I just finished reading the book The Unlikely Disciple last night. Took me about 4 days to read it, bits and pieces at a time. That is really the only way I know how to read. Kevin is a senior English lit major at Brown University…which makes this the first book I’ve ever read by someone close to my age or younger than me. I’m still figuring out what that means.
Essentially the book is a reality tv show…in written form. It follows a Brown student who decides he wants to attend Liberty University (yes, the Falwell school) for a semester and then write a book about it // he really was an unlikely disciple. In fact, he did the last print interview with Jerry Falwell before his passing.
I would highly recommend the book, and buy it now because you can get it a lot cheaper right now on Amazon. I thought Kevin did a “fair and balanced” job of portraying the inner workings of conservative Christianity, something he was very unfamiliar with before going to Liberty.
I’m not going to do a big book review (mostly because I find them pretty boring), but did want to point out my favorite quote from the whole book.
“Most college students, myself included, talk about entering the real world with a certain level of wariness. But I suspect Liberty students have more reasons to worry than I do…Liberty students going anywhere outside Lynchburg’s city limits will soon find their whole cosmology shaken. They’ll meet people who believe in evolution, don’t believe in Jesus, people who mock them for going to Jerry Falwell’s college. What’s more they’ll see that those people bear no resemblance to the heathen masses they learned about in their GNED classes. For Liberty students who have spent 4 years hearing from their professors about how unfulfilled, relativistic, flimsy, and hedonistic the real world is, meeting hordes of happy, principled, morally sound non-Christians will come as a shot between the eyes. And to be honest, I’m not sure how they’ll take it” (emphasis mine, 271).
My experience at a Christian college (albiet, not a conservative one) was very much like this quote.
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