Between a Church and a Hard Place
One Faith-Free Dad's Struggle to Understand What It Means to Be Religious (or Not)
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Read Andrew Park's post on the Penguin Blog.
At age thirty-five, Andrew Park hit a parenting snag. Teaching his children about ethics, good manners, and how to shoot a free throw posed no problem. When they started asking about religion, he came up empty-handed. Raised in a faith- free family where teenage rebellion meant being born again as an evangelical Christian (as his brother did), Park always believed he'd be a nonbeliever. (And his lapsed Christian wife thought the same.) But when his children ask if God is real, he knows it is his responsibility to try and find the answer. Between a Church and a Hard Place is the often funny yet deeply tender story of that quest. It follows the author as he tries to reconcile his upbringing with the demands and liabilities he faces as a young father. He realizes with alarming clarity that if he doesn't provide some answers, someone else gladly will.
As he searches for middle ground, Andrew Park addresses the hot-button questions surrounding faith and freedom and explores the polar reaches of religion in America. Along the way he uncovers what it means to embrace faith-or not-while still being a good role model, and more important, still being true to himself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One day, after Park picks his son up from his preschool classes at the local Methodist church, the three-year-old utters the word "God." A few evenings later, Park overhears his son telling his little sister how cool it is that when we die we go back to God. Because he has lived most of his life free of any faith tradition, Park finds himself anxious about how to address his son's questions about religion, and so begins to research what it means to be religious in the modern world. Part memoir and part summary of recent studies about religious belief and practice, Park discovers his great-grandfather's staunch commitment to the Pentecostal Holiness Church, and he talks with his own brother about his brother's Presbyterianism. The research about American religion that Park culls from George Barna's polls and Rodney Stark's books is so familiar that it appears as if Park has been living in a cave for the past ten years. Park's own story of his search for faith is so unremarkable and superficial that it has no features to distinguish it from hundreds of other similar memoirs. This book would have been better as a magazine article.
