MATURING IN FAITH; FAITH IS BELIEVING

A disjointed selection of personal and religious reflections that is at best impolitic and at worst nasty indeed.

In large part, Yeiser’s book is a transcription of the author’s journals from the mid-’90s. Yeiser, a Christian who, as the title suggests, continues “maturing in faith,” writes on a bevy of topics, mostly relating to his evolving sense of spiritual understanding. But even for an occasional diary, the book is surprisingly fragmented. At times, Yeiser seems to pursue straight autobiography. At other times, he reviews the tenets of his faith. Occasionally, he will simply quote the Bible at length. Frequently, Yeiser wanders into seemingly random, and unintentionally funny, theological speculation: “Something tells me that the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was not an apple, but a fruit that makes us sexually horny.” It’s a humorous non sequitur, but one that is not irrelevant to the author’s own spiritual concerns, for Yeiser, like Augustine before, cites carnal sins as the main stumbling blocks that hinder his personal march toward faith. Thus Yeiser frequently holds forth on sexual issues, including romance, marriage, abortion and homosexuality. For example, he writes of the morning-after pill: “Dumb young girls, remember, even if you take the morning-after pill now days after having good, immoral sex, you just killed your baby.” It’s a startlingly flippant critique, even from an abortion opponent. Unfortunately, this is not the author at his most outrageous. In a passage halfway through the book, the author implicates the people of Israel in the death of Jesus and argues that God, by way of punishment, visited upon them two millennia of exile and violence–which ended only with the death of Hitler in 1945. To imply that the Holocaust was the culminating punishment for the Jews’ murder of Jesus is not only wrongheaded, it is almost unspeakably offensive. It is statements like these that reduce Yeiser’s journal from harmless meandering to dangerous slander.

A perilously immature spiritual autobiography.