Appropriately enough, I stumbled accidentally onto Accidental Saints: Finding God in all the wrong people by Nadia Bolz-Weber. I have a thing I do when I want a type of book but don’t know what specifically–I look up a similar book in the library catalog, find that shelf, and see what else is nearby. That brought me to Accidental Saints, and after I loved that one, I went backwards and read Nadia’s first book, Pastrix.
Nadia is a Lutheran pastor. She is also unconventional, heavily tattooed, honest about her flaws and kind of brilliant. Pastrix tells Nadia’s story, from early days as a sarcastic, alcoholic stand-up comic, to finding her faith in God (with a side-trip into Wiccan goddess worship before becoming Lutheran–she doesn’t find the two in contradiction), to founding her church, the House for All Sinners and Saints. Accidental Saints tells the story of her church, sharing about some of the individuals there and how she has learned from them. They’re known as the inclusive church for the people who don’t look churchy–drag queens, prostitutes, former (?) con artists, cynics and alcoholics.
Nadia is funny, insightful, inclusive and somehow both deeply reverent and deeply irreverent at the same time. (Maybe it’s a question of what’s considered irreverence.) I think Nadia speaks to me where I live because she, like many authors I gravitate to, is another driven, sometimes self-critical woman. She also shares a concept of God that really resonated with me, one focused on love, compassion (the core of my personal morality), and acceptance. Continue reading
Remember when I listened to the 
What if the world you and I are living in is, in fact, a dystopia? That could (tragically) be the beginning of a review of a nonfiction book, but instead today I’m talking about another parallel universe book: All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai. What if the world we think is real is actually the product of meddling with time travel, and we’re living in the universe gone wrong?
