Donald Miller
Posted on 01/24/2008 11:14:00 AM PST by rightwingintelligentsia
ORLANDO, Florida (AP) -- Donald Miller still loves God and Jesus. Don't misunderstand him.
His problem is with Christianity, at least how it's often practiced.
"It's a dangerous term so I try to avoid it," said Miller, who considered giving up his career as a Christian writer and leaving the church in 2003 because he couldn't attend services without getting angry.
For him, the word conjured up conservative politics, suburban consumerism and an "insensitivity to people who aren't like us."
To quell his rage, he sat in his boxer shorts and banged out a memoir of his experiences with God, stripped of the trappings of religion.
"Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality" sold just enough to pay a few months rent. Then five years later, spurred by a grass-roots movement of 20-something Christians longing to connect to God without ties to the religious right, the book became a sudden hit.
Fans were buying caseloads and passing out copies to friends. It peaked at No. 18 on The New York Times list of best-sellers among paperback nonfiction in November. He was mobbed by fans after a recent Young Life conference in Orlando where he addressed a crowd of roughly 4,000.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Please show me from this article that the book is about this author's realization that his anger was a problem with his spirit. Otherwise, I will suggest that you address your own spiritual problem of anger.
Have a nice day.
I’ll post from the book when I get home. The article, as has been mentioned by several on this thread, is not a clear or correct look at what the book is about or what the author believes.
In the book he discusses why he left Church in 2003 and what brought him back. The article is not an accurate description of what the book is about.
‘It’s not unilateral - just try saying you’re a Progressive Democrat in your typical Evangelical church. People will look at you like you have a demon in you.’
Well, that would be a sign...progressive democrat...demon
hmmm there you are
Here are a couple of passages from the book:
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"A few years ago I was listing prayer requests to a friend. As I listed my requests, I mentioned many of my friends and family but never spoke about my personal problems. My friend candidly asked me to reveal my own struggles, but I told him no, that my problems weren't that bad. My friend answered quickly, in the voice of a confident teacher, "Don, you are not above the charity of God." In that instant he revealed my motives were not noble, they were prideful. It wasn't that I cared about my friends more than myself, it was that I believed I was above the grace of God."
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"I remember thinking that I would follow Jesus anywhere, that it didn't matter what He asked me to do. He could be mean to me; it didn't matter, I loved Him, and I was going to follow Him.
I think the most important thing that happens within Christian spirituality is when a person falls in love with Jesus.
Sometimes when I go forward at church to take Communion, to take the bread and dip it in the wine, the thought of Jesus comes to me, the red of His blood or the smell of His humanity, and I eat the bread and I wonder at the mystery of what I am doing, that somehow I am one with Christ, that I get my very life from Him, my spiritual life comes from His working inside me, being inside me."
I guess he was projecting onto the church the problems he was unwilling to face within. Sounds like he could have profited by reading Waking the Dead.
Internalized anger was a large portion of it. He still has issues with hypocrisy, but we should all have issues with hypocrisy.
Learning, not just with his head but with his heart, that Christ is the focus of Christianity instead of what people think and expect was a big portion of his journey. No matter where he went, or what he did, he kept finding that the love of Jesus was the only thing that made sense to his soul.
Goody:
To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about[a] himself: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.'
"But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'
"I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted." Luke 18:9-14
Does the term
whitewashed sepulchre
ring any bells for you?
Careful how you judge there, kiddo. LOL
In other words, the article doesn't indicate that he says his problem was with himself.
So don't blast me for making comments based on what the article says.
To uphold the democrat’s platform,you must have a demon.
by Donald Miller (Author)
“I ONCE LISTENED TO AN INDIAN ON TELEVISION say that God was in the wind and the water, and I wondered at how beautiful that...”
That's either an incredibly ironic statement or it needs a sarcasm tag ..
That was my whole point, though. You were making comments based upon the article, while my assertion was that the article was incorrect. Reading the book based upon the word of Freepers rather than condemning the book and the author based upon an article from the main stream media would seem what this website is about.
Miller and a buddy bluffed their way into the 1992 Republican Convention by telling officials at the convention hotel that they were Ohio delegates and had lost their credentials.
"Everyone just wants to have a beer," Miller says. "I could be an alcoholic for free if I lived in the South."
He still lives in a communal house off Burnside with four other guys, but he drives a newish Saab.
Miller was once an enthusiastic Young Republican who forged credentials just so he could hang out inside the 1992 GOP convention in Houston. Now he's a Green-turned-Democrat with a link to MoveOn.org on his website. And he is also the only writer in the cosmos who jump-started a career in Christian publishing by going to Reed College, a school where the unofficial motto is "Atheism, Communism, Free Love."
Miller says the fate of his mom's Enron-based 401(k) played a role in his political conversion. "She's lost 95 percent of her retirement, she's working two jobs, and Bush is denying he's friends with Ken Lay," he says. "And I'm like, you really don't care about us, do you?"
He'd moved to Portland in the early '90s, in part because it offered a different cultural universe than Houston, where he grew up Southern Baptist. His first book had stiffed and gone out of print. He'd quit his job as a youth minister at a suburban church ("It was like going to church at the Gap," he wrote in Blue Like Jazz).
(Miller also confesses a crush on the bisexual songwriter Ani DiFranco.)
evangelical Christianity looks like a right-wing monolith right now: bolstering Bush, crushing gay marriage, waging abortion jihad, saving America's children from SpongeBob SquarePants.
"to talk about faith without sounding like assholes."
Donald Miller, author of the book Blue Like Jazz, is involved with the Emergent rebellion against sola Scriptura. Yes, and Miller’s BLJ has fast become a classic in Emergent circles and his popularity even rivals that of one of his own favorite authors potty-mouthed “Christian” and New Age advocate Anne LaMott.
Some of you may recall a post Ingrid wrote about Miller last year called Donald Miller: Rising Emergent Star. In it she said. “One of the Emergent church’s rising stars is Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz, sort-of comedian and one cool, postmodern ‘Christian’.”
Miller, “grew up in Houston, TX,” but is now a member of an emerging church in Portland, OR called Imago Dei Community Having left home “at the age of twenty-one,” Miller “traveled across the country until he ran out of money in Portland, Oregon, where he lives today.” Unable to launch “his own publishing house”:
Miller is just another of the Emergent new school of so-called “Christians” who feel that because they are the “missional” and alleged true “followers of Jesus” they are somehow excused from having to watch their language and Christian character. Last year Zach Dundas of the Willamette Week Online, “a weekly in Portland, Oregon,” did a piece on Miller called “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.”
And as Ingrid introduced it she informed us that it would: “have to be bleeped.
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