Great Minds Think Alike

For this task we will find out if this saying is true when in comes to reading preferences. Go to the individual page for the last book you gave a 5 star rating to (i.e. if the last book you rated 5 stars was The Help by Kathryn Stockett you would go to this page The Help). Scroll down to the section for other reviews and click on the link for 5 stars...then click on the link to organize the list by date. Once you do that you will need to click on page 6,7, or 8 (if the book you use does not have that many pages of 5 stars use page 1-3) and select a person. Visit that persons profile and select another book (one that you haven't read before) that they gave 5 stars to and that will be the book you need to read for this challenge task.

Yeah. This one was a bit confusing, but somehow at some point in time this summer I stumbled on someone reading the following.

Book Title/Author: The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University by Kevin Roose
Publisher/Year Published: 2009 by Grand Central Publishing
Where I got it: My local library
Rating: 4/5 stars

I've been wanting to read The Unlikely Disciple since I found out about it through a Goodreads giveaway. When I found out he was a protegee of A.J Jacobs (whose The Year of Living Biblically I absolutely adored!), I needed to read this book.

Here is some of the summary from Goodreads:

As a sophomore at Brown University, Kevin Roose didn't have much contact with the Religious Right. Raised in a secular home by staunchly liberal parents, he fit right in with Brown's sweatshop-protesting, fair-trade coffee-drinking, God-ambivalent student body. So when he had a chance encounter with a group of students from Liberty University, a conservative Baptist university in Lynchburg, Virginia, he found himself staring across a massive culture gap. But rather than brush the Liberty students off, Roose decided to do something much bolder: he became one of them.

I have to give him credit. Going into it I thought it would be more biased than it actually was. He did a great job of separating himself from what he already knew and trying to understand the things he didn't. I don't know if I could have been so forgiving to some of the things he witnessed. Also I think it would be a whole different experience for a woman (not to mention the fact that I was raised Catholic).

But Roose takes a very open-minded stance, but he does this without losing himself. Many of the passages he wrote, I could feel the struggle within him between what he thought he knew about Liberty students and what he was seeing before his eyes.

If you are at all interested in religion and the perception thereof in modern American society, this is a great book, especially for the college sect. It was something I could relate to while learning a lot about a major religious demographic that I know next to nothing about.