Praying at Burger King

Praying at Burger King
by Richard J. Mouw
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E.
Grand Rapids, MI 49505
©2007 134pp Soft Cover
Does being a Christian upset you? Do you wish you were cool like all the other heathens? Well too bad. God has you and there’s nothing you can do about it. However, He can make your life miserable as He drags you into heaven. Yet our modern culture demands secularism at all times. Richard Mouw looks into this odd conundrum of giving God His due in public and trying to fit in with your fellow men in the book Praying at Burger King. The book is a series of vignettes about various situations in which Christians wonder if they are acting too Christian to be cool.
Praying at Burger King provides light reading and will probably be most appreciated by teenagers. This is because, ironically, Mouw chooses to wuss out very early on in the book on the same subject he claims to be trying to defend. Mouw writes that he does not complain too much about the secularization of the Christmas and Easter holidays because Christians “abused” other people with their loud celebrations of them. This guy wants God to drag him kicking and screaming into heaven. Mouw also writes that he will sometimes not pray over a meal if it makes the other people at the table nervous. I personally have never found anyone who got nervous when I prayed over a meal. It is for these two reasons that the book will appeal to teenagers. It involves cheating on the topic, light reading, and trying to look cool. This is not to say that Praying at Burger King is a bad book, far from it, but it is to say that Mouw does not stick to his guns as well as he should. Hence give it to the misunderstood 14 year old in your life.