{"id":849,"date":"2010-08-23T21:48:58","date_gmt":"2010-08-24T05:48:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=849"},"modified":"2010-08-23T21:48:58","modified_gmt":"2010-08-24T05:48:58","slug":"review-the-unlikely-disciple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=849","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Unlikely Disciple"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin Roose’s The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University<\/em> has a great hook: Brown Student spends a semester at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and lives to tell.\u00a0 It was certainly good enough to get me to pick it up.\u00a0 The danger with a hook book is that it never becomes more than its gimmick. Disciple<\/em> is so good that by the middle I’d forgotten that there was a hook at all.<\/p>\n

Roose has many great qualities as a writer.\u00a0 He’s inquisitive, intelligent, fair, and he writes clearly and with a sharp eye for the details that bring scenes alive.\u00a0 Better than all of those things, though, he is fearlessly honest.\u00a0 He puts himself into a situation where he keenly feels the prejudices of himself, his friends, and his family and works his way through it with us.<\/p>\n

That sounds like Disciple<\/em> is some Hallmark Channel journey of self discovery, but it’s more like a Bill Bryson travelogue.\u00a0 There are interesting things to see, new people to meet, and moments that change one’s life.\u00a0 Roose greets the points of interest with enthusiasm and wonder, sketches the people with lively economy, and earns the deep moments with great pacing and structured writing.\u00a0 He hides all that structure behind an adventurous tone and brisk narrative.<\/p>\n

Those kind of skills will serve a journalist well in any environment, but Roose has bitten off a big hunk of\u00a0 discomfort and portent.\u00a0 Liberty is uncomfortable to him because he, like many of his readers, believes that he’s heading into a world of hidebound intolerance. It is important because the group represented at Liberty is a significant segment of our society.\u00a0 And the preconceptions matter because any time we demonize a group – and those preconceptions are demonization – we forget that these people are people.\u00a0 Many excellent writers and good journalists would not be able to keep their integrity when confronting their own prejudices.\u00a0 Roose acquits himself exceptionally.<\/p>\n

He conveys the dogmatic blinders in place at Liberty that lead to real world intolerance and violence, and he describes the unexpected openness and fellowship that draws the students there together just as clearly.\u00a0 It is here that his skills as a writer and fairness as a journalist shine.\u00a0 The transcendent surprising beauty of this world and its insular biases both come out as the natural constructions of human beings and human communities.\u00a0 Through his prose we feel the tug of a community on his heart that he disagrees with in his soul.\u00a0 Everything in his experience at Liberty is personal and human – the very antithesis of demonized.\u00a0 One may still come away believing that the Liberty teachings are wrong, but not that the people are inhuman.<\/p>\n

It is a remarkable book.<\/p>\n

A must.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kevin Roose’s The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University has a great hook: Brown Student spends a semester at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and lives to tell.\u00a0 It was certainly good enough to get me to pick it up.\u00a0 The danger with a hook book is that it never becomes more than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=849"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":868,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849\/revisions\/868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}