It seems that with the emergent church movement we saw an increase in the popularity of theological books that were not written exactly as theology and not exactly as simple memoir or confession, books that were intensely personal and subjective with a commitment to recounting thoughts and reactions honestly rather than conforming them to what the author knew to be safe or agreeable.  As literature, I found them to be a mixed bag.  I liked the idea of approaching faith in that genuine human way, but it was not necessarily something I needed to read about.  After all, the point as I saw it, was that we can all live our lives and our faiths in an unpretentious open way, allow ourselves to be unvarnished and sincere and be all the better for it.  I did not need someone to do this for me.

My frustration with this genre of writing comes from the fact that I know too many people who love reading it, but read it as an end in itself.  It’s a counterpoint or entertainment or something to emulate but not an approach to life.  For my part I can’t think of any reason to read Blue Like Jazz more than once.  It’s not a bad book and I have used it with others as a conversation starter, but it contains no great insights you are going to miss on the first read.  It just disappoints me when I hear about people adapting it as a play or using one of its ideas for a gimicky evangelism project.  The point of the book is that Theology is meant to be lived out, wrestled with, contested and argued about over beer.  Be messy, unvarnished, enjoy the company of people who seem outwardly not to belong in church and don’t worry if, in the end, you don’t look too much like you belong in church either.

This approach to theology, getting into the thick of it, embedding and living in it without any pretense to objective distance seems to me to draw a natural, if humorous, parallel to the Gonzo approach to journalism-hence the title of the site.  I’m not a big fan of gonzo journalism, but I am a big fan of the subjective end of truth.  Truth doesn’t seem worthy of its title unless it has the power to change hearts and minds, and this does not occur on some ideal plane of objective abstraction, but in the gritty and ambiguous realm of human life.  So it goes.