The German's Silly Sermon

Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I love Kurt Vonnegut!!

I got this from the library not realizing that it was non-fiction and a sort of autobiographical collage (kind of like a blog before they existed). So it wasn't a tight, neat, clever story like Cat's Cradle, but I couldn't help totally loving this guy's writing, and much of his perspective on the world.

Some theological highlights:

-"I don't think anybody ever dreaded hell as much as most of us dread the contempt of our fellowmen. Under our new and heartfelt moral code, we might be able to horrify would-be evildoers with just that: the contempt of their fellowmen. For that contempt to be effective, though, we would need cohesive communities, which are about as common as bald eagles these days."

-"The nuclear family doesn't provide nearly enough companionship."

-"Be warned: if you allow yourself to see dignity in someone, you have doomed yourself to wanting to understand and help whoever it is."

-"It seems to me that the most universal revolutionary wish now or ever is a wish for heaven, a wish by a human being to be honored by angels for something other than beauty or usefulness."

For someone who calls himself at various times an atheist, a Unitarian,a skeptical Free Thinker, and a Christ-loving agnostic, Vonnegut is pretty spot-on with much that I love in Christianity. He named his book "Palm Sunday" and finished it with a sermon. He quotes Bertrand Russell and Jesus in the same breath. And it's a really, really refreshing breath that I find myself never able to get enough of.

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