Book Review- Soul Survivor

Hey guys, so I'm dropping the formal prose just to let you know that i finished reading a great book this morning. I have been making my way slowly through Philip Yancey's Soul Survivor for the last two months now. The book's subtitle is "How my faith survived the church" and Yancey speaks about how his own fragile faith was held together through certain role models through his life. He devotes a whole chapter to each of these characters some of them being Leo Tolstoy (a Russian novelist), G.K. Chesterton (an English preacher with a personality), historical figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, John Donne and contemporaries such as Annie Dillard (Pulitzer Prize winner).

Without expressing my own thoughts too much I think it is safe to say the following: The Church has caused much damage over the years. It has been responsible for wars, dodgy political movements, private agendas and worst of all, individual hurt on a grand scale. Yancey seeks not to defend the church as much as he seeks to defend faith- at the most crucial place ever... the heart of every single believer. Keep hope alive. Learn wisdom so as not to repeat the same mistakes. But most of all, keep faith alive. Feed the flickering flame that is meant to light the world.

I have always been a big Yancey fan and this book was great for me because it was the most personal of all his books that I have read thus far. I got a bit of an inside scoop into his childhood and his struggles which I really enjoyed. (It's always nice to know that the famous ones struggle just like everyone!) Some of his books I find a little bit 'mono-theme-ish" but this was far from being that... I think that writing about a new character every chapter kept the book amazingly fresh and remarkably insightful.

Philip Yancey is a man with many opinions and ideas. He has allowed questions to consume his thinking and spiritual world such that we benefit from his well-weighted conclusions. I guess if I ever had to identify spiritual role-models in my life Yancey would be right up there.