A Pilgrim's Digress : My Perilous, Fumbling Quest for the Celestial City

Rating:
Summary: Sometimes it takes someone from the outside looking in...
Review: John D. Spalding, lapsed Protestant, brings us this humorous collection of observations and encounters with offbeat expressions of religious fervor. It's formatted loosely on the structure of "Pilgrim's Progress", but the parallels are really unnecessary, as this book stands on its own as a collection of observant essays. Whether preaching on a New York City streetcorner or making an arduous pilgrimmage in Europe, Spalding gets personally involved in every quirky journey. I had to give it less than five stars, however, because one section of the book, "A Pilgrim's Dreams", which starts off with a chapter about God as a football fan that an eighth-grader could have written, is just Spalding trying to be funny on his own, and, to me, it just doesn't work. It's his observations that hit the target. A good read for a rainy afternoon.

Rating:
Summary: Satire in the age of political correctness
Review: Maybe because I'm as lapsed as John Spalding is I took great delight in his exploration of the sillier side of religion. I think it's possible to take it all too seriously and in our American quest for political correctness we've hogtied our funny bones. I laughed out loud frequently while reading about his interchanges with characters like Alpha and Omega, the Christian wrestlers, and Whatsyourname? the itinerate street preacher. I'm a former English teacher and anyone who can satirize "A Pilgrim's Progress" gets on my reading list. Pick it up on a day when you need a deep belly laugh.

Rating:
Summary: author is too kind
Review: This book is fairly entertaining, but the author is too kind to the people he profiles. I was hoping for a little more exposure of the fraud called religion. Surely the author had stronger feelings about the subject matter than what he wrote.