This week, The Happy Rant: Wandering To and Fro Through Some Things That Don’t Matter All That Much (and a Few That Really Do), the book I co-authored with Ronnie Martin and Ted Kluck, released from Harvest House Publishers. It is a collection of written conversations about topics ranging from personality tests to money to manhood. Ronnie, Ted, and I have co-hosted The Happy Rant podcast for eight years, so we have some rapport, but we’ve never written together. Turns out it was a blast.
In each chapter Ted, the book host, nee podcast host, kicks off the topic with a story or an opinion or a list of thoughts then we riff. We are irreverent and sarcastic. We aspire to be iconoclastic and insightful. We attempt to be self-effacing and humorous. And we do our best to be thoughtful throughout. Most of all we take very little seriously except Jesus and our faith in Him. Everything and everyone else, including ourselves, is on the firing line for jokes, ribbing, satire, and analysis.
We wrote this book for the sheer fun of it, the same reason we do the podcast. But we’ve learned over the years that fun with a dose of thoughtfulness is good medicine. Shooting some sacred cows, tipping some altars, and burning poking some idols in the eye with humor is good for us. Learning to laugh at our goofy church culture is good for us. It seems all too rare in the church world even though it doesn’t come at the expense of honoring Jesus. So our hope is that this book will make readers laugh, make them talk back, make them argue with the pages, make them think a little, and lift some spirits. And hopefully we give some uptight evangelicals permission to laugh and take things a little less seriously.
If you read it, we would be much obliged if you would share about it on social media and rate/review it (even if you hate it) on Amazon/Goodreads/etc. There is no podcast or publishing without listeners and readers, so thank you!
