A fascinating trip through the different lives Yancey has chosen to highlight. The biographical sketches each illustrate how they impacted the author's life and how he related each of their lives to his own reforming faith. Highly recommended. ( )

Given to Matthew Hayes - 05/03/2023

Not exactly what I thought it would be, but Yancey’s profiles of the people who influenced and helped him salvage his faith were really interesting. I learned a lot, and my to-read list got longer. Especially Chesterton. I must get to Chesterton this year.
I love Yancey. This isn’t my favorite of his work, but it’s quite honest—sometimes uncomfortably so—and it’s worth a read. ( )

I enjoyed reading this book. Philip Yancey reflects on 13 people who helped him grow spiritually after his walking away from Christianity and then coming back to the faith in his college years. He grew up in church and his family was Christian, so he knew a lot about conservative Christian culture and he could see so many things wrong with it. These 13 people helped him see that there is more to walking in the faith than following the moral rules he grew up with and inspired him to live his life following Christ. He wrote about MLK, G. K. Chesterton, Paul Brandt, Robert Coles, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mahatma Gandhi, C. Everett Koop, Henri Nouwen, Shusaku Endo, John Donne, Annie Dillard, and Frederick Buechner. I only knew around 5 people on this list, and not well. So I had an eye-opening time learning about their them and what aspects of their lives inspired the author in his Christian walk. I think, because of the author's early negative experience with church people, people who talked or behaved as if they come from that background did not inspire him. In fact, he included some people who many Christians will probably frown upon -- I mean, come on, Gandhi is not even a Christian lol But I can see why the lives of these people have so much appeal to him, and after finishing this book, I share his admiration for them as well. And I'm quite inspired by several of them, including Gandhi, in terms of what the Christian faith should look like. The author is drawn to people who speak out against injustice, who help the poor or the patients with stigmatized illness, who embrace Jesus's teaching of nonviolence and forgiveness, who move "downward" in career for spiritual growth, who humble themselves before the problem of pain and death without lecturing to others about it, who communicate the kingdom of heaven and God's grace and creation in a way that is easy for nonbelievers to understand. (He is also drawn to writers -- 10 writers on this list of 13 people lol. I secretly feel it's a little much :P) Anyways, highly recommend. Really happy the first book I finished in the year of 2022 is such a good book. ( )

Martin Luther King Jr.
G.K. Chesterton
Dr. Paul Brand
Dr. Robert Coles
Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoevsky
Mahatma Gandhi
Dr. C. Everett Koop
John Donne
Annie Dillard
Frederick Buechner
Shusaku Endo
Henri Nouwen