra and Geometry, usually people like one or the other. I happen to be a Facebook addict user.

But then I got an email reminding me to review this book so I took it off my shelf and began reading through it. Then I handed it to my 16-year-old son who loves to read Peter Kreeft and Tweet defenses of Church teaching to his peers. He said that Tweeting With God is one of the best books that he has ever seen to help him do just that. I really wondered how exactly you could help people understand just a deep faith in 140 characters or less, but as my son pointed out to me, that is how his generation figures everything out. Twitter is where the youth are and hashtags are their love language.

I have noticed that the more I am on social media, the less I am able to process long pieces of writing, good or bad, this is just how it goes. It seems that is the case with how people tend to dialogue these days too. We text, Tweet, Facebook all while doing a million other things. We rarely sit down and read a long book or have a telephone conversation which can be a bad thing, but when it comes to evangelizing people who have grown up communicating in Tweets and hashtags this way it’s a good thing to learn how to speak in their language.

The Catholic Faith has never been about holding on to one way of communication for all time, the deposit of faith is never going to change, but the way that we communicate it will always have to change according to the times. That is one thing that gets evangelizers caught up many times, because audience and context and place in history all come into play when we are talking about preaching the Good News. It doesn’t mean watering down the faith, but share it in a way that it is heard.

The one thing that I loved the most about this book is that it opened up a conversation with me and my teens. They really were able to explain to me about Twitter and why it matters and I got to hear about what they are doing and saying on it. I am proud to hear that they spend their time on there discussing issues of marriage, homosexuality, chastity and things with their friends and that they feel empowered to speak about their faith. This book is a great tool for them and a great way for us to have deeper conversations about the faith together.

As Elizabeth Scalia says in her review, every household should have a copy of this book!