Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality (Walker Large Print Books)
Selected Book Details
- Paperback
- Author: Donald Miller
- Publisher: Walker Large Print
- Release Date: May 2007
- ISBN-10: 1594151547
- ISBN-13: 9781594151545
- List Price: $16.95
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryI never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. . . . I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened. In Donald Miller's early years, he was vaguely familiar with a distant God. But when he came to know Jesus Christ, he pursued the Christian life with great zeal. Within a few years he had a successful ministry that ultimately left him feeling empty, burned out, and, once again, far away from God. In this intimate, soul-searching account, Miller describes his remarkable journey back to a culturally relevant, infinitely loving God. |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
A Rhapsody (not a Riff) on Christian Love and Hypocrisy
Rating:
The book has many moments of clarity for the soul, whether one is Christian or not. Through its relaxed but brutal honesty and selfless tone, one gets to plumb the full depths of both his Christian and his non-Christian humanity, and that is the way it should be. Although I am no longer a Christian, I still have no problem listening to people of faith whose messages ring true with the reality we both share. As this author notes early in the book, wearing Christianity like an enforced strait-jacket, leaves little room for the moral mind to see the full frame and range of moral or even human possibilities. Too many people come to religion because they have nothing else to do, and become moral pygmies and lemmings in their religion even before they understand the full parameters of their faith, their humanity, their life or the morality in which they are situated.
The author tries to "walk the talk," but doesn't get upset nor apologizes when he asks the wrong questions of his god, or when he falls off the Christian bandwagon, as he often does here. It is precisely in those moments of clarity and honesty that he is at his best and that he learns to trust his faith.
This book thus is about the life of a Christian, but also about life more generally, beyond just Christianity. And his vantage point: that of a Christian who can see beyond the bounds of his Christian faith might irk doctrinaire Christians. However, the very fact that he has an exterior view over the Christian horizon means that he can be a more active and perhaps a more dangerous soldier of his God, rather than a passive and unwitting tool of the devil, as he suggests that many mindless Christians become. His view of reality is not just a "pasted on Christian doctrine, qua ideology:" It is about doing things moral that make a difference in the world, and being there, aware that this is what being a Christian means and is all about.
He iterated over a life span to this understanding about himself and about his religion from a dirt poor childhood and the keen mental sensibility that such unflattering circumstances tend to provide. He never lost this vantage point. Nor did he allow his religion to get in his way and distort his faith into a mindless "comfort zone" operating on autopilot and blindly following the Christian crowd. It is for this reason and many others that the reader is likely to enjoy and cherish this book. It does not make a statement: It is a statement. One of the most refreshing looks at Christianity one is likely to see for a long time. Five stars.
Tripe
Rating:
Burns me up to see such tripe getting media attention. My five-year-old niece can articulate more deeply-considered thoughts than Miller does in this utter waste of time.
I thought that after we got rid of George Bush, shallow thinking poorly presented would stop being cool. Sigh.
My old lit. teacher would call this book, Mental Masturbation.
A must read
Rating:
This is a great book for people who want to understand that Christianity is more than a philosophy or code of beliefs or ethics. This book shows the heart not only of Christianity but of God, Jesus Himself. It also shows that heart that Christians should be showing to the world.
An Honest Memoir
Rating:
I'd never read Donald Miller before. This book made me a huge fan! I really enjoyed his honesty about his private world on several topics, mainly his spiritual faith in God. As I was reading, I could identify with so much of what he was saying in his book. It also made me laugh to myself in several places because of his sharp sense of humor and the eclectic group of friends that he mentions in the story. His writing is very personal and intimate. You feel as if you know him at the end of the book and he would be someone that you'd like to share a beer with at some local artist hotspot. He discusses his imperfect nature and his internal battles that he's faced. He is explaining why he believes in Christ, yet never seems to want to push an agenda on you. He simply is telling you his belief system and why he thinks what he thinks. Miller openly admits his confusion at times in that belief system, which reinforces the strength of it. He doesn't believe in a routine fashion. He questions everything, but he lets his heart lead him to the truth. I found the book very refreshing and felt I wanted to share my experience reading the book with my friends and family. Whether you are a Christian or not, people of all types would find his tone and prose entertaining and engaging. I would definitely suggest this book as a must read.
Blue Like Jazz!
Rating:
This one's for you Tom Bombadil. And for anyone else who cares about this sort of thing as much as I do. Or even if you don't.
Tom has been recommending a certain book by a certain "Christian" author to me for quite some time now and I have been telling him for quite some time now that I would get it to it. Well, I finally got to it. The book is Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller and I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it. I devoured this little 250 page or so book in about 5 or 6 hours, almost at one sitting.
It was just so refreshing to finally see a "thinking" Christian, someone who has wrestled with the same issues that I have been wrestling with for so long. If more Christians were like Don, I truly believe there would be more Christians in the world.
Donald Miller is basically not your Grandma's Christian. My own mother would probably call him a heretic. For you see he loves Jesus, but he drinks beer and smokes cigarettes, cigars and pipes. He even attended what he termed the most liberal college in all of America, while auditing a few courses, Reed University in Portland, Oregon.
To me, Donald Miller's version of Christianity is MUCH closer to that originally envisioned and taught by Jesus Christ himself. I can't really put it all into words, Don did such a fine job of it himself.
But... not to rain on the parade, there were still some problems with all that he had to say, things I didn't quite agree with.
For one, he says at one point, that the story of the Fall of man, whether viewed allegorically or as actual historical fact, is the ONLY explanation for why man is the way he is, why mankind is so selfish, mean, etc. Hold on a minute, Don. Is it REALLY the ONLY explanation around? I think not. Maybe the only explanation he has ever heard of but certainly not the only one. Maybe the only one that makes sense to him, but certainly not the only one. Evolutionary biological theory explains it all pretty well if you ask me. As does the Buddhist way of looking at the concept of suffering. Even IF the Fall of man in the garden of Eden WERE the only explanation around, where does that leave us? All 3 Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity AND Islam believe this same story. But they each have very different views on the way to salvation, only one of which believes Jesus is the one and only way.
So even if I concede that the story of the Fall of Man IS the only explanation around, great, now we have narrowed the field down to 3 different religions, each of whom believes the other two are going to hell. We still haven't progressed much past ground zero, have we?
Also, he says that it doesn't really matter if the story is taken allegorically or as fact, it is still the only explanation. But... it DOES matter if the story is allegory or not, doesn't it? Truth matters, does it not? Are we merely subscribing our beliefs to what makes us feel good? If the story is not really true but just an allegory, just myth, then it explains nothing. Some cultures have stories about how the earth is suspended on the back of a giant tortoise and when you ask them what holds the tortoise up, the answer is another tortoise, ad infinitum. This story explains things, does it not? But it's not the truth. There are lots of theories around the world relating to creation, they all explain what is observable, but they can't all be the truth.
Another minor point of contention, is that Don at times, resorts to old Christian cliches. You can readily tell that he was raised in a more conservative Christian surroundings. When he was in the mountains at one point in the book, he is staring up at the stars and all of a suddent has an epiphany. He says that God holds the stars and the heavens static in the sky. Apparently, he didn't audit any basic astronomy courses at Reed or else he would have known that nothing in the universe is static, not even the stars which appear to be static. God does not hold anything in the heavens static, everything is in constant flux.
Lastly, it all just appears to me as if, not only him but his many friends who were once skeptics but become Christian, do so as a sort of intellectual giving up, so to speak. It's as if they have just given up. The questions were just too difficult for them to bear, and the society in which we live tells us that Christianity is the answer, so after much internal wrangling and fighting, they just gave up and defaulted back to the religion of their youth. His friend Penny had some major issues with Christianity, as far as I can tell from the book, none of them were answered, she just called him one day to say, "Hey, I love Jesus now too."
Having said all of that, if I was to become a Christian again one day, this would be the kind of Christian I would be. Don seems like a really cool guy, a really smart guy who loves the arts and is not afraid of intellectualism. I really loved the fact that he once fell in love with Emily Dickinson. Here is a man that understands that just because one loves Jesus does not mean they have to be a monk. There is still much beauty in this world to behold, much to enjoy, and that includes reading, the arts, a good beer, and even watching South Park.
I am not saying that this book totally convinced me, as I said, there were some issues that I had with it, but it's come closer than anything in a really long time to showing me that it's ok to be a Christian and that the Christianity I grew up is not necessarily all there is to Christendom.
I understand what he means when he says that believing in Jesus is not something he can intellectually explain to someone, but it is just something he feels in his gut. I can understand that. I can respect that. I can relate to that. Even as I have run away from the Church, I have still always found myself believing in God, I have NEVER been able to make the leap to Atheism and I have always admired and revered Jesus Christ, even if I haven't always admired and revered the Church that sprang up after his death.
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