A.J. Jacobs, a writer and the editor of Esquire magazine, grew up in a non-practicing Jewish family. For this, his second non-fiction book project, he decided to live a religious life for an entire year to see what would happen. He read the Bible and took note of every passage that acted as a command or rule and set out to live by these rules, seeking to determine whether such legalistic living does have any unforeseen positive effects on the life of a man while also having his own preconceived bias that living by such a legalistic degree of religiosity is inherently ludicrous (a standpoint with which I do not disagree; it is a basic tenet of most Christian denominations that salvation comes through faith, not works, whereas Catholicism, some fundamentalist denominations, and Judaism believe that varying degrees of works are required).

For the first eight months, Jacobs lived only by the old Jewish laws presented in the Old Testament, and only spent the last four months of his year augmenting those laws with the directives found in the New Testament.

Having been a Christian all my life, it was hard not to read this book with all sorts of biases and preconceived notions. While on one hand I appreciate his attempt to show extreme legalism for the silliness that it is, especially in this time of clashing fundamentalist sects and dogmas worldwide, on the other hand I wanted Jacobs to experience the Christian life as I and many, many others understand it - something that frees you from trying to attain salvation by your own efforts rather than something that shackles you into all manner of rules and regulations. The fact that Jacobs did not seek to experience Christianity in this way was disappointing and frustrating to me; it's as though he pointed out the major flaw in one of the two major fashions in which Judeo-Christian religions operate, fundamentalist legalism, but did not turn around and examine the other major fashion, that of faith, mercy, and grace.

However, this was one of the biases that I had to try to let go of; Jacobs writes about his struggles to be genuine in his experiment because he is coming from an agnostic point of view; by attempting the legalist route, at least there were many concrete actions he could take to "be religious" whereas launching himself purely into the faith side of the issue would have been extremely difficult in an intellectual sense. I can't begrudge anyone for the point of view that they start with.

One other problem I had with Jacobs' project was that he admitted the fact that he was an amateur when it comes to understanding the Bible and so he sought the guidance of a myriad of religious authorities. However, he gave nearly equal credence to all sorts of different viewpoints on Biblical interpretation, which was a huge mistake. I know it's trendy to be pluralistic these days and say that "what's true for you is true for you and what's true for me is true for me," but when the object in question is a three-thousand year old faith with ancient manuscripts, languages, and cultures in the mix, you can't be reckless. You can't afford to give any random nutcase an equally valid a say in your examination of religion. There were quite a handful of moments in the book in which I inwardly cringed at the very sloppy, ill-informed, un-academic exegesis that some of Jacobs' contacts gave him.

In the end, Jacobs finds that some of the disciplines in which he engaged himself did, indeed, positively change his worldview and the way he lives his life, but ultimately he is still agnostic. So as far as Jacobs is concerned, his project was a success in that he uncovered much of the hypocrisy and silliness of a fundamentalist, legalist type of religion while still confirming that certain tenets of religious discipline does the body and soul good, albeit in almost purely practical ways (not necessarily spiritual ways). I enjoyed the humor he brought to the project, and I enjoyed reading about the positive effects of the project that pleasantly surprised Jacobs, but I, as a reader, felt that he missed out on a lot by focusing so much on the Old Testament and then only searching for the same sorts of laws in the New Tastement, thereby missing the point of the New Testament - that it's not about rules and regulations anymore, it's not about your own efforts to get into heaven; it's about the grace and mercy of Christ.