About this title: As a student Kevin was eager for a term abroad - a break from the mind-numbing sameness of life at Brown University, one of the most liberal colleges in America. Well Kevin found the most foreign place he could in America's backyard. Liberty University is the late Rev. Jerry Falwell's fundamentalist Christian college for hardcore conservative Christians. The 10,000 students learn everything through a strict lens of Biblical literalism, every professor is a born-again Christian, the student code of conduct, lays out a host of rules e.g. no witchcraft allowed and at spring break, they take a ...
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Binding: Hardback
Publisher: LITTLE, BROWN BOOK GROUP Country = UNITED KINGDOM
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780446178426ISBN:044617842X
Description: BRAND NEW HARDBACK. 336 pages. Like neil strauss pe*n*e*t*rating a secret society of pick-up artists or norah vincent becoming a man for a year, brown university sophomore kevin roose takes a term abroad to liberty university, rev. jerry falwell's fundamentalist baptist college in lynchbur (Hardback) read more
Binding: Hardback
Publisher: Grand Central Pub
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780446178426ISBN:044617842X
Description: New. Armed with an open mind and a reporter's notebook, Roose dives into life at Liberty University with the goal of connecting with his evangelical peers. He experiences their world first-hand, in this hilarious and heartwarming, respectful and thought-p... read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Grand Central Pub
Date Published: 2009-03-26
ISBN-13:9780446178426ISBN:044617842X
Description: NEW. Hardcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780446178426. read more
"This was a well-written, interesting book. Roose, a self-described unchurched liberal attended Liberty University for a semester, an ultra-conservative Christian school in order to get to know the type of person who would choose such a school. On the plus side, Roose is very open-minded and personable. He is surprised how well he fits in and how normal his classmates are. On the negative side, he makes up a Christian testimony so that he blends in and so that his new friends will be totally unguarded. I say that this is negative because he almost never mentions Jesus, grace, or the need for salvation. I assume his friends never talked to him about these things because they assumed he already knew about them. It is no surprise, then, that Roose talks about having "the form of religion without the content" and that he longs for the peace that his dorm mates exhibit. (He enjoys prayer meetings, even though he doesn't believe in the One being prayed to.) One glaring oversight on Roose's part is his hang up with the "homophobia" at Liberty. (I have never understood that term, as not agreeing with something is not the same thing as being afraid of it.) He just can't get past the fact that his friends, who are kind, articulate, and funny, believe the Bible when it says that homosexual behavior is sinful. On the other hand, he doesn't find it strange at all that his secular friends and family assume the worst about his Christian friends and faculty, but are totally unwilling to examine their prejudice against Christians (Christophobic?) Further, Roose talked about his lesbian aunts flying to gay pride rallies every weekend and leading support groups at 10 high schools. I was surprised that Roose didn't see the parallels with evangelicals witnessing. (Both believe in their message to the point of spending a lot of time sharing it with others.) Still, this was an interesting book a worth looking into."
"A co-worker loaned me this after we were discussing fundamentalist Christians. The coworker came from that environment and I have a relative who went into that environment. He suggested it as a good way to try to get inside the relative's head.
It was but it was also incredibly frustrating. The Falwell style of Christianity is so full of nastiness that it is hard to see the good that might be there. The author did a good job of showing that without cutting them too much slack on the negatives. Ironically, it's the binary all-or-nothing approach that Falwell style religion takes that forces me to reject it. That there are schools that "teaches" students blatantly bad "science" and indoctrinates them on religion without any real debate is a shame. Our children deserve better. School should be a place where we learn how to think critically, not where we learn how to shut off our minds. Fortunately, Liberty isn't quite as successful at that as I feared but that still leaves a lot of room for damage.
In the words of my coworker, part of this will make you laugh and cry. You'll laugh at the blatant nonsense but you'll cry because it's real."
"Interesting seeing Christianity from the perspective of someone who is not a Christian, but was truly trying to look at at it all with an open mind.
Quotes that made me think:
"One recent study showed that 51 percent of Americans don't know any evangelical Christians, even casually. And until I visited Thomas Road, that was me. My social circle at Brown included atheists, agnostics, lapsed Catholics, Buddhists, Wiccans, and more non-observant Jews than you can shake a shofar at, but exactly zero born-again Christians. The evangelical world, in my mind, was a cloistered, slightly frightening community whose values and customs I wasn't supposed to understand. So I ignored it."
"I'm still adjusting my mind to all the earnest God talk I'm hearing here at Liberty...But one thing has become clear: these Liberty students have no ulterior motive. They simply can't contain their love for God. They're happy to be believers, and they're telling the world."
"At first, I thought the 'Liberty Way' and its rules against physical contact would ruin the dating experience. But strangely, I'm not feeling frustrated on these dates. In fact, having preordained physical boundaries takes a huge amount of pressure and anxiety out of the process...And that's a very freeing feeling. When dinner dates aren't just preludes to hooking up, you end up truly listening to each other. The conversation is the centerpiece, and what emerges is deeper and more intimate than if you had been spending your time trying to Don Juan your way into her bed.""
"This book earns my highest praise for 3 reasons: 1.) although it is a nonfiction memoir, it somehow manages to incorporate all the attributes of fiction: romance, suspense, conflict, and a compelling denouement; 2.) it covers a topic so important that it threatens to tear this country apart much like the civil war, and that is the growing division between extreme Christians and extreme atheists; 3.) and it was written by a 19-year college sophomore who is so talented and well-educated that he is on par with the best writer of any age. I found this profound, surprising, evocative, interesting and thought-provoking. The story of the young student who finds happiness despite huge philosophical and practical differences between himself and the other students has much larger implications. I personally cannot stand Bible-pounding, homophobic, right-to lifers, but this book made me pause to remember that nothing is as black-and-white as it first appears and I am just as biased as they are if I despise these people as a group. I consider a book that teaches me a lesson like that to be a really important work. At the same time, the classes he took in "Creationism" were so ludicrous that I began to think that this idea is on its way out. These people seem too intelligent to sustain that kind of nonsense indefinitely."
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