Huff Po: Believer, Beware “Gets” It
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For full disclosure, let us admit that bestselling novelist and memoirist Frank Schaeffer has written one piece for Killing the Buddha, but we in no way put him up for the rave review
he published today on the Huffington Post. Here’s a taste:
The just published Believer Beware is the most amusing and touching collection of stories about religion, faith and loss of faith I’ve sucked up in years. (The perfect summer read too.) Recovering religion survivors (of all traditions) will embrace it in the same way that one revisits childhood memories that both haunt and comfort….
I hate anthologies — all that stopping and starting, just as you get into a writer. I loved this one though because it reflects the theme of my own disjointed weird life. I grew up as a missionary kid, pastor’s sidekick, God merchant, Religious Right leader, you name it. I long since escaped if not to sanity then to a little more happiness. So I sometimes read other people’s books about religion and most are from the outside in. Take it from one who knows this wacky territory, Believer Beware is from the inside out….
[It] is laugh out loud funny, touching, irreverent and yet, in deeper ways, pays religion the ultimate compliment: it’s worthy of scrutiny, debate, hate, love and loathing and measuring up on a very personal scale of intimate first hand experience. You may divorce religion but as the writer’s in this book demonstrate, you never sever the ties, you’ll owe “alimony” for the rest of your life. So this is a book for anyone who knows two things: first, that for better or worse religion is important; second, that experiencing religion can be a harrowing passage into the darker side of human frailty and sometime into liberating (even sublime) hilarity.
Read all of Believer, Beware “Gets” the Funny (and Poignant) Side of Religion.
