What We Talk About When We Talk About God

No doubt there is and will be many opinions on Rob Bell's new book and even more so on some of Bell's opinions on our culture's current moral and theological issues.  But after recently reading his new book, I am not sure what all of the fuss is about.  Of course, I think you can read something by someone and agree with parts while not agreeing with everything in a book (or every thought or opinion the author has).  So, with that in mind, some of my takeaways from the book:

• We’re an exotic blend of awesome and pathetic, extraordinary and lame, big and small.
• Which leads us to a crucial truth: there are other ways of knowing than only those of the intellect
• Science does an excellent job of telling me why I don’t have a tail, but it can’t explain why I find that interesting.
• This is because conviction and humility, like faith and doubt, are not opposites; they’re dance partners.  It’s possible to hold your faith with open hands, living with great conviction and yet at the same time humbly admitting that your knowledge and perspective will always be limited.
• Learning to water-ski requires a person to make the counterintuitive leap from trying to do what seems natural, which is to get yourself up onto the surface of the water, to trusting that the boat will do that work for you.  Which can take a few tries and often involves a lot of water up your suit.  I talk about the counterintuitive nature of learning to water-ski because at the heart of what Jesus teaches us about God is something called the gospel.  Gospel is an unexpected, foreign notion, a strange idea that cuts against many of the dominant ways we’ve all come to believe are how the world works.  My own personal note- as someone who waterskis and has helped people water ski, I love this analogy.  If I had a dollar for every time I've said "let the boat pull you up" . . . !
• Who do people who don’t pray, pray when they’re terrified?