GOD, CHRIST JESUS, AND I

A lay minister collects 15 years worth of writing about the Bible’s relationship to daily life to create a meditation on faith and God.

Beginning in March 1990, Yeiser began writing down his thoughts and reflections on faith, religion, the Bible and the contemporary world. These writings vary in scope, but none achieves any kind of depth–they are deliberate, but serve no purpose. The most taxing entry is comprised solely of selected passages from the Bible that relate to the concept of heaven, with the author providing no further explanation or analysis. If Yeiser doesn’t contribute any analysis, one may wonder why readers will bother. Other entries are more interesting, but the quality of the work doesn’t exactly improve. His meditations on modern phenomena like teen sex–in which he posits that the number of teen girls having premarital sex is directly related to the number of teen girls attempting suicide–definitely raise some questions. These questions, however, are not about the promiscuous, suicidal teens lambasted here, but rather the author of this out-of-touch and insensitive rumination. Throughout, Yeiser reveals–either directly or indirectly–that he’s had a hard life, including a near-death experience in 1984 and his ex-wife’s betrayal of his trust. These emerge as defining moments that shaped him into the person who’d pen this book. The author’s musings are too shallow to be considered “conservative” or “fundamentalist”–their myopic focus on religion and propriety is marked by an offensive ignorance and naïveté.

A book that casts ineffective stones at the contemporary world.