The shack

I've been working on lectures all day today and my brain is mush. I prepared two lectures for Intro to Old Testament and one for Pentateuch. My goal this Reading and Research week has been to finish the lecture prep for the remainder of the semester, so that I can focus on other projects through October (mainly the Jeremiah commentary project).

I am about to turn off the computer for the evening (it's 7:32 PM, early shut-off for me), but I wanted to post about getting ready to read The shack, a novel that has gained some notoriety of late. I borrowed it from a friend and I am a few pages in already. It's interesting, seemingly having to do with theodicy and dark nights of the soul, in the former of which I'm interested as a scholar and the latter of which I myself experienced a few years back. When a book gets this much hype in the popular press, I generally try to avoid it on principle. It took me several years to read The DaVinci Code, for example, although I almost picked it up when it was first published and before all the hoopla started. I hadn't heard of The shack until this same friend asked me about it. He says he's interested to hear what I might have to say about it. To be honest, so am I.