Two stars for Moore, one star for Jesus. It's about time to update this as well. It reads like a time capsule. It would have been four stars had anybody bothered to go in and release an updated edition. The message doesn't change. The message would be better served by taking some of the generalized predictions Moore makes here and noting that they happened exactly as planned/ordered/expected.

When Godly People Do Ungodly Things is about a niche kind of sin within the Christian community. It's about those people who spend years, decades, the whole lives on fire for the Lord, and then, one day out of the blue (or so it seems), they are eyeball deep in an affair, pornography, prostitution, embezzlement, etc. In other words, they let their guard down and were seduced. Moore spends the majority of the book discussing the particulars of this seduction, this temptation to sin, and provides more than adequate examples of resistance to it, all scripturally based. What she doesn't do is provide adequate examples of falling prey to it, of the tipping point, of the moment of descent. Nor of hitting bottom, of self-loathing, of grief. Not even the grief that comes with knowing you have sinned against God, first and foremost, and then added to that sin against other believers. Moore went out of her way to write a few tantalizing paragraphs and then go LA LA LA TAKE MY WORD FOR IT HE GOT BETTER.

No. In the absence of anything like journalism (for lack of a better word right now), this is so much repetitive, "look out! don't do it!" But IT is so personal and so individual and so specific, that she's forced to fill the center of the book with a long section reasoning out why it's usually sexual sin. Well, it's usually sexual sin because that's the best way to hit every sin target, every soul tie, all of it, all at once.

It's a good set of ideas and one that needs to be expanded on by a born-again writer who will really, actually write it all out. Moore is good, but she reminds me of a terrible historical linguistics professor I had in grad school. He'd write some IPA on one half the board, then move to his right and write a bunch more IPA. He'd turn around and gesture between them and someone would say a few sounds. He'd smile and nod and raise himself up on his toes expectantly. Someone else would bark out a few more sounds. Then he'd lower himself, nod, and write all of it in between. That's how we were supposed to learn the art of capturing a single word set in one language and connecting it to language change over time in another. Just before and after, with bouncing and smiling in the middle. Moore writes before and the immediate after, never the middle, and nothing at all about the long term. As in historical/comparative linguistics, if you don't know the beginning, you can't possibly know the end except by guessing. I know the beginning-- the story of the Gerasenes demoniac (a more apt illustration of addiction, but that's a whole other rant) and the idea that unless you gaurd against it, your demonic oppression will return times seven. But nobody knows the end, and Moore's not the one to write it.

In the end, I got a B in that class, but only because when it came to the final, which was a 12 word set-- reconstruct the alphabet and name the language, I got it. I got an A, because the language was proto-Semitic and I knew Hebrew. Let's do better with expository Christian writing that that professor I can't remember, except his stupid bouncing tennis shoes just expecting the lightbulb to go off via divine inspiration.