{"id":2530,"date":"2019-07-21T13:13:32","date_gmt":"2019-07-21T20:13:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikebellah.com\/?p=2530"},"modified":"2019-07-21T17:04:10","modified_gmt":"2019-07-22T00:04:10","slug":"not-another-little-book-on-christianity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/?p=2530","title":{"rendered":"Not Another Little Book on Christianity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mikebellah.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/mb_color_bestyearsblog-150x150121.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-2328\" src=\"http:\/\/mikebellah.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/mb_color_bestyearsblog-150x150121.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a>A friend wanted to know if I was writing a Christian book on retirement.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNo,\u201d was my first answer; then, \u201cwell, sort of.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I did not set out to write a theology of retirement. That is, I didn\u2019t scour the Bible to see what the Scriptures said about the concept (the word isn\u2019t used at all) or about aging in general (many passages address this). Such a work might be useful (I\u2019d read it), but it wasn\u2019t what I wanted to do.<\/p>\n<p>I was interested in something C. S. Lewis had said: \u201cWhat we want,\u201d wrote Lewis, \u201cis not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects\u2014with their Christianity latent.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Lewis wanted these books to be \u201cthe best work on the market\u201d and, thus, more effective in proclaiming the truths of Christianity (especially to those who are uninterested) than \u201cany direct apologetic work.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So that\u2019s what I tried to do\u2014write the best book on retirement I could\u2014without preplanned pitches for my faith. \u201cLatent\u201d Christianity, I believe, is what happens when your passion and world view slip unobtrusively into your writing because\u2014well, because you can\u2019t help it, because you are who you are.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I hope that has happened in this work, but I\u2019m not sure I stayed \u201clatent.\u201d Any secular retirement book that quotes C. S. Lewis (more than once) is a bit suspect. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A friend wanted to know if I was writing a Christian book on retirement. \u201cNo,\u201d was my first answer; then, \u201cwell, sort of.\u201d I did not set out to write a theology of retirement. That is, I didn\u2019t scour the Bible to see what the Scriptures said about the concept (the word isn\u2019t used at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2530"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2532,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2530\/revisions\/2532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}