I recently finished reading Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, by Daniel Radosh. It was another Ooze Select Blogger book that I received. I really enjoyed this book and I think it lent some great insight into the Christian culture in the United States.

Radosh is a self-proclaimed humanistic Jew. His search into christian culture was not some spiritual journey, nor was it a witch hunt. It was both an honest journalistic insight into the culture and at times an insightful critical commentary on it as well.

I really liked Radosh’s writing style, as he traveled the country investigating facets of the parallel universe as far reaching as christian wrestling to the pinnicale of Christian marketing, the CBA Christian Retail Show. The book draws you in, and even if your well aware of the culture, you interact with it in a new and different way. If anything, I think it’s a great book for ‘insiders’ to read, because it will give you an opportunity to listen and hear things from a different perspective, and allow your self to think critically about Christian Pop Culture.

I’d definitely recommend this book to anyone, particularly Christians, because of the critical insight in lends. Radosh is balanced and has a number of touching commentaries that are quite positive about Christians he met. The really thought provoking stuff to me was the constructive critiscism so I’ll leave you with a handful of quotes I enjoyed…

Evangelical blogger Fred Clark has written one of the most effective (and hilsrious) critiques of Left Behind, a page-by-page dissection of the first book that has taken him, at the time of this writing, about four years. The level of detail gives Clark space to build a devastating case that the book’s glaring absence of sympathy for anyone other than its main characters is not just a failure of imagination on the part of the authors but a form of hatred. The heroes of the book, Clark declares, are sociopaths. They are men who arrive at an airport an hour or so after billions of people have vanished without a trace- with countless hundreds or thousands more dead or dying in the wreckages of suddenly pilotless planes- yet who make no attempt to help or even inquire about the feelings of, a single person they meet. Instead they focus relentlessly on their own travel plans, jobs, and lives…
“The authors behave as they imagine God behaves,” Clark writes, “They have a plot that must move forward and they will advance that plot even if it means causing, then callously disregarding, the suffering of billions of people. Plot trumps — and tramples on, and violates — character. Here, once more, Bad Writing and Bad Theology intersect.”
-p. 79-80

“I think if there’s a legitimate indictment of the church today, it’s that we’re subcultural rather than countercultural. A subculture, sociologically, speaking, buys into the vast majority of the values of the surrounding society but tacks on its own things. We buy into the same materialism, we say, ‘Nope, money won’t make me happy,’ and then we go out and work sixty hours a week to buy stuff, because we act like stuff is going to make us happy, and we go out pursuing stuff- just like the rest of the world does” -p. 169 (from interview with Jay Howard, author of Apostles of Rock)

I think that might be it for the quotes for now. I had a few more, but my wonderful daughter pulled the sticky tabs right out of the book and now I can’t find the pages I marked any longer. If anyone has read the Left Behind series or any of Frank Peretti’s novels, I’d love to hear your opinion on them. And if you want to borrow (or have) this book just let me know, I’d be glad to pass it on.