"The Great Wall of China and the Salton Sea" (Russell Rathbun)

TITLE: The Great Wall of China and the Salton Sea: Monuments, Missteps, and the Audacity of Ambition
AUTHOR: Russell Rathbun
PUBLISHER: Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017, (198 pages).

I know about the Great Wall of China. I have read about astronauts saying that the only visible man-made object from space is the Great Wall. What about the Salton Sea? What is the Salton Sea? What makes these two objects so fascinating for the author? He sums it up as follows:

"There are only two man-made objects you can see from outer space. One is the Great Wall of China, and the other is the Salton Sea. One is the result of the work of hundreds of thousands of laborers over two thousand years, and the other is the result of a gigantic mistake."

For over twenty years, these sentences have occupied the author's mind. The key thought revolves around God's creation and man's folly. God creates man and desires for him to have fellowship, but man bungled it big time. In the process, there is alienation. There is lostness. There is illusion. There are big messes throughout history, and messes that continue to occur. Both the Great Wall of China and the state of the Salton Sea were man-made. The Great Wall was built to prevent invaders from entering China. The Salton Sea was created by accident. The Salton Sea was a result of a failure of a project that tried to irrigate desert lands by re-directing water from the Colorado River. Both failed to achieve the original purposes. Looking from space, while both man-made structures and accidents are visible from the sky, they symbolize the mistakes and vulnerabilities of human intelligence. Moving forward, Rathbun poses a modern dilemma about our technological world: Have we allowed technology to reform us into an image we do not yet recognize? Does the Digital Revolution offer more hype than promise? Are we re-inventing the wheel of disaster?

"Post-Traumatic Church syndrome" (Reba Riley)

TITLE: Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome: A Memoir of Humor and Healing
AUTHOR: Reba Riley
PUBLISHER: New York, NY: Howard Books, 2015, (368 pages).

Disappointment with Church? Longing for an alternative to searching for "Godiverse"? According to author Reba Riley, she thinks that there is a God bigger than the one defined by her home Church, and that there is a bigger form of spirituality that does not leave her feeling "hollow inside" amid all the religious talk. The title, PTCS reflects her own need for spiritual recovery after getting disillusioned with "narrow religion." Her solution: Try 30 different religions or expressions of faith and spirituality before she turns 30. Feeling broken and exhausted, she takes on this spiritual project of hers and begins with Word Alive, a megachurch who has a new pastor change its name to "The Palms" which is known for its Pentecostalism fundamentalist practices. After experiencing the different physical expressions of verbal pronouncements and how people were "felled" by the Spirit, she feels more "Word Dead" than the former name of the Church. It even causes her to throw out her own list of "thirty by thirty." Her book club friend helps her to get back on track with a journal of repairing one's own spirituality: "Finding Your Own North Star." While it didn't exactly spring her back into a New Age spirituality, it did get her back on track to other spiritual expressions, including other forms of Christianity. She tries "Tenth Avenue Baptist," which really engages them in a warm and friendly fellowship.