I'm slogging my way through William Young's The Shack and Francis Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future. There is no end in sight.
Young started out interesting, gripping even, and then he hit a wall: religion. As soon as the book shifted into a dialogue between him and the Trinity it got downright boring, and even embarrassingly simple-minded. In The Shack, God is a black woman called Papa, Jesus is a middle-eastern man in his thirties and the Holy Spirit is Sarayu (an Asian woman, I think). They are all smiley, talky, laughy with each other...makes me want to throw up. Not because it paints an inaccurate picture of God, but because it's just bad writing. Which is such a switch from the first half. This book has sold millions of copies... I expected something different.
It's super disappointing. I want to throw it, but its required reading for Theology in the fall...and I'm not a quitter. Well, sometimes I am, but not this time.
As for Fukuyama, the book is good but it hits a snag when he starts talking philosophy, which he isn't good at. He tries to create philosophical grounds for an ethics based on human nature. I agree there is a human nature, but it's a tough subject to argue and Fukuyama is not a philosopher. So I wish he would stick to the real purpose of the book: telling us why science is gonna suck us all into a black hole.
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