Thoughts on “Blue Like Jazz”
The problem with Christian community
A longer quote from the book, and one of my favorite paragraphs, to give you a sample of how Don writes.
The problem with Christian community was that we had ethics, we had rules and laws and principles to judge each other against. There was love in Christian community, but it was conditional love. Sure, we called it unconditional, but it wasn’t. There were bad people in the world and good people in the world. We were raised to believe this.
If people were bad, we treated them as though they were either evil or charity: If they were bad and rich, they were evil. If they were bad and poor, they were charity.
Christianity was always right; we were always looking down on everybody else. And I hated this. I hated it with a passion. Everything in my soul told me it was wrong. It felt, to me, as wrong as sin. I wanted to love everybody. I wanted everything to be cool. I realize this sounds like tolerance, and to many in the church the word tolerance is profanity, but that is precisely what I wanted. I wanted tolerance. …
I was tired of biblical ethic being used as a tool with which to judge people rather than heal them. I was tired of Christian leaders using biblical principles to protect their power, to draw a line in the sand separating the good army from the bad one. The truth is I had met the enemy in the woods and discovered they were not the enemy.
[...] Posted by germanhokie on January 11, 2008 My parents gave me this book for christmas…but only because i asked for it. i don’t think they woulda got it for me any other way. i’m already readin it for the 2nd time and i love it! it’s an easy book to follow, it kept my attention the whole way through. The style of writing is more laid back and not so…shall i say discriminating as other books on the same thing. it is simply the author telling his story in a very realistic, down-to-earth way, friendly to everyone. he’s not trying to push his ideas on you, he just tells you how he sees things and gives logical and valid reasons why he sees things that way. he tells mainly from personal experience. below there is a link to show you what others think about this amazing book. http://www.nosq.com/blog/2005/03/thoughts-on-blue-like-jazz/ [...]