My eyes had already welled up with tears after the first three pages of Rob Bell’s latest book, Everything is Spiritual: Who we are and What we’re doing Here. Those early pages took me to his grandmother’s front porch on a windswept farm in central Michigan, introducing me to the grief and love that shaped him and set his life on its course.
My emotional response testifies to Bell’s skill as a storyteller, which makes Everything is Spiritual a quick, even compulsive, read. At just over 300 pages it is not a short book. It is written in a flowing style more reminiscent of free verse poetry than conventional prose: there are no chapters, no subheadings, and no index. Sections (if they can be considered such) are demarcated by occasional lines of asterisks.
I found this style surprisingly captivating. It drew me inexorably in as he pondered his own creative efforts, his failures, his relationships, and through it all, his…
