Holy Fools Following Jesus with Reckless Abandon by Matthew Woodley

Earlier this summer, we invited four readers to contribute book reviews to ThinkChristian. The first review is here -- Matthew Woodley's Holy Fools: Following Jesus with Reckless Abandon, reviewed by Mark Main of The Untried. Enjoy the review, and be sure to chime in below with your own comments on the book or its themes.

holyfoolsBefore cracking open this book, I read its subtitle: 'Following Jesus with Reckless Abandon' suggested a kind of how-to book to me. I expected lots of fun activities and events for churches, and maybe a few ideas for youth groups looking for 'crazy' ways of showing an example of Jesus to the world.

Fortunately that's not what Holy Fools is about. Not that there's anything wrong with those types of things -- they're fun, but all in all they produce no real changes in the people who witness them, or the people who participate in them. So I was delighted to find a book that instead presented stories of "holy fools" from ages past to present. True stories. Stories that made me do everything from grin to laugh out loud.

Who are these holy fools? The best definition of a holy fool in the book is a quote from Saint John Chrysostom:

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