Jesus For President: A Review

Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals by Shane Claiborne

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
If you have read Shane's first book you are getting much of the same. The positive of the book is it did make me ask about how I am using my time and finances. How do I look at the war? Treat the poor? etc. It has convicted me in a good sense and I am glad about that. Hopefully it'll reform my heart closer to God's will.



Now for the negative. A lot of his ideas to solve problems for helping the poor, to me, don't sound like they are really helping the poor. In creating a very temporary fix that in the long run does them no good. Feeding the poor is good. In my mind getting them off the streets for good whether through drug councelling, job placement, etc. is even better. They hand free pizza out to the homeless so they can continue to live on the street. That just seems wrong to me. Sure they got to feed them, but at the end of the day they are still homeless without prospects. Hey, I might be wrong. Plus there seems to be a lot of patting themselves on the back, but not nearly as much on their own backs. The desing of the book is great, but all the added little tidbits were a tad destracting. All in all it was a decent book. I'd have given it three stars, but the negative outweighed the positive. It still did teach me a few things.


View all my reviews.

Movie Review: The Valet

Every so often I'll go on the spur of the moment to see a movie without knowing anything about it. This is kind of risky because without the aid of reviews (which can be total crap at times) they can at least give you an idea of what the movie is about. This time I chose The Valet for no other reason, but because it happened to be playing when I got there and I didn't feel like waiting an hour for the next movie of my choice to start playing. I knew nothing about this film, not it's premise, not whether it was a comedy or drama, nothing. I didn't even know it was a French until I looked at a synapse of the movie. I felt optimistic since I had seen other french films before and gotten lucky. Ok, so here I am watching a movie having shelled out five bucks for something I had no preconceptions about. Consider all the crappy movies coming out that I can't bring myself to pay even matinee price for I woudl have been more than willing to pay full price to see The Valet. Though it wasn't a laugh out loud comedy I did find myself smiling through most of the film enjoying the good fortunes of the characters who deserved good things in their lives, and the change of heart from the ones who needed to come around. The story is about a married rich business man who is having an affair with a famous super model. A photographer happens to take a picture of the two as they are leaving a hotel along with the valet who just happened to be walking by them. In order to protect his marriage the business man convinces the model and the valet to live together in order to fool the news papers and his wife. In spite of all the infidelity the movie offers as a message that fidelity and true love are much better than a cheap fling. I was pleased with this movie. As I walked out the few people who were in the theater all had the same satisfied grin on their face. We didn't bust out laughing, it wasn't slap stick or raucous, but the corny idea of a feel good comedy.