Hybrids

After a number of successful books on atheism in the past few years, I wonder if we're not seeing something new--books from non-believers who take a more sympathetic look at religion. Okay, I only have two examples, but one more and we can officially declare a trend.

First you got William Lobdell's Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace. Lobdell, the former religion writer for the LA Times, has a personal story of finding and then losing religion that's probably more common than most people think.

Then there's Kevin Roose's book The Unlikely Disciple. He was an English major at Brown who went undercover for a semester at Liberty University and lived to write about it. Though he did not share the religious or social views promoted there, he found the students and their beliefs more complex than the caricature he was used to.

I'm reminded of an article I read years ago in Spy magazine, which had a line that made me laugh out loud. One of their writers attended student orientation weekend at Liberty and wrote "my two roommates, Shlomo and Mustafa Muhammad (not their real names)...."