I enjoyed listening to this book: Stokes writes well and reads his own writing well, too. It’s funny and (mostly) accessible, and it has a lot of ideas I can get behind.

I also have a list of nitpicks, though. Stokes wants to have it both ways with critical Biblical scholarship, accepting (for example) that the Garden of Eden story is allegorical rather than literal but then also running with traditional interpretations (e.g., the serpent = Satan) without acknowledging that there’s not a lot of basis to them. I also find anarchist writing to make a lot of assertions without walking me through them; while I’m sympathetic to the conclusions, I feel like I can’t get on board without some more help.

Nonetheless, this is the most approachable book on (Christian) anarchism that I’ve read so far, and that Stokes could make constant pop culture jokes without feeling like he was trying too hard landed well with me.

• Jesus and the Abolitionists
• Terry Stokes
• anarchism
• Christian anarchism