Review of a review

In a previous blog this month, I panned Dating Jesus by Susan Campbell.

I will have to admit, however, that she made the the whole book worth its cost in the last chapter called "Jesus Haunts Me, This I Know."

Some statements:

(As she reiterates the story of the woman with the issue of blood and ponders the status of gays and women in Christianity)"Her faith healed her. That is what blindsided me--she felt unworthy, but her faith healed her. That, and the notion that there's a whole army of us, regardless of our orientation, who have been made to understand that we don't fit in and aren't entirely wanted, that we are somehow unclean, unworthy....And I knew as a woman, my church did not think me quite worthy of the entirety of God's saving grace. Don't tell me that God had in mind for me a special role. We all know there's no such thing as separate, but equal."

(I dated the wrong Jesus). " The real one wouldn't have worried if I spoke out in Sunday school. He might have expected it--demanded it, even. He tended to gravitate to mouthy women who were willing to buck convention and pick up and follow him, social mores be damned. They saw in him something they saw in absolutely nothing else in their lives, and so they followed."

Dating Jesus

I am reading Dating Jesus, a Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl by Susan Campbell.

I expected the read to be an ironic, sometimes amusing look at the times of my life as a girl growing up in the Church of Christ as Campbell did in small-town Missouri. Although many of her experiences ring true, reading the book has been painful, almost torturous. Although Phyllis Tickle recommends the book on the blurb, Campbell does not write nearly as well as Tickle.

Perhaps it is because she feels compelled to go into lengthy histories of fundamentalism, Title IX, feminism, etc. The book could have been written by any number of my acquaintences in the little church in which I was reared and at A. C. U. where I attended college. Many of them, as Campbell, long ago left the church. I do like some of her chapter titles--the last one is "Jesus Haunts Me, This I Know".

She does proclaim, "I still love Jesus."