making it worth it

I must now confess that, yes, I did it. I suppose one could blame it on a touch of madness, perhaps brought on by the poison of the philosophy I had only a day before drained to the dregs. Perhaps it could be blamed on a curious so morbid the modern puritan would call it obese. Whatever the cause, whatever the reason, I did indeed give over the almost-$30 that I knew would be required of me by those gatekeepers of the law and the profits, and having surrendered the precious amount, I was free to take in hand and from the store a copy of the incontrovertibly controversial "A New Kind of Christianity".

When one does such a mad thing, it only shows a steeper descent along the slippery slope to begin to scour the pages looking for an adequate return on investment. Perhaps because McLaren is decidedly of the Left, and for the Left a return of any such kind seems to be a sin on the order of the original Fall they do not believe in, I have thus far found all attempts at such a return to be fruitless. I am left with mere pages, and the words upon them, which any postmodern will all too readily tell you are worthless, anyway.

If nothing else, McLaren has proven the Bible to be literally true when it says that a fool and his money are soon parted.

But if a book must be worthless, at least it cannot be completely worthless. I have never written a book, so cannot claim to know the joy of such an accomplishment. Perhaps those who bind books may have at one time found satisfaction in such a craft, though I would think that today those who bind books are machines who take little joy in anything. Those like myself, who read, can find a degree of joy in doing our part. But what if that joy is denied us? To borrow McLaren's favorite type of question, what if he who reads does not enjoy the reading? What if he learns nothing, or at least nothing of value? What if he longs to find some joy, some satisfaction, in a book? What is he left with?

Merely the shredding of it.

So, let the shredding begin...