Looking for Answers about Inter-varsity Press Blessed Are the Uncool: Living Authentically in a World of Show?

Cool is a destination: everyone else has arrived, but we can't seem to catch up. Cool is a security blanket: we wear it ragged and hide beneath its tatters. Cool is a coping mechanism: we're all leaning on it, and it keeps breaking down on us.

Sooner or later, we all count ourselves among the uncool: in those moments when everybody gets the joke but us, when the new kid's swagger leaves us self-conscious, when our friends invite us to do what we swore we'd never do.

In those moments God sees us and calls us blessed.

In Blessed Are the Uncool Paul Grant deconstructs the cultural phenomenon of cool, an ever-elusive, exclusionary act of perpetual rebellion for rebellion's sake. A life spent chasing after cool is exposed for the fickle, fruitless and ultimately inauthentic life that it is.

In its place God offers us the beloved community: where exclusion is replaced with love, rebellion is redeemed with hope, and all our elusive longings are answered with faith that in Christ, God is reconciling this uncool world to himself.

Raised by American missionary parents in Switzerland, Paul Grant is a deacon at Fountain of Life Family Worship Center in Madison, Wisconsin, and a staff writer and editor for urbana.org--which is, ironically enough, pretty cool.