Pope Awesome and Other Stories by Cari Donaldson

I used to make fun of Mike for his reading habits (in my head, of course, until now.) He had a fixed set of things that he would always chose to read and it seemed like such a crazy mix of stuff- for fiction he likes thriller/suspense/political type books and for non-fiction baseball, Mt. Everest, and WWII (but not in the Pacific, only in Europe. Think Band of Brothers.)  Lately tho, as I try to actually blog everything I read, I discover a shockingly narrow range of interests of my own. (Romance novels, paranormal young adult/romance, brain science/psychology  non-fiction/memoirs and books about religious experiences/conversion.) So last fall when Cari Donaldson's book about becoming Catholic came out I made a mental note to look for it. I broke down and bought it over Christmas. A couple weeks ago we took a little car trip and for reasons unknown I skipped all my review books and decided to read this instead. I read all but the last few pages in one day.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that not many of my blog readers (all three of you) also read a lot of Catholic parenting blogs, but if you are looking for new blogs to read I can highly recommend Clan Donaldson. Cari is down to earth, funny and realistic about having a large Catholic homeschooled family.  I can honestly say I enjoy all of her posts, except the ones about The Walking Dead which I skip because we don't currently watch it AND I don't want any spoilers just in case we start.

Cari grew up going to church because you were supposed to go to church. Not because you felt anything or because of any theological reason, but because you were supposed to go. (Which is pretty much what I did. Looking back, it seems very strange that you'd go to church every week and learn these stories and listen to a minister talk, but no one ever says THIS IS WHY. It was all just stories and lock-ins but there was never any emotion or personalization. There was no discussion of what it all meant. I think perhaps as an adult you might start to clue in on your own, but as a kid? Not so much. You wore a cross because you went to church like a good girl, duh. And to get even more off track, I hear stories of little kids bullying other kids because they don't believe in God, but I bet even those bullies don't believe anything more than "good kids go to church/Heaven".) As a young adult and college student she actively avoided Christianity. She felt a void in her life but pretty much did every possible thing to fill it with any other religion or spiritual practice.  Pope Awesome is her hilarious recounting of how she ended up joining the Catholic church and how the Church ultimately overcame all her reservations about Catholicism.  Many of her reasons for not wanting to be Catholic matched up with mine, so I found that all to be highly interesting.  I'm not interested in a theological debate here on my blog, but this was a really great book that managed to be both funny and thought provoking, while not actually feeling like she's preaching to you. You never feel like she's trying to convince the reader to also become Catholic. In my informal study of religious memoirs, I'd put this right up there in my top two or three.

Now go read her blog.

Therese, Faustina and Bernadette by Elizabeth Ficocelli

The Blurb: In Thérèse, Faustina, and Bernadette: Three Saints Who ChallengedMy Faith, Gave Me Hope, and Taught Me How to Love author, speaker, and retreat leader Elizabeth Ficocelli introduces her readers to three remarkable women saints who became not only her role models, but also her life-changing friends. Thérèse, Faustina, and Bernadette taught Ficocelli about faith, hope, and love, and showed her what true Catholic womanhood looks like.
Some of the best saint stories are not about wonder-workers, but rather the everyday saints—friends who understand the challenges of marriage and motherhood and the banalities of day-to-day life. Bestselling author Elizabeth Ficocelli discovered three such friends in Thérèse of Lisieux, Faustina of the Divine Mercy, and Bernadette of Lourdes. The witness of their lives moved Ficocelli to cultivate the virtues of faith, hope, and love as she journeyed from a successful career as a marketing executive to what she found was a more authentic, even counter-cultural Catholic womanhood. Ficocelli offers women the wisdom of these saints for their own spiritual journeys.

 

In Short: Oddly compelling, but at the same time hollow feeling.  It feels like the author is rehashing stuff she’s done before (I say that not having read anything else she’s written.)

 

The Long Version:   I am (still) fascinated with non-fiction books about other people’s spiritual journeys. In particular, I enjoy it when people convert to another religion, or in this case from non-practicing-Christian to Catholicism.  I am ALSO fascinated with Catholicism. I requested this one from NetGalley  They weren’t mothers, nor where they even wives.  That said, I could see understand that one might learn something from them. For example, Saint Therese was an example of pure love. And, in all honestly, I did see where the author is going here. I can see how you should learn from the book that You! Too! Could be sainted if you only love Jesus/everyone enough, but I absolutely could not tell how the author was relating that to her life. Her personal stories were interesting, but they didn’t relate to the specific saints that she was claiming she was learning from.

 

I also didn’t feel like the book itself delved very deep. Let’s take for example Faustine of the Divine Mercy. Ficocelli repeated “Divine Mercy” roughly every other sentence, but barely even touched on what “Divine Mercy” means. Yes, I can see, God’s Mercy. Whatever. Tell me what that really means and why I WANT that, don’t assume that I know. OR assume that I am well versed in Catholic theology and write ALL the book like I know what you’re talking about. (It’s like telling someone they have a “Federally Compliant ID card” but not explaining what that is or why it matters.) Ficocelli also continually refers to books she’s written or read about each or the saints prior to writing this one, and I couldn’t tell what new thing this book brought to the table. Sure to me it’s all new, but I hate to read something that feels like a summary of something else. Perhaps if she’d done a better job of relating her personal stories to each saint and tying it all together I would not have felt this way. I really came out of it feeling like this is a 60 minute speech she gives somewhere and she padded it out to be a 180 page book.

 

In the end, I am more interested in the lives of these saints, and exactly what made them a saint, but I didn’t feel that this book was one I’d recommend to other people.

The World's Strongest Librarian by Josh Hanagarne

I recently read a review of The World's Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette's, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family that convinced me that this was the kind of book that I loved. And, on the surface, it really is. A combination of things that fascinate me- libraries and books, faith, and personal experience with something that makes him different, in this case, Tourette Syndrome. I happened to see it on my library shelf shortly thereafter and picked it up.  I mentioned recently that I’ve been doing a large portion of my reading on the Nook lately, but I realized there was no point in having all these paper books checked out if I wasn’t going to make the effort to read them so despite reading a truly excellent e-book during the day, I started reading this one at home.

Hanagarne has an easy, conversational style. His  book started with a blog (doesn’t every memoir?) and that writing style carries over.  The book is laid out chronologically, starting with his childhood and continuing on into his marriage and late start career. This is the first thing I’ve really read about Tourette’s. My idea of it was mainly of people yelling out curse words, but of course it’s much more than that. Hanagarne tries to describe what the tics are like, and how debilitating it makes his life, but I am not 100% convinced that he does a good job of it. He spends a page saying that he can’t fill the book with every tic, that we just have to imagine adding on to what he’s already said when he mentions something new.  Much of his life in his 20s is lost to the tics, and he enters and withdraws from college a dozen times. His mission trip is cut short because of their severity.  He tells us these things, but it’s not very powerful to read them.  I feel like his descriptions are a bit lacking, that what he’s said about the tics themselves and their impact on him don’t actually match up.

I had a similar response to his writing about faith. Hanagarne is a Mormon. He does an excellent job explaining specific aspects of his faith and what it entails. He writes a very powerful scene about accepting God in college, but then he kind of backs off both in his belief and in his writing about it. When his struggles with Tourette’s and his and his wife’s inability to have a child overwhelm him, he questions God, but only in the mildest of ways. It felt to me like he’s pulling his punches, that he doesn’t want to offend any of his readers, trying to keep both the religious readers and the ones who don’t care to read about religious struggles. By the end he's honest with the reader, and I can see that perhaps the uninspired writing comes from his apathy towards God, but it made for pretty boring reading, for me.

As an adult, Hanagarne falls into weight lifting as a method of controlling his tics.  He does traditional lifting before moving onto kettleballs and then spends an entire chapter talking about this strange individual who is not a trainer nor doctor nor really a friend who offers opaque advice and waits for Hanagarne to figure it out.  Ultimately, he learns that he can control his tics with breathing (until he can't), but the book really bogs down while he’s figuring it out. He could have cut out 90% of the chapter about the other guy and not lost a thing. I find his dedication to the task remarkably impressive, as well as his recall of the process (I’m guessing the blog helps), but he didn’t need to relive entire conversations.

As a whole, I found the book to be mild. Mildly interesting, mildly informative, mildly forgettable. That said- I checked out his blog while writing this, and find it to be much more interesting. In fact, it's the first new addition I've made to Feedly, now that Google Reader is gone.

Devotion by Dani Shapiro

 
As mid-life approaches for Dani Shapiro, she starts to struggle with anxiety about her faith and her life. Is this all there is? Clean house, do work, send email? What is the bigger picture, or is there a bigger picture? Having been raised in a devout Jewish household but no longer practicing, Shapiro dedicates herself to finding what she really believes.

 "The whole world is a lesson in what's true," she said. "Everyone is struggling. Life is difficult for everybody. And we all die in the end. So how to deal with it?" -p35

Devotion: A Memoir  is written in a very free flowing style. There are chapter breaks, if you can call them that, of only a page at times. Shapiro weaves together bits from her daily life, her struggle with her parents before their deaths, her son's life-threatening illness as an infant, and her quest to find her place spiritually.   The comparison to Eat, Pray, Love  would not have been lost on me, even if Shapiro herself did not bring it up. What keeps this from being the same book (other than the obvious of a different author) is that Shapiro does her quest from home. She doesn't take a year off her life to search for meaning, she looks as she lives.

I believe that I have mentioned in the past that I am not a religious person, but I really enjoy reading about religion and other people's search for faith and meaning. I believe that I am a spiritual person, and that there are a lot of things to gain from the ritual (there's that ritual I love again!) of regular religious practice. I find little bits of a lot of religions appeal to me quite a bit and I suspect that were I to take upon a quest like Shapiro's that I might find something meaningful to myself.  Just in reading this book I found something that really appeals to me- Shapiro attends a local retreat and learns a short mantra to think during meditation. This is taught to her by Sylvia Boorstein and begins as such (p.36):

May I feel protected and safe.
May I feel contented and pleased.
May my physical body support me with strength.
May my life unfold smoothly with ease.

The idea was to silently repeat the phrases again and again, at first focusing on ourselves, but then eventually directing the phrases to others.

Eventually, Shapiro and Boorsteing with both shorten this to be:

May I be safe
May I be happy
May I be strong
May I live with ease

That is what I'll be taking from Devotion. A bit of a rhythm to help find some calm in my mind. My situation isn't Shapiro's. I'm not full of anxiety and despair, but my life is full of chaos and stress. If I could learn to sit for even 15 minutes a day (yeah, I'm laughing too) and blank out everything else? Well, the very idea is appealing to me.

I'm not sure if Shapiro finds what she is looking for, but I enjoyed reading about her journey. She's honest about her struggle and the causes of it, and the inability to fully relax.  It's a very personal story, one that opens what's in her heart up to all of us. Shapiro doesn't claim to know the answers and she's honest about the questions she's asking.  The book has definitely made my TBR list grow as I added most of her recommended reading to my list. (I even own a couple of them, packed away in the garage.)

This is the kind of memoir that I like best, and I'm thankful to Trish of TLC book tours for sending it to me. For more information you can find the author online:

* website
* blog, Moments of Being
* Facebook
* Twitter: @DanijShapiro

The author is also available to talk to your book club via Skype. (Oh that I had a book club!)

You can see more reviews of this one on the following blog stops:

Tuesday, February 8th: Chefdruck Musings
Wednesday, February 9th: Kelly’s Lucky You!
Thursday, February 10th: Book Club Classics!
Monday, February 14th: {Mis}Adventures of an Army Wife
Tuesday, February 15th: Books Lists Life
Wednesday, February 16th: nomadreader
Tuesday, February 22nd: Coffee and a Book Chick
Wednesday, February 23rd: Colloquium
Thursday, February 24th: The 3 R’s: Reading, ‘Riting, and Randomness
Friday, February 25th: Books in the City
Monday, February 28th: English Major’s Junk Food
Tuesday, March 1st: she reads and reads
Tuesday, March 1st: The House of the Seven Tails
Wednesday, March 2nd: Boarding in My Forties
Thursday, March 3rd: Man of La Book

 



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1. The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A. J. Jacobs falls squarely into that category of memoirs/ non-fiction that I like best.  I've seen the term "stunt memoir" used to perfectly describe this type of book and would definitely apply it to this one. Jacobs has decided to follow ALL of the rules in the Bible as literally as possible (bet you couldn't figure that out from the title). He spends the first 9 months of his year with the Old Testament before finishing up in the New.

What did I think? Well, I enjoyed it and I went looking for Jacob's other books, but it took me a very long time to finish it up, I'm talking Months.  I'd put it down and walk away and there was nothing about it that compelled me to pick it back up.

Jacobs spends  a lot of time talking about how this experiment has changed his view of religion and I think that was the most interesting part, to me. He starts off the book as a non-believer of Jewish descent, but as the book goes on he has moments of pure belief. He is as startled by this as you would expect and I enjoyed his honestly.   In addition to deciphering the rules on his own, he consults with quite a few other religious scholars and the differing view on things is also quite interesting. Overall a good book, but not one of my favorites for the year.


How do you feel about "stunt memoirs"? Do you have a favorite? Do you prefer straight biographies? Do you think that writers can be completely honest when they know they are doing a trick for a book? Or do you think they probably fudge a bit to sound better? (Hello, James Frey.)

If you're interested in other books about personal religious experience, I also read and enjoyed:

Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture by Daniel Radosh (my review)
The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew-- Three Women Search for Understanding by Idliby, Oliver and Warner (my review)
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert (pre-blog)

Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life by Lauren Winner (also pre-blog)


You can find AJ Jacobs online here, but it doesn't look like he updates very often.


The Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs
Simon & Schuster
2008
416 pages

PS. I decided to number my 2010 reads in the subject line of the post. I like the idea that I'll be able to tell at a glance where I am. 



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Rapture Ready by Daniel Radosh

Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture by Daniel Radosh is pretty much exactly what you would expect from the title. Radosh is a secular Jew who becomes fascinated by the different aspects of Christian pop culture and spends some time exploring it. I first heard about the book in this post by Stephanie at Open Mind, Insert Book. Stephanie's review made me look and see if my library carried the book, which the did. I've since heard from several other trusted readers that they really enjoyed it. Looks like Stephanie has good taste!

Ok, enough of that, what's the book about? It's about Christian music, Christian fiction, Christian movies, superheros, wrestling (yes, really) and other forms of entertainment. Radosh is intent on figuring out just what makes some of them successful and some not. He goes to great pains to talk to artists and producers of various media to see if he can figure out their motivation. He explains the different tactics and beliefs- for example, is it Christian music because you sing about God, or is it Christian music because you yourself are Christian? For the most part he manages to present a fair, if skeptical, view of beliefs that are not his own. There were both moments that made me think about faith and what it means to me and moments where I felt he was making fun of the true believers. (And of the Left Behind series.) It was a fascinating book and one I'd recommend to anyone who enjoys reading about faith and/or enjoys memoirs/ non-fiction where the author embarks on a quest (think The Year of Living Biblically, Bonk, or Eat, Pray, Love.)

Most of the book is fairly light hearted and avoids big political agendas. In the very last chapter Radosh makes the point that by maintaining that Christian pop culture as something different, something to be kept separate, that we make it harder for Christians to come to the liberal side of thinking. That the secular world helps enforce the split between liberals and conservative Christians. Here, let him tell you, from page 306:

Our ignorance of Christian culture not only causes us to misunderstand, misinterpret, and mis judge our Christian neighbors, it also precludes our effectively challenging those aspects of Christian culture that may be properly judged as offensive. To the extent that we hope to change Christian culture, we have to understand and appreciate it. Think about the situation in reverse: Is there anything more ridiculous than a fundamentalist's rant about a TV show he's never seen?

Uh, Harry Potter, anyone?

I don't know if this makes me more likely to read Christian fiction, but it does make me think more open-mindedly (is that a word?) about it.

Do you read Christian fiction? What authors do you enjoy that you don't think would turn off a non-Christian? What about music? Are there any artists who inspire you without preaching? Have you attended a Passion Play? For years there was a permanent play in local Spearfish SD, called the Black Hills Passion Play, but it closed a year ago. If you haven't already weighed in on my Bible question, inspired by this book, please stop by and do so!


Rapture Ready by Daniel Radosh
Scribner
2008
310 pages

So, tell me about your Bible.

Let me preface this by saying that I am not a religious person. I enjoy reading about other people's path to faith and about the little quirks and facts about various religions, but I am not personally religious. I enjoyed Eat, Pray, Love and Girl Meets God. I have The Year of Living Biblically in my TBR, along with Karen Armstrong's Through the Narrow Gate and Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. I am currently reading Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Cultureby Daniel Radosh, because of Stephanie at Open Mind, Insert Book's review.

I have just finished reading a fascinating chapter about the various types of Bibles currently on the market and it makes me curious about what Bible most people choose, and why they chose that specific one. Radosh quotes a statistic that most people have FOUR Bibles in their home (I'm too lazy to go look up his source, sorry.) I know that we have more than one, though I couldn't tell you just how many.

I don't want to turn this into a topic about religion itself, but I am curious: what do you think about the Bibles aimed at specific niches? There's the Teen Study Bible, New International Men's Devotional Bible, Bibles for women... well, you get the idea. I remember several reviews last year (I think) about a Bible in magazine format. This doesn't even address the issue of things like devotionals and study guildes and books about finding your faith. I'm talking the Holy Book itself. Do you have more than one Bible? Do you actively use/read/study them all? Do you have different Bibles for different purposes (as the chapter claims)? (For example; one for practical application, one for historical reading, one for children, one that highlights God's promises and one that translates it into Klingon.) Do men and women really need separate Bibles? I'm really curious what you think, so please tell me!

(PS. This also makes me want to ask how many dictionaries you have, but that might take us off topic.)

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

A Thousand Splendid Suns is possibly the best book I'll read this year. (The Book Thief was also excellent, it's a close race between them at this point.) ATSS is the story of Mariam and Laila, two women who live in Afghanistan from the early 70s or so until almost present times. Laila was born in 1977, making her two years younger than I am, which figured heavily in my reaction to the story. Their story is set against the very real political actions of the times- Soviet invasion, Mujahideens, the Taliban. I admit, this is not an area of politics that I know much about. My husband was nice enough to give me mini history lessons as the need arose.

This book was so emotionally hard for me. It took me something like three weeks to read it. I kept reaching points where I had to stop for days to recover my equilibrium. I finally emailed someone who had read it and forced her to tell me that it ended well. (That would be Trish, of Trish's Reading Nook. Her review is here.) The book, though it is fiction, seemed so very real to me. Mariam and Laila are so well done, so different and so believable. I kept saying to myself, "this can't be happening, it can't, it can't!" My mind could not comprehend that in 1994 when the Taliban invaded and women had to be covered in burqas, and couldn't leave home without a man, that I was 19 years old and in college. I had my own apartment. I was wearing swimsuits in mixed company! It was fiction, but it was so real. I cried so many times. Two points were worse than others (spoilers here. PLEASE come talk to me about it if you've read it! Shawna, if you're reading this DO NOT go read them!)

A Thousand Splendid Suns was beautiful and horrifying. It affected me more than any book ever has, I think. I felt sick while reading it. It was the first time that I have ever wanted very very badly to read the ending first. I didn't, but I really wanted to.

Trish recommended that I read The Storyteller's Daughter by Saira Shah and I picked that up at the library today. That one is non-fiction, also about Afghanistan. I also have two books to follow up The Faith Club with that deal with Christianity, Judaism and Islam (Peace Be Upon You by Zachary Karabell and The History of God by Karen Armstrong.) Holy Blood, Holy Grail has come up in conversation lately. I realize I am combining two topics- religion and oppression, but it all blends together for me. I am not at all sure when I'll get to these, what with all the challenges I'm in for and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows being less than a week away, but I am certainly all fired up for it. You can bet I'll be paying closer attention to the news now, and trying to imagine myself in their shoes. This was a very good book, I'll be recommending that everyone I know read it.

(This is my first book for the Saturday Review of Books Challenge.)

Monday Math. On Wednesday.

Yeah yeah. I'm behind.

Monday's Math- 93 books in (this is the last one), 38 books read, 55 books behind. I'm not reading so much this week, because I have a new obsession. Remember a few days ago when I posted about my lovely tote bags? Well I've made a few more since then. And then I SOLD one. (this one) For actual real cash money. They kind you can SPEND ON BOOKS. Suddenly, visions of retirement swam through my head, and it became an obsession. So I opened a shop on Etsy. Ok, so there's only one bag up for sale right now, but you should see my sewing room! There will be more, soon. I even added it to my side bar, see?

I returned two books to the library UNREAD yesterday. The first was Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth- the next Simon R Green Nightside book for me. I just didn't ever get to it and couldn't renew it again. I'll definately go back for it later this summer.

The second was Wisdom Walk: Nine Practices for Creating Peace and Balance from the World's Spiritual Traditions by Sage Bennet. Here's the summary:

For ordained minister Bennett, familiarity breeds wisdom. She examines eight of
the world's great faith traditions, mining them for transcendent practices and
forms applicable to any spiritual discipline. Prior to a culminating multifaith
chapter on service, Bennett explores Hinduism's home altars; Buddhism's
meditation practices; Islam's rewards of surrendering in a daily cascade of
prayers; Judaism's observance of the Sabbath to keep relationships with friends
and family intact; Christianity's rich legacy of forgiveness; Native American
spirituality's nature insights; Taoism's trust in the processes of life; and New
Thought's application of "visioning" to discern calling and course. Each chapter
uses broad brush strokes to cover the elements of each tradition, as well as the
author's running personal narrative to reveal how this approach has unfolded in
her own life and teaching. Bennett's thrust is always on seeing how other
traditions can support, not erode or supplant, an existing faith.

Sounds like something I'd like! But something about the author's writing style kept putting me off, and I never got it read. I finally couldn't renew it any longer and so took it back. I'll probably try it again in the future.

Still reading A Thousand Splendid Suns at home, and have Anne of Green Gables in my bag. I hope to actually READ something at some point soon.

The Faith Club

The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew- Three Women Search for Understanding by Ranya Idliby, Suzanne Oliver, and Priscilla Warner.

After September 11th, Ranya Idliby was faced with questions about their faith and death from her children. Ranya and her children are Muslim and live in New York where they were confronted often by the persistent stereotypes of Muslims and terrorism. She was inspired to seek out a Christian (Oliver) and a Jew (Warner) to write a children's book about the three religions and hopefully to reassure her kids (and others) that Islam wasn't scary and that the three religions were about the same original God.

What followed was several years of regular meetings and open discussion about each woman's beliefs and the background for each religion. Each chapter is divided into sections written by each woman on their take on the discussions, and there are small sections taken from recordings of their conversations. Each one took notes, and this book is the result.

I am not a religious person, but am drawn to books like this one. I am fascinated by the path people take to God and how they express it in their lives. This book starts off with some stereotypes and misunderstanding and the project almost ends before it starts. They stick with it and through some very open discussion are able to continue. Each chapter addresses a different area of faith (prayer, rituals, death, etc.) I learned quite a lot that I didn't know about all three, and how they interact with each other. I learned that some of my assumptions about Islam are completely wrong. The parts about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict were the best, as it was finally written in terms I could understand. I've read about it before, but it's always been very political, this made it very personal and I could really understand both sides.

I have a copy of The History of God: The 4,000 year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by Karen Armstrong on my shelf and hope to eventually get it read. I think it would be a nice follow up to this much more casual approach. I'm going to give The Faith Club a 4/5 because it lost steam for me at the end. Near the end the women have a strong relationship with each other and the last chapter is about their (new and improved) relationship with each respective religion. It becomes the kind of religious book that I don't like, but that many people love. This failing is due to my own beliefs, not the book, so if you're into that kinda thing, you'll love it.

I marked several passages in the book to mention here. The only one I'm going to post is from near the end, and is Suzanne responding to a question about Christian values vs. Jewish values. This is on page 289 of my copy, and is in one of Priscilla's sections.

"They're the same!" Suzanne said in her honest, straightforward way. "But I don't think everyone recognizes that. They confuse social values with Christian values. Or they see that our religious practices are different, so they assume our moral values are different, too. We should all be taught early on that our religions boil down to one morality: to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself."