Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

I couldn't put this book down, reading 80 pages the first night I received it. It is really great reading -- kind of a Charles Karault journey through Christianity -- humorous and includes little-known and interesting facts. Simply excellent!
Barb in Florida

A brilliant interweaving of the sublime and the ridiculous that highlights the amazing (sometimes disturbing) varieties of religion in America. The people John Spalding writes about may have peculiar faith practices, but Spalding lets you see beyond the strangeness to the humanity, and even the validity, of their perspectives. He lets his subjects speak for themselves, adds some historical background to give grounding, and suffuses it all with his unique sense of humor. I must say I chuckled my way through the essay about the man who drilled a hole in his head to relieve stress, but by the end I was thinking there might be something to his approach!

Spalding holds a mirror up to American culture, particularly American *spiritual* culture, and shows us something quite peculiar!

In the "Celestial City," we find Spalding on a Midwest excursion to elucidate an American obsession with spiritual expression -- all 113 tons of it!

On the other side of the Atlantic, Spalding discovers the shocking truth about John Wesley and his health "methods."

Whether it is riding around in a coffin stashed in a pink hearse, or doing the bidding of a popular theologian who rants about the pope's "mania for virginity," Spalding keeps the reader's interest much more than piqued! And, much more than sardonic laughter (though there is plenty of that!), the reader also must explore the truth of the matter *with* Spalding and ask, "Really!?"

Pick it up, it's a great read!

John Spalding's writing is both intelligent and funny, not always an easy thing to pull off. He has found people across this land who seem like fictional characters. The fact that they aren't fictional is both an interesting social commentary, and just plain hilarious. This is a VERY engrossing book.
I went to see John's reading at his book release, and he is as genuinely nice as he is intelligent, and he's plenty of both.

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.

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.