On the whole, i think its big problem is that it’s a memoir about a spiritual journey, which means it has two very different things to talk about and both of them get short-changed because she’s not a good enough writer to pull it off. The anecdotes about her life and the trajectory of her life feel scattered.

I actually agree with this. I remember feeling thrown a couple of times by the seeming randomness of the anecdotes, thinking, "Yeah, that connection's a bit of a stretch, Lauren," or "Hmm, that just feels too forced or artificial or something." I could identify with some of the angst of her journey, and I found her voice authentic and reasonably likable much of the time, but at some points she struck me as annoyingly self-righteous in her very attempt not to sound that way... I know some people (as evidenced by the Amazon reviews) objected to the whole concept of a "spiritual memoir" written by a twentysomething, and I see their point, but I suppose I retained a soft spot for what she was doing since I do this sort of writing so often. And I felt like she was conscious of the twenty-somethingness of the project, that she was simply writing from a specific time in her life, not trying to sound definitive or pretending that she can speak from experience that she doesn't have.

I was also frustrated, because i felt like, “Of course that’s how Christian church services should be -- examining Scripture in context, both Testaments, sometimes relating the two,” and it made me sad that this was such a rare experience for her.


Yeah, me too. I was a touch annoyed that, in her view, only Anglicans read Jewishly...she "always knew she would be the Episcopal kind" of Christian... I was unclear on how she seemed to have arrived at this before actively exploring different Christian environments...

I actually thought Advent was supposed to be about preparing your heart for Christ to enter into rather than anxiety.
Yeah, I don't know that I had ever heard that latter interpretation before, either. And I am bad at the whole Advent thing; once you start singing the Jesusy carols, it's Christmas as far as I'm concerned. Of course I have my own reasons for hating the season, that have more to do with the artificiality of the calendar, and my reluctance to get all hardcore churchy just because it's that time and it's what all other Christians are doing...

Yeah, the "Second Coming" allusion squicked me slightly.

(I really need to figure out what exactly Jesus’ own claims about his divinity/resurrection were.)


I would love to know, too. It's a rather dodgy endeavor, since the Gospels (to my great chagrin and frustration) interpret everything through a post-Resurrection lens, filter what Jesus said through what the apostles remembered a couple of decades later (look at me being a bad biblical scholar and not bothering to look up commonly accepted dating of the gospels). I just don't know to what extent we can recover what Jesus thought and what he claimed. I'll probably talk a little about this in an upcoming Jesus, church, bible & more post.

Might this be the post you were looking for? And yeah, not my favorite view of the Incarnation. As Creator, God has *always* known us more intimately than we know ourselves, understood the human lot better than we could.

I’m such a Christian Karaite.

Yeah me too, pretty much, though aforementioned post will discuss the annoying ways in which I've found myself drifting away from that position.

She calls Anglicans Catholics!
Yeah. I know that Anglicanism is supposed to represent a "middle way" between Protestantism and Catholicism, but my impression is that there is a whole spectrum, from very Protestant, sometimes evangelical, to Anglo-Catholic...

I can't think of much else to contribute at the moment. However, I'm planning on reading Winner's Real Sex next week and am a bit scared...

I would like to hear what your mom thought of the book.