This is the Gospel of John (in a bad translation, unlike the one I reviewed recently in this space) interleaved with some stories from people who were in the pornography industry, or were strippers, or were in the sex trade--and the way the book implicitly conflates those things is one of its deeply problematic aspects, and so, I hate to say it, is the banality of some of the stories--although I'm perfectly willing to chalk that up to my superattenuated English-studentness, and assume that some people are still capable of being touched by people's stories-in-their-own-word without resisting all their hamfisted efforts to use rhetoric and composition and intentionality to affect you with their real and awful pain. And it's weird, I pushed back hard against that, but not against the preachy bits at the beginning, which had a direct perceptiveness that seemed real and simple and sincere to me. "You are loved. And there is nothing you can do to change that."


And hey, here's a thing, and it won't come as a surprise to all you Christians prolly but it did to me, and a good one: God didn't send his son to die on the cross to make up for our sins to him: he sent him to die to make up to to ourselves. You've done bad, and you feel like you are bad, and you deserve to die. You don't want to, but in a way you do, to show that you're sorry. But you don't need to--Jesus already died for you. And if you wanna feel guilty for that too, go ahead--Jesus' death relieves you of guilt for Jesus' death. It may be ersatz theology, and it's my interpretation not the book's, but it cuts through that weird thing where God loved us so much he redeemed us from a cruel God who demanded restitution for our sins. And it cuts through it in what I think is an uncommonly beautiful way. ( )