The prodigal

Frank Schaeffer is the prodigal son of Francis Schaeffer, the well known fundamentalist leader, rumoured founder of the Christian right and real founder of L'Abri. Frank eventually broke with his father's views and became an unsuccessful Hollywood director and moderately successful author of both fiction and non-fiction. "Patience with God" is a kind of summary of his life and current views.

The book is meandering and very uneven. Sometimes, the prodigal says interesting things, but most of the chapters contain gossip about himself, his parents and Christopher Hitchens. Add to that boring preaching of an almost agnostic kind, a misplaced chapter eulogizing the U.S. Marines and a rather idiosyncratic interpretation of Eastern Orthodoxy, and you end up with "Patience with God". But OK, I admit that the gossip about Hitchens was quite revealing. A veritable guilty pleasure!

Frank Schaeffer's own ideas are hard to pin down, and he seems to like it that way. Nominally a convert to the Greek Orthodox Church, Frank's religious opinions sound rather like a blend of liberal Christianity (except on the abortion issue), vague New Age notions about cosmic evolutionism, and agnosticism. He endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and is considered an "Obama Republican" by Wikipedia.

I'm not a fundie either, but I find it more difficult than Frank to "live with paradox". Perhaps that's why I *want* to pin him down, even pidgeon-hole him. And perhaps that's also why I didn't really like his book. For the effort, however, I'll give it three stars.