Wowed by an Unlikely Book

When you stand as close as we have to real life miracles, you will get roughed up. . .Splinters fall from the cross. They travel a long distance and they pierce the skin -- maybe even the heart. And wrapped in this risk and danger is God's embrace and promise to work all things (even evil ones) to the good of those who love him. . .[W]e are not to be Pollyanna about this. Many of the "things" we will face come with the razor edges of a fallen and broken world. You can't play poker with God's mercy -- if you want the sweet mercy then you must also swallow the bitter mercy. And what is the difference between sweet and bitter? Only this: your critical perspective, your worldview. One of God's greatest gifts is the ability to see points of view that exceed your personal experience. That is what it means to me to grow in Christ -- to exceed myself as I stretch to him.

-The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, pp. 124-125.

Rarely have I finished reading a book and thought, "I want to buy a stack of these to hand out to people." But The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, is on that short list. Since I can't buy it in bulk right now, I wanted to at least say something about it here. I first heard about the book through reviews (there's a good one here) and bought a copy directly from Crown & Covenant Publications. You can also get it from Amazon, and apparently there's now a Kindle edition.

The thing about this book is that there's probably something in it that will nettle or disturb virtually any reader. I'm not normally drawn to books like that; they're too exhausting. But the story of Rosaria's conversion is never provocative for its own sake -- it always points to Christ. So even though I wouldn't call it a leisurely read (I finished the book in two sittings because it was too hard to put it aside for long), it has a hard-edged beauty that will stick with you.

Rosaria was a tenured professor of nineteenth-century literature specializing in queer theory at Syracuse University. In the process of researching a book on the American religious right, she was welcomed into the home of a Presbyterian minister and his wife. Through many conversations with them and others, her whole world was upended as she came to accept the precise claims of Christianity that she had set out to critique. By the end of the book, Rosaria herself is a Presbyterian minister's wife with experience in Christian college teaching, church planting, classical homeschooling, and foster care. But, as you're probably guessing, there is a lot more to the story than that -- and it's the messiness amidst all those things that made the book especially beautiful to me.

I finished Secret Thoughts with unanswered questions and points of disagreement, and I'm sure that in subsequent readings, I would find more; but what the book emphatically did was make me think differently about the power of the gospel. Even if you're not sure you would like Rosaria's story, I'd encourage you to give yourself the opportunity to be surprised by it. I was. And if you do read it, I'd love to hear what you think.