Why would I put myself through such pain?

I felt like I was taking myself and my beliefs way too seriously. I feared that I was losing my balance and not putting enough of my faith into practice. I had shifted from the more conservative (possibly fundamentalist in some ways) end of evangelicalism into the more progressive end, and I sensed myself making the same mistakes under a different banner.

A parody of myself would force me to look at myself in a different light, take some of my beliefs to their extremes, and help me figure out where I needed to change and what needed to stay the same.

As I grew more comfortable with the concept of a parody, I began to experiment with a series of posts called “Sarcastic Saturday.” It was quite hard to do, and it didn’t quite pack the punch I wanted as a parody of myself.

So I sat on the idea for a while.

In the midst of the Rob Bell “HellGate” debate, the wheels began to turn.

I began thinking of a parody that would hopefully help all sides step back, laugh a bit at themselves, and hopefully cool things off a bit. At the very least, a parody helps us step back and take ourselves less seriously for a moment. That has done me a world of good in making me a more loving and open conversation partner.

Out of the ideas swirling in my mind, I mashed together a parody of Bell’s book Love Wins with a parody of Twilight and all of the other vampire TV shows and books in pop culture and wrote a novella e-book that I titled Love Bites (you can still download the whole 15,600 word e-book). I didn’t have an agenda other than helping us step back from the angry debates, laugh a bit, and hopefully returning to our conversations with a little less… well… bite.

I want to make it clear that I really like Rob Bell. His book Velvet Elvis echoed many of the things I’ve been thinking (you could say it’s a more accessible take on some of the stuff I say in Coffeehouse Theology).

Hopefully everyone who reads the book noticed another character: Ned Ciwinski. Ned is a parody of myself: a bumbling, dorky writer obsessed with being relevant with theology and culture. One of my friends thought he was the hero of the story, but that was purely a mistake on my part if anyone thought that. I really wanted Ned to just provide comic relief, to get lucky at a few key points with his half-witted ideas, and to provide that parody of myself that I’ve longed to put together.

Ned Ciwinskiy reminds me that I can get lost in my theology and isolate myself to the point that I end up forgetting how to relate to others. To a certain degree, Ned was my round-about way of getting to the excellent point made by Don Miller that Jesus doesn’t need theology experts to advance his Kingdom. Sometimes the theology experts can lose their way.

I currently have a book proposal that I’m sending around that examines what we can learn from the people who rejected Jesus. The majority of those who rejected Jesus were the theology experts of his time. I’ve often written on this blog that the New Testament reads like a horror story for seminary students.

I have a feeling that Ned wouldn’t want to read a book like that, which is why I needed to write a silly story about our theology debates with vampires and a self-absorbed and self-proclaimed theology and culture expert named Ned fumbling his way through the story.

Ricky Gervais once said to Steve Carrell (who plays Michael Scott on The Office), “If you don’t know someone like Michael Scott, then you are Michael Scott.” Along similar lines, if I couldn’t write that story with Ned in it, then the truth is that I could very well become just like Ned—without the vampires I hope.

Love Bites: A Story about Life, the Undead, and the Fate of Every Person Ever Bitten by a Vampire (Download It Now)

In this novella by Ed Cyzewski, Eva attends Stoker College in dreary Sporks, Michigan after a voice calls her there and finds intrigue, danger, and the kind of love that bites in a beautiful stranger named Thomas who believes unusual things about the undead. In fact, Thomas believes that all of the undead may be able to live forever.

Will Eva find true love without having to sacrifice herself? Will Thomas ever stop asking questions? Will Ned Ciwinski ever find a publisher for Coffeehouse Vampirology? Will Max the werewolf ever find a shirt? Unfortunately you’ll have to read all 15,600 words of this Love Wins/Twilight parody in order to find out.

You can download the full novella (all 15,600 words of it) for free here.

If you can, please consider chipping in $.99 for an ebook download from Amazon.com. It’s a huge help to me, and enables me to continue offering fun projects like this at no cost to the general public.

Don’t forget: There’s more to this than just this blog post. This is a real book you can download and read.

If you enjoy this book, please consider:

• Tweeting: “Farewell @edcyzewski! #LoveBites http://bit.ly/dPXYBy.”
• Posting to Facebook: “Farewell @Ed Cyzewski! Love Bites: http://bit.ly/dPXYBy.”
• Returning to http://inamirrordimly.com/love-bites in order to download Love Bites for $.99. Every little bit helps!
• Contacting Ed, edcyzewski (at) gmail (dot) com, so that you can learn when the Love Bites Special Edition is coming out with a discussion guide, a sample chapter from Coffeehouse Vampirology, and an exclusive interview with Ned Ciwinski.

Previous April 1st book releases:

The Lost Tweets of Jesus: Uncovering the World’s Greatest Ancient-Digital Mystery (book to download)

Coffeeshack Theology (blog post)

In light of this offer, starting December 15th and ending at 7 pm EST on December 31st 2009, the Coffeehouse Theology: Bible Study Guide will be available as a free PDF for download. This guide, which complements Coffeehouse Theology, provides group or personal Bible studies under the guidance of a series of theologians, commentaries, and discussion questions.

There is a limit of one print out per person. Need more copies for your group? Then share this page with your friends or place an order with NavPress.

This offer ended December 31st at 7 PM EST.

Refractions

While the book contains a fair bit of writing, it also feels like an art book you may pick up at an exhibition. Fujimura’s essays are warm, personal, and insightful thus far, creating a great atmosphere in which to read the book and to absorb it.

Who knows where publishing is going these days with ebooks, the black and white Kindle 2, and all manner of cost-cutting measures, but Refractions is the kind of book you’ll want to hold in your hands, the kind of book that cannot be justified with an online viewer. Let the mass market books slip away into the Kindle and iPhone. However, I think NavPress and Fujimura are right on with the design and content of this work. Both this book and Jesus for President are the kind of books that marry both content and design in a way that will create books worth buying and storing on our shelves.

I look forward to reading the rest of the book and posting some more thoughts in the days to come.