Soul Graffiti: Making a Life in the Way of Jesus Book

This book is meant to expand your understanding of what it means to live a life in Christ, and to challenge you to find ways to put that understanding in action.

The first task is attempted in the actual text of the chapters, which comprises 90% of the book. The task might be accomplished if you are a brand-new Xtian or legalist (and legalists would not read this book). For the rest of us, we end up reading some anecdotes that highlight how cool and accepting the author is (despite being a Christian!), and how wise.

He summarizes past conversations by quoting them, but then the quotations say things that no person would say in real life. That leaves you wondering whether he made it up, or is sprucing it up for a written publication. If it's the first, it's bad fictional dialog; if the second, it's needlessly pretentious. His anecdotes are all the same, too, while trying to show how different they are and how well they point to deep spiritual truths. They all involve him, and he's doing something new and quirky and edgy and outward-oriented, meeting new people, hanging out with people outside of his class, even crazy people. Shocking! Just like Jesus, how brave!

If this blatant self-aggrandizement were all the book offered, you would have seen 1 star.

But occasionally he brings up new concepts, a few of which I strongly agree with (and take for granted, but was glad to see someone write down). And many, many of which I disagreed with, and which he made no attempt to convince me of. More specifically, made no attempt to relate to readers unlike him, and convey his message in a way they would be open to. Still, several interesting ideas was a good change from the anecdotage.

I guess we'd still be at 1 star, except for the 10% of the book that is aimed at the second task of challenging readers to act on their non-legalism and find ways to live deeply for Christ.

The author still shows his personality bias (he's into art, music, the lyric, beauty, life, love, fruitiness-general, remembering to foster your inner world [as opposed to doing it naturally]) in what he recommends we experiment with to live for Christ, and I didn't like that.

But ultimately this part of the book is better. I support his call for experimentation, for one thing. And I like that he often asks the reader to find something related to what he said in the chapter, something that fits them, and wrestle with an idea or try living something out.

This is good, and I got a couple of ideas from the end-chapters, and am better off b/c of it. Others like me who know how they should be living and need periodic nudges to get out of ruts, but better than me b/c less critical, may get lots out of it.

For that reason I would have gone to 3 stars, except the writing wandered all over the place, discursing on this idea then that anecdote, and finally a major point at a random place in the chapter, then suddenly, end of chapter. Badly organized. Like my book reviews.

I would like to see the author put this book into a new form, online. Allowing easy skimming of the main text and fleshing out the Questions and Experiments in individual blog entries maybe.