Love Wins

3.5 stars. I prefer hearing Rob Bell in auditory format: podcasts and such. His semi-poetic, too-many-line-breaks style of writing bugs me. Personal preference thing. Couldn't get into this one much until chapter 6.

I hadn't heard of Rob Bell before Ryan Holiday wrote about this book in one of his newsletters. I'm not a Christian nor religious and probably never would have picked this book up otherwise, so I'm glad he did.

Some parts of the book (and his writing) I struggled with but I did like Bell's interpretation of heaven and hell and how he used the historical context of the times to explain it. That we create our own version of hell (suffering) and heaven (peace and creativity) on earth NOW and that we always have a choice feels pretty stoic and rings true for me. I also loved how he broke down the story of the prodigal son and talked about how you tell a story (even to yourself) matters, that there can be several perspectives at once and that we get to choose which one we want to believe.

Definitely not for everyone, but I wouldn't write it off just because you're not religious.

OH, bloody hellz. So, I'm fascinated by the topic of Hell. And since this book seemed to take the more liberal scholar tack of at least questioning it, AND since Mr Bell is incredibly popular, I thought I'd give it a go.

Mistake.

His writing style. It almost killed me. It's sparse. It's...pretentious, frankly. It's written like it should be delivered as a sermon. A fairly vapid one. If he condensed his paragraphs, this already small book would probably be half its original size. Every few pages, I would have to take a break and read something else that didn't suck.

As for the information. Well, it gets two stars merely for theological information and interpretation.

But if you want
to actually get, y'know
solid information and scholarly discussion–

Well, you're barking up the wrong tree.