Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God...

... subtitled, "How I Grew Up as One of The Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back."

At the mid-life age of 42, I would be hard pressed if you asked me to tell you who my heroes are. I deeply love and respect my parents. As parents they would be hard to beat in my book--I don't come close. My wife is a champion for the oppressed. Hire her if you want a go-to person for children who ask Santa for a bed for Christmas. My heart breaks to realize the situations some kids are growing up in out there.

OK, OK, I do remember in the past being in awe of people whose names I had read when I first started this scholar thing. I would walk around AAR/SBL looking at the name tags. Wow--Thomas Altizer! Or in England I remember watching Charles Cranfield walking down the street all hunched over--Wow! Or in Tübingen I remember how surreal it was to eat my Döner Kebab on the steps of the Stiftskirche and watch Martin Hengel casually stroll by.

Now I just envy these guys :-) Tom Wright is just a guy like me... just a little more famous and better published and could get a job anywhere and I guess he's the Bishop of Durham too.

All that is to say that I've not been offended yet as I read Schaeffer Jr.'s new book. I used to deeply admire Francis Schaeffer, but I never worshipped him the way so many do him and C. S. Lewis. And indeed in some ways for me he came to be simply another fundamentalist thinker, ironically the type of image Schaeffer Jr. says his mom strongly resisted. I continue to respect the man, but I don't think I would recommend anyone read him.

The strange thing about this book--that some apparently are decrying--is that it actually makes me feel good about Francis Schaeffer again. The book is hilarious--I can tell that Franky takes after his apparently exuberant mother. Not in the sense of nakedness, but I get the sense of Frank as a bit of an "exhibitionist," a show off. But he does it openly and with panache. Somehow it seems appropriate that Carrie Fisher has been on the talk circuit at the same time as Franky is making the rounds! Franky and his mom come off manic (and his dad depressive).

Well, all of that is to say that it's a very enjoyable read, especially for someone like me who comes from a not dissimilar background, well, apart from the whole growing up in the Swiss Alps with Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and Barbara Bush coming for dinner every once and a while.

I'm only 25 pages in and probably won't say much more if I combat my ADHD long enough actually to finish the thing. I tried to read some this afternoon from a monograph in the Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft series, but it just wasn't working for me. But salacious details by a prodigal son about his famous but now dead parents and grandparents, now that kept my attention for a full 25 pages before I had to blog!