I’m
not sure about reviewing Pastrix here.
Nadia Bolz-Weber subtitles this “memoir” as the
cranky beautiful faith of a sinner and saint. Religious people may find it
more cranky than beautiful, for Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran pastor and founding
pastor of The House for All Sinners & Saints in Denver, uses a lot of
profanity, in the book as well as in her preaching, and she accepts into her
church a lot of folks who do not fit the usual description of religious. She is
much more into grace than works, to use the Lutheran definitions
of those words. Non-religious people may
find it interesting but be put off by her commitment to religious acceptance in
the midst of any chaos.
This
is a blog about words, though, and she uses words so well. Not surprising, I suppose,
for someone who made her living as a stand-up comedian while she was rebelling
against her strict, fundamentalist, anti-woman upbringing with a life of booze,
drugs, and promiscuity, what conservative Christians call “building a testimony.”
If
you love words and good story-telling, this is well worth the read, even if you
are not interested in Nadia’s move from fragmentation of life and soul to a
shaky but defiant faith. The stories are so well told, and the people in them
are so interesting.
Published
by Jericho Books in 2013.
John
Robert McFarland
I
write of my personal reaction to reading Pastrix
in my Christ In Winter blog for Feb. 11, 2015. http://christinwinter.blogspot.com/2015/02/pastrix-past-tricks.html
Daughter
Katie Kennedy’s Learning to Swear in
America will be published by J. K. Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury Press,
in 2016.
Author
guru Kristen Lamb says that author blogs are counter-productive, that a blog
must be “high concept.” I have no idea what that means, but just forget about
JUST WORDS being an author blog and consider it ‘high concept.”
My
novel, VETS, about four handicapped
and homeless Iraqistan veterans who are accused of murdering a VA doctor, will
be published by Black Opal Books in 2015.
I tweet as yooper1721.
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