This One's a Winner

Now that summer is here, I'm finally getting to some of the books that have been impatiently glaring at me from my bookshelf this school year. I'm well immersed in one that I've been meaning to get to since last summer--Lauren Winner's Girl Meets God. It's an extraordinarily well-written, honest, thoughtful, sometimes in-your-face memoir of Winner's conversion to Christianity after being brought up Jewish and eventually embracing Orthodox Judaism. She find that she never is quite able to leave her Jewish self totally behind, despite her realization that there's no turning back from Jesus' claim on her life. Here's a glimpse:

Sometimes I meet Professor Kerry, one of my undergrad advisers, and he looks at me and furrows his brow. He never did understand how this straight-A, Ivy League student could really believe that somewhere up in the sky sat a God who cared if she turned on a TV on Saturday afternoon; he finds it even less intelligible that the same student now believes that God took human form and walked around Palestine. “One day you’ll have to explain to me how intelligent people can believe in something that sounds like a Greco-Roman myth,” he says. “You know: Zeus, Demeter, Jesus.”

Admittedly, it’s a little crazy. Grand, infinite God taking on the squalling form of a human baby boy. It’s what some of the old-timers call a scandal, the scandal of the Gospel. But it is also the whole point.

. . . My old professor can’t imagine how I can possibly make sense of it, but I no longer know how to make sense of God, or anything else for that matter, without it.

The book has broad appeal, but will appeal especially to young adults in college and in their 20s & 30s.