Weekend Reads: What to avoid and embrace in the Christian life

Trivial Pursuits: Why Your Real Life Is More Than Media, Money, and the Pursuit of Happiness

By Ian DiOrio

Ian DiOrio’s prose style tends toward the overwhelming. A typical sentence: “It is our deep feelings of shame, judgment, self-hatred, fear, and isolation that fuel our entertainment-obsessed, money-driven, death-defying, instant-gratification culture.” His sentences are so packed one wonders how he can sustain the intensity. But he always does, and the effect is to force the reader to slow down and think. This is certainly appropriate for a book written to make its readers question pop culture. Does such “culture” truly offer “deeper avenues of self-discovery,” or is it mainly a form of distraction? DiOrio’s verdict is clear: Pop culture is distraction, and choosing entertainment over thought is a dangerous gambit. Hence his title: Trivial Pursuits: Why Your Real Life Is More Than Media, Money, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Baker Books, 2014).

Entertainment culture, as summed up by celebrity gossip and endless hours in front of the television, is no friend to grace. This is the book’s main point. And DiOrio knows entertainment. Before the Lord saved him, he was a successful DJ in rave and nightclub-style events. Now he sees their futility. As he puts it, “Raves, for me, were plastic, artificial, pharmaceutically driven, and temporary. I was longing for, and still do, the tangible, real, pure, and eternal.” Raves, he writes, give a euphoric feeling of belonging for a night, but authentic community is found in the church: “Our desire for connection, for reconnection with the body of another, is not at its core sexual but theological.”

Now a pastor, DiOrio is very good at comparing God’s way with the world’s way. To abandon one for the other is to trade “champagne for swamp water.” Though he rarely quotes the Bible, DiOrio stresses the importance of knowing God’s Word and living in God’s community. Only by doing so can we escape the world’s triviality.

The Allure of Gentleness: Defending the Faith in the Manner of Jesus

By Dallas Willard

Though Dallas Willard died in 2013, his final book (assembled by his daughter) was just recently released. The Allure of Gentleness: Defending the Faith in the Manner of Jesus (HarperOne, 2015) contains some heavy-duty philosophical arguments, but its core point is simply that your character must be your primary source of credibility.

In other words, it turns out that knowing Christ (and becoming like Him) is in fact the biggest requirement for Christians. Willard does not devalue the intellect—in fact, he argues for why we need to learn to think clearly—but he does value all aspects of character. He demands wholeness, insofar as it is possible. Why? “The ultimate lifter of doubt,” he writes, “is the believer acting in faith in an interactive life with God. That’s it.”

“I’m not here to defend the Christian faith,” Willard insists. “The Christian faith defends me.” For example, the correct response to the problem of evil is to trust and submit to God’s providence. So long as you are trying to force your life to happen the way you want it to, you will either perpetrate evil or compromise with its perpetrators. But when you submit to God, when you are controlled by gentleness, you will be able to help people overcome their honest difficulties with the Christian faith. After all, people want to be part of “Grace Church,” not “Right Church.”

Willard segues from topic to topic, always in effortless fashion. For him, a book need not be a dry, third-person treatise to be erudite and respectable. His very humility is disarming. The Allure of Gentleness powerfully models what it’s arguing for. It is not afraid to “destroy arguments and every lofty opinion” (2 Corinthians 10:5, ESV), “yet do it with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15, ESV).