Kevin Roose's Blog, page 3

Jerry’s Kids: Meet Dane Pascoe

Back in February, I announced a new blog series, called “Jerry’s Kids,” in which I’d be interviewing students, faculty, and alumni of Liberty University “every Monday or so.”  Ha.   Anyway, I’m continuing the series this week with a Liberty student who is a little less iconoclastic than the last one I interviewed.  He signs his notes, “For the KING,” and has Philippians 3:10 ( “I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised Him from the dead”) as his e-mail signature.  He comes

The Unlikely Disciple on C-SPAN's Book TV!

My "Book TV" appearance, which was taped in early April and aired on C-SPAN 2 for the first time on Sunday morning, is online!  Click below to watch.

The Unlikely Disciple on C-SPAN’s Book TV!

My “Book TV” appearance, which was taped in early April and aired on C-SPAN 2 for the first time on Sunday morning, is online!  Click below to watch.

The Liberty Situation, part 3

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my Liberty bookstore saga, detailed here and again here.  For those of you who are just getting here, the story in a nutshell:

When he first heard about THE UNLIKELY DISCIPLE, Liberty chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. pulled the book from the shelves of the campus bookstore, thinking it was a nasty exposé.  Upon meeting me and hearing more about the book, though, Chancellor Falwell sent the matter to an advisory committee composed of LU faculty member

Week in review

What a week this has been.  My apologies for being blog-negligent for a couple days, but I’m back with a vengeance and have no plans to slow down.  Let’s take this from the top:

– On Sunday, I trekked to Westtown School, my lovable Quaker high school in the Philadelphia suburbs, for a book event, part of Westtown’s Shoemaker Lecture Series.  Turnout was great (it helped that upper school students were required to attend), and the Q&A was lively and intelligent.  I had a great time meeting current

And the winners are…

The Unlikely Disciple Easter Giveaway has been a huge, huge success, garnering around 270 entries as of this morning.  I just picked the winners using the random number generator at Random.org, and here’s what I came up with:

1st Place (iPod Shuffle pre-loaded with Christian music, Liberty U. pennant, “Politically Incorrect Since 1971″ t-shirt, and signed ARC of THE UNLIKELY DISCIPLE): Kati (comment posted April 14, 2009, 10:42 am)

2nd Place (LU bottle-opener, plush “Sparky the Eagle” doll, signed

TUD hits the road! (Plus: Pennsylvania, the NY Times, and one more day to enter the Easter Giveaway!)

Last Friday, one of the most exciting stops on my book tour came to pass: my return to Lynchburg, Virginia, home of Liberty University.

Returning to the setting of my undercover book to sign and talk about said book could have been extraordinarily awkward.  (One friend compared it to the scene in “Harriet the Spy” when Harriet comes to school to find her scandalized friends reading her diary entries about them.)  But even though it was Good Friday, we had a great turnout at two book signings (one

The Unlikely Book Party

After a week of travel, I’m finally back in Providence.  I’m uploading photos from my book tour stops, and will post everything in a day or two.  Until then, I’m bringing you photos from last night’s book party.

The party was co-hosted by A.J. Jacobs (my former boss and author of “The Year of Living Biblically”) and Scott Poulson-Bryant (co-founder of VIBE magazine, author of “Hung,” and a 2008 graduate of Brown who, at 40, is leaving his teaching gig at Brown to get his Ph.D. at Harvard – don’t

The Unlikely Disciple EASTER GIVEAWAY!

While unpacking my suitcase from another trip to Liberty this weekend, I realized that I’ve accumulated a lot of LU-branded souvenirs on these Lynchburg visits.  Too many, in fact.  (Does a guy really need three “Team Jerry” mugs?) Which is why I’m using today, Easter Sunday, as the occasion for my first-ever blog giveaway!  Hand-me-down Christian tchotchkes aren’t exactly hot-ticket items (or so says my publisher, anyway), so I dug up a few additional prizes to spice things up.  The contest wi

Why you need to know the Bible (even if you’re an atheist)

In the spirit of Easter…

(cross-posted from Forbes.com)

This week, millions of Americans will head to their houses of worship to celebrate Easter and Passover, the high Judeo-Christian holidays. When they arrive, they’ll hear familiar sermons and stories drawn from both the Old and New Testaments, Exodus and the Gospels. And when they leave, they’ll relegate those lessons to a small, dusty corner of their brain, where they’ll sit all but forgotten until this time next year. That’s the sad truth im