Book Review
Sabbath Unrest
Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church
by Rachel Held Evans
Thomas Nelson, 2015
(288 pages, $16.99, paperback)
reviewed by Dennis R. Di Mauro
In the late 1970s, when Campbell's Soup entered the spaghetti sauce market, its sauce didn't sell well because of a public perception that a Campbell's brand sauce would be too "soupy." It wasn't until Campbell's introduced its Prego line of sauces in 1981 that its sales started to soar. It was still the same sauce, but its new name removed the "soupy"perception.
In a similar way, Rachel Held Evans holds essentially the same views as her colleague and conference partner, Nadia Bolz-Weber, a tattoo-clad, foul-mouthed, recovering alcoholic and Lutheran pastor. They both hold to a high view of the sacraments and liturgical worship. They both vociferously defend gay marriage and "radical hospitality," the practice of offering Holy Communion to the unbaptized. They both seek to serve the outcasts of society: alcoholics, drug addicts, gays and lesbians, and so on. The only difference is that Evans is the "nice Southern Christian girl" version of Bolz-Weber. It's the same sauce, but Evans is the brand you can take home to mother.
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Dennis Di Mauro is the secretary of the National Pro-Life Religious Council, and a doctoral student in Theology and Religious Studies at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of A Love for Life: Christianity’s Consistent Protection of the Unborn (2008).
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