Under the Overpass
This was a story about a man named Mike, and how he found God all over again. Though you may or may not believe in God himself, I believe this book would touch your heart regardless. Mike had been an upper class college student who was doing very well in his life. He had, money, an education, respect and overall he had a great life. He was considered a Christian and even attended a Christian collage. He had grown up in the church, and was what most people viewed as the perfect American citizen. Yet one day, while attending a church service themed of being the kind of person you say you are, he began to question himself. Was he actually being the person he said he was? Or was he just going on with life, and only focusing on what makes him happy? Is being a “good” Christian simply mean to go to a church and listen? To invest your money into different “Christian” organizations and to judge those that are different from you? Or is being the Cristian you say you are, mean to help out the people that we all ignore, and to actually rely on God, as opposed to going to him when you've ran out of choices? Those are just few of many things that Mike had began to question about his life.
He wanted to be challenged in both his life and in his faith. He wanted to know that his faith was real, to literally depend on God and God alone. As opposed to his life, job and school being the number one and God being in the background. He had never literally needed to depend on God, but he wanted to and he needed to. He had then discovered a way to do all of this, and a way to find God in a way that he would know is real. Though thought of as strange, and in many cases looked down upon he knew he had to. Mike was going to become homeless for a 5 month period. With nothing but his backpack and a sleeping bag. No food, and no money. He would attempt to quite literally live off of God. But he would not do this alone, and therefor needed to find someone just as crazy as himself. What mike wanted, was a traveling partner, someone to keep him company.
I can relate this book to my life in many ways; it was easier for me to relate to this book because were both 18 year old girls who want to live life the right way. Also I don’t want to live life trying to be like everyone else, so this was really encouraging to me. A part that helped me was the part about confidence and how important that is. Its important to have confidence in your faith because say you get in a situation you can protect your faith and stand up for what you believe. Another part that I can really apply to my life was how when people were talking about her she didn’t even beg to know. Personally whenever I hear that someone was talking about me, I really want to know what they said! This helped me to learn that why fill my brain with negativity sinful gossip, because that’s not what Jesus would do.
Touching, intriguing, depressing, these are all words that would describe the book A Prayer for Owen Meany. This story shows those characteristics by how showing how one’s life can change for better and worse, by having a good friend. One of the main characters in this book is a man by the name of John Wheelwright. John is led to religious faith by the life of his best friend Owen Meany. Owen believes in fate and he has visions of what the future holds.
The main theme of A Prayer for Owen Meany is religious faith -- specifically, the relationship between faith and doubt in a world in which there is no obvious evidence for the existence of God. John writes on the first page of the book that Owen Meany is the reason that he is a Christian, and ensuing story is presented as an explanation of the reason why. Though the plot of the novel is quite complicated, the explanation for Owen's effect on Johnny's faith is extremely simple; Owen's life is a miracle -- he has supernatural visions and dreams, he believes that he acts as God's instrument, and he has divine foresight of his own death -- and offers miraculous and almost undeniable evidence of God's existence. The basic thematic shape of the novel is that of a tension being lifted, rather than a tension being resolved; Johnny struggles throughout the book to resolve his religious faith with his skepticism and doubt, but at the novel's end he is not required to make a choice between the two extremes: Owen's miraculous death obviates the need to make a choice, because it offers evidence that banishes doubt. Yet Johnny remains troubled, because Owen's sacrificial death (he dies to save the lives of a group of Vietnamese children) seems painfully unfair. Johnny is left with the problem of accepting God's will. In the end, he invests more faith in Owen himself than he invests in God -- he receives two visitations from Owen beyond the grave -- and he concludes the novel by making Owen something of a Prince of Peace, asking God to allow Owen's resurrection and return to Earth.
I think that Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is written partially in order to convert people who have not yet fully accepted the Christian faith. O’Conner, having a strong upbringing and solid Christian background, wrote this story believing it would help people who do not have a strong moral base and Christian convictions to seriously making the necessary changes. Flannery O'Connor showed deep concern towards the value system of the youth at the time. She firmly believed in helping to guide the youth in a positive direction. Her belief that Christ was no longer a major priority to the people of her generation was a driving motivation. "A Good Man is Hard to Find" shows Flannery O'Connor's concern for the priorities and values of her time.
In the novel, The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson, the author capitalizes upon society’s expectation of a character to emphasize the struggle to achieving his goals. Ian, one of the central characters in the plot line, is heavily impacted by these expectations, which hold a substantial influence upon his decision’s regarding his future. To teenagers an expectation: a strong belief that something will happen or be the case in the future, is nothing but a restriction upon them. Ian believes he is contained within these expectations; to the point where he does not wish to follow this given path. In a time of adolescence, teenagers are compelled by the strong desire to denounce that which is expected of them; Ian is no exception to this. Societies expectations create a negative influence upon Ian’s struggles to achieve his goals. These effects are due to the following expectations: to leave Struan for a superior education, to obtain the opportunity to become successful; to strive for a medical career, since he excels at the trade already; and to settle into a happy relationship, to raise a family.
This story was about believing in god. What I got out of the story was this…if you do good things and are true to god, you get rewarded. Your reward was life. If you do bad things you die. John Howland was a good man and did good things to show god that he appreciated him. Therefor when he was in trouble and feel off that ship, god saved him and made it possible for him to hold on to something to pull himself up. That other man that didn't do things to show god that he appreciated him got sick and died.
The theme of this novel is to look at the good you do in life and how it carries over after your death. The moral of the book is; "People can make changes in their lives whenever they really want to, even right up to the end."
In life, empty, forsaken, lonely people in dire need of help put their faith toward God or a significant individual. A current example includes the 10 year old boy released by his kidnapper after singing a gospel song for hours. In Mark Twain’s The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Joan Arc, a teenage French military commander shows faith whenever she goes to battle or is about to face death. Eventually she gets captured and even though she will die she continues to keep her faith in God. By showing the effects of faith on Joan of Arc and her comrades, Mark Twain illustrates his belief that the value of an intense personal faith is important in everyone’s life.
A small church congregation comes together for Sunday evening mass. The congregation is made up of close friends and family. The novel is centered around the Grimes family. They go to a Baptist church, “Temple of the Fire Baptized” and it is a very close congregation where every member has a personal bond with one another. This fact, I believe, adds to the dynamics of the way they worship and ultimately the way they identify with God.
...fighting his feelings about not seeing Jesus. He feels that he is lying to God and himself by getting up and being saved even though he cannot see Jesus. Even though the reader knows that he truly is being saved from sin. He is doing something good for himself. Therefore, we can see that he truly does not understand the meaning of God. He is a child on the verge of adulthood. He has every right to be confused and misinterpret religion because he is learning. Religion is metaphorical and imaginative; it is what you believe it to be.
The central idea of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O'Connor deals with the struggle to change a person in a positive way through religion. A person can be easily changed if grace, properly experienced, changes one's personal qualities (O'Connor qtd. in Hendricks). Attempting to change a person through religion becomes difficult when that individual demands to witness a miracle in order to believe: “if the Misfit had been able to see the miracle of Lazarus for himself, he would have believed that Jesus was the son of God, and he would have been able to live a conventional Christian life” (Hendricks).
A Good man is Hard to Find" focuses on Christianity being filled with sin and punishment, good and evil, belief and unbelief.
... was before. It is this striving as a fireman, the pursuing of knowledge symbolized by Clarisse, and the symbolism of Jesus in the existence of books that alludes to the early stages of a Christian life. People are lost in the world until Jesus comes after them and they are initially enlightened to the scope of eternity. The following escape, death of the civilian, crossing of the river, and enthrallment with nature demonstrate the flee from the sin-filled world, death to old self, baptism, and enlightenment that a Christian goes through. Bradbury offers a very thorough look at the Christian life with a plethora of other symbolisms throughout such as the hardening of hearts, community, and the end of time according to the Bible. Bradbury shows his brilliance in this novel and whether by choice or chance, depicts Guy as a prototypical Bible hero from page one to 165.
David Foster Wallace’s “Good People,” is a very touching, powerful story about a young, unwed, Christian couple facing an extremely difficult decision and the moral and religious implications that may result. As the story begins, we are allowed into the head of Lane Dean, a college student, as he sits on a park bench with his girlfriend, Sheri. Lane and Sheri find themselves faced with an unplanned pregnancy, which causes them to battle with several moral and religious dilemmas. Both of them are devout Christians who have built their moral beliefs upon God and their religious upbringing. Although torn Sheri schedules an abortion, which weighs on Lane deeply. Lane, frozen in fear and not having the courage to freely talk to Sheri about the situation, has a conversation with her in his own head which leads him to question love, morals, religion and life. As they face this unwanted pregnancy, Lane, controlled by fear realizes that sometimes in life certain situations are too complicated to solely be answered within the rigidity of religion. People are human and regardless of how strong their faith in religion is, the battle between right and wrong will forever exist. Ultimately, Sheri decides to carry the child, which Lane assumes is a statement of Sheri’s faith in him. Inspired by her leap of faith, Lane decides to break free from the fear, muster up some courage and ultimately makes a leap of faith of his own and decides to give loving her a try. Lane’s epiphany leads to the central idea that sometimes it takes breaking the confines of fear and having faith in love or in another person to win the battle between right and wrong, which Wallace conveys beautifully.
The first sentence of the short story is “The tube journey had been one of the most desolate Mike had endured”, and in a tube journey there is often some sort of claustrophobic atmosphere. There is also a lot of foreshadowing in the first couple of sentences of the story. The fact that the author wants to tell us that Mike is going to go through a ‘journey’, and a journey is often interpreted as a ‘journey through life’, and as readers we will be expecting that there will happen a change in the plot. We are also told, that this journey is the most desolate that Mike has endured, and this loneliness that Mike is experiencing tells us something about his mental state. He is feeling lonely, because he has suffered from lack of love throughout his life. There is a dramatic change in the scenery and atmosphere of the story, when Mike chooses to go down to the basement of his house, because the whole style in which the story is written, changes. There is also some symbolism in this, because when someone goes down into their basement, that is the lowest they can go. We can say about Mike, that he has “hit rock bottom”. There is a fake-ness, to some extent, portrayed in this short story. This is very evident on the first page of the story where the author describes the house as having a “hyper-shiny elegant dining room table”. This shows us that this family looks perfect, if you look at them from the