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Wow! What a great read! This is a series of essays, each one full of thought-provoking ideas that I wish were much more the norm in our talks at church and our discussions. A lot of it really resonated for me and is where I have landed in my own faith struggles. I’ll just share a few quotes to whet the appetite, but I heartily recommend this book to any and all. On Work: “Uncouple your desire to be loved from your desire to be great. . . . if you try to secure God’s love through your excellence then, no matter how excellent your work, you will fail. . . Your pursuit of excellence will, ironically, hollow out your faith and, absent this trust, you will become more and more doubtful and afraid. The more desperately “worthy” of love you style yourself, the deader your faith in its graciousness will become. . . Work chained to its outcome is misery.” On Sin: “Sin depends not just on your actions but on the story you use those actions to tell. . . . Life is full of stories, but life is not a story. God doesn’t love your story; he loves you. . . . Everyone knows that little blush of pleasure that comes when you feel like your life and your story match. And I’m sure you know the pinch of disappointment that follows when you feel like your life hasn’t measured up. . . . The coat seemed like exactly the kind of prop I needed to tell myself a more convincing story. And a more convincing story seemed like exactly what I needed to better protect me. That coat was just one of the many, many stories in which I’ve tried to hide. . . . Even if you feel guilty about how you’ve hurt others, that guilt remains problematic because your guilt is about you and about how you didn’t measure up to your story. Guilt recognizes your story’s poor fit and then still demands that life measure up. It recognizes that your shoes are too small and too tight and then blames your feet for their size. Repentance is not about shaving down your toes; it’s about taking off your shoes.” On Faith: “The fashionable line is that faith is a poor man’s substitute for knowledge. When you lack good evidence and sound reason, but you still want to say something is true, you need “faith.” On this account, faith is a kind of admirably earnest wishful thinking . . . spiritual progress is measured by your willful commitment to imposing on life a religious-sounding version of your story about how things should be. This account of faith is appealing to outsiders because it lets them box up religion as a curio. But it’s also often appealing to religious people because this version of faith doesn’t press us to confess how deep sin goes. . . . Faith is not the same thing as common sense. It may be that, for you, God’s reality is so natural and so consonant with common sense that you’ve never doubted it and don’t have to work at believing it . . . . it may be true that, for you, the existence of God is so unlikely and runs so counter to common sense that even an earnest kind of wishful thinking is more than you can credibly muster . . . . what seems like common sense–what seems so sensible because it’s so conveniently complicit with your stories–should itself regularly come in for a healthy does of skepticism.” and “Faith is more like being faithful to your husband or wife than it is like believing in magic.” and “A testimony is a promise to stay. . . . A testimony doesn’t just reflect what someone else has already decided, it is a declaration that, in the face of uncertainty, you have made a decision.” Good Stuff! I almost bought this the other day. I think I’ll go through with it. Thanks for the quotes. Very good to read stuff like this. We need more of it. very cool. I enjoyed reading your post. Thanks for sharing. I know this thread is a bit old, but I REALLY enjoyed this book(let). I even gave a bishopric’s 5th Sunday lesson to all the youth on it a earlier this year. I have listened to few Adam Miller podcasts and I find I like his books even better. He even commented on one, “I am a philosopher, so I take simple things and make them complex” and on his podcasts I have a harder time following exactly what he is saying. I have a masters, but clearly not in philosophy! But this book was perfect and I understood almost every single bit (I think?). Maybe it is because he is “writing down” to the youth that I get it! 
I love the emphasis on “stories” we try to share our ideas about our life with others. Recognizing life and the story we tell are not the same thing is important to finding peace, I believe. Very Ekhart Tolle-ish. Quote:Guilt recognizes your story’s poor fit and then still demands that life measure up. It recognizes that your shoes are too small and too tight and then blames your feet for their size. Repentance is not about shaving down your toes; it’s about taking off your shoes.”
I liked this part, particularly. Good stuff!
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