HOW KEROUAC’S

ON THE ROAD

CREATED A GENERATION OF

HALF-BELIEVERS

ADAPTED FROM

THE ROAD TRIP THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

BY MARK SAYERS

MOODY PUBLISHERS

CHICAGO

© 2012 by

MARK SAYERS

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

All websites listed herein are accurate at the time of publication, but may change in the future or cease to exist. The listing of website references and resources does not imply publisher endorsement of the site’s entire contents. Groups, corporations, and organizations are listed for informational purposes, and listing does not imply publisher endorsement of their activities.

Edited by Elizabeth Cody Newenhuyse

Interior design: Smartt Guys design

Cover design: Matt Deutscher, Oak and Ink

ISBN 978-0-8024-8940-1

We hope you enjoy this book from Moody Publishers. Our goal is to provide high-quality, thought-provoking books and products that connect truth to your real needs and challenges. For more information on other books and products written and produced from a biblical perspective, go to www.moodypublishers.com or write to:

Moody Publishers

820 N. LaSalle Boulevard

Chicago, IL 60610

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Part One: From Home to the Road

Part Two: The Journey

Notes

The following pages are taken from The Road Trip That Changed the World, by Mark Sayers. If you own the full book already, you can find this section in chapters 3 and 4.

If you are interested in hearing more from the team that facilitated this adapted content or would like to give input into the future of our books, please visit www.moodycollective.com/site/contact.

PART ONE:

FROM HOME TO THE ROAD

“All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room.”

Blaise Pascal in Pensées

After fourteen hours in the air, my back is stiff and my mouth is filled with a horrible taste. We left Melbourne, Australia, as smiling human beings. Yet somewhere over the Pacific we have morphed into sleepless zombies, packed into a metal fuselage. The pilot’s voice crackles over the public address system, telling us that we will soon be making our descent into Los Angeles. I have now been awake for almost thirty hours. Despite how terrible I feel I cannot switch off my mind. The cultural radar inside of me continues to pulse. Trying to orient myself, I peer out of the window as we float over the City of Angels. I spot the 101, the Hollywood Freeway.

The Hollywood Freeway was built in 1925, when the emerging industries of cinema and the motor car were creating a new sense of the modern. The individual, no longer tethered to a piece of dirt, could take off down the open road of self-discovery, with movie-inspired dreams of personal reinvention. My dog-eared copy of The Penguin History of the USA has on its cover the image of an open road, leading through an expansive desert, disappearing over the horizon. It is the iconic American symbol. As I look down at the freeway below me, snaking through the Hollywood Hills, linking with ten thousand other roads, each representing ten thousand possibilities, I think of America immense in its geography and its dreaming, and I think of Jack Kerouac.

In 1947 Jack Kerouac set off on a road trip that would reshape the mental landscape of almost everyone born in the West since that date. His cross-country jaunt would change how we viewed the world, processed our lives, and interacted with our faiths. It would alter the cultural code of the West, reorientating our collective psyches around the idea of the road.

Kerouac recorded his road trips in his classic book On the Road. Even if you have never read the book, you have been influenced by it.[1] It, almost more than any other work, laid the foundation for the culture of the road. It would ensure that Kerouac for decades would operate as a kind of template for the cool, brooding hipster—would be a sort of grandfather for punk, indie, and everything cool that has come since.

I first read On the Road years ago and found the book anticlimactic. The counterculture bible did nothing for me. The hedonistic, transient, and self-absorbed lifestyles of Kerouac’s characters were on display all around me. They were groundbreaking and strange in the fifties but normal in our day.

Then I started reading On the Road for the second time and realized that what I was holding in my hand contained clues to how we had gotten to where we are. It was a vision of the lifestyles that were to come. It would be read by millions, but its approach to life would be imitated in one form or another by millions who had never read the book.

True, the release of the book did not change the culture single-handedly but tapped into the desire for change that was already bubbling under the surface. Kerouac’s friend, the author William S. Burroughs, remarked, “The restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.”[2] Yet it was Kerouac’s motif of the road that provided the spark that would ignite the fire of cultural change.

OUR CULTURAL IDEAL USED TO BE “HOME”

Before Kerouac changed the life script of the West, life was processed through the idea of home. Home was not just a building in which you lived. It was a place to which you were deeply connected. Home was a family and a community of people to whom you belonged. Home was a unified worldview. This worldview infused every part of your life: it informed your recreational life, your work life, your religious life, even your sex life. This sense of home was held together by traditions and a way of life to which the individual submitted.

Despite these traditions restricting options and personal freedoms, the ideal of home gave the individual a sense of purpose, belonging, and place. You did not need to discover who you were. Your sense of rootedness and your communal connections gave you a sense of self, an identity that was set and solid. Sure, not everyone experienced home in this way, but for the culture it was the ideal; a secure home and a loving community was what we hoped for. Journalist Thomas Friedman uses the symbol of the olive tree to describe this worldview of home:

Olive trees are important. They represent everything that roots us, anchors us, identifies us and locates us in this world — whether it be belonging to a family, a community, a tribe, a nation, a religion or, most of all a place called home. Olive trees are what give us the warmth of family, the joy of individuality, the intimacy of personal rituals, the depth of private relationships, as well as the confidence and security to reach out and encounter others.[3]

Today we could not be in a more different space. No longer do we view our lives through the ideal of home. Thanks to Jack Kerouac, our ideal is the road. We view life through the prism of the journey. In contrast to the olive tree, Friedman uses the symbol of the Lexus to illustrate the emerging contemporary worldview— that is, a luxury vehicle for a new kind of individual who prefers movement and individual autonomy to the stability and traditions of the worldview of the olive tree.

HOW WE BEGAN TO SEE LIFE AS A JOURNEY

An award-winning commercial for Louis Vuitton exemplifies this ideal. It features lush, cinematic shots of attractive individuals in deserts, cities, and exotic locales. There is a deeply sensual tone to the commercial. A suited man takes off his shoes and walks barefoot on the Saharan sand. Another man stands before the vista of an exquisite river, exhaling a cloud of visible breath in the cool morning air. A young female traveler sleeping in the alcove of a Tibetan village is awakened by the wind moving through her hair. Pages rustle in a journal; a young man drinks in both his tea and the sight of Shanghai at dawn. Across the screen come a series of statements and questions:

What is a journey?

A journey is not a trip. It’s not a vacation. It’s a process. A discovery.

It’s a process of self-discovery.

A journey brings us face to face with ourselves.

Does the person create the journey, or does the journey create the person?

The journey is life itself.

Where will life take you?

It is easy to see why this commercial is award winning. It is beautifully shot, drenched with evocative images. Its romanticism resonates with us because it reveals one of the great values that our contemporary culture holds dear—that life is a journey. That true meaning and happiness are found on the road.

Another commercial, this one for a Ford sedan. The voiceover reads Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” An unsure young man with a backpack stands before two roads in a forest. He chooses the unpaved road. Next a montage of shots. The young man traveling the world. Swimming in the sea. Laughing with an old man on a Greyhound bus. Making love with a beautiful young woman in the back of a van. Crying in a New York alleyway. Always walking or driving. Always on the road. His beard grows longer; his walk is now determined and devoid of its hesitation. In the final scene the young man is now older, driving a Ford sedan with his wife and children. He pulls over and picks up a young hitchhiker. Before driving off, he turns to the hitchhiker in the backseat and gives him a knowing and wise look. The unspoken message of the commercial is that he now can accept driving a family sedan with all its implications of home, responsibility, and maturity because he has lived the journey.

HOW OUR CULTURE OF CHOICE CREATED THE CULTURE OF THE ROAD

So why do we choose to view life as a journey? How did Kerouac’s image of the road become so applicable to how we live and think? Well, modern life is a confusing business. The culture of home, in which everyone subscribed to one worldview, has disappeared. Now, every moment of our lives we are faced with countless decisions. The contemporary person is stuck in a constant quandary. Would I be happier in a smaller city? Should I eat more fruit? Am I overweight? Am I bisexual? Should I invest in the stock market? Android or iPhone? Do I need a vacation? Should I take up yoga? Am I stressed? Should I read more? What do I think of global warming? Sure, we have freedom of choice but we must navigate the immensity of the options before us.

Our confusion only increases when we understand the way that our culture segments our lives into compartments. We have our family lives, our work lives, our emotional lives, our sex lives, our spiritual lives, and our recreational lives. We have our finances and our fitness, our health and our political beliefs. Our culture tells us that to be happy we must find meaning and success in each of these areas. How do we do this? We are told that we must survey the immensity of choice in each segment and then make the right decision that will ensure happiness—a feat comparable to winning the lottery.

There is a whole industry of magazines, books, websites, and TV shows dedicated to providing advice on how to achieve success and meaning in each life segment. This creates an anxiety in the individual. Contemporary life becomes a constant rolling of the dice to pull off the impossible. Our lives may be great, but if one area is not up to scratch, we feel that something is amiss. Thus we suffer from a permanent restlessness. How do we chart and plan a life of meaning and happiness when we are confronted with so many choices, so many contrasting worldviews and opinions, so many experiences, and so much information? This is where the motif of the road comes in.

The Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, in his study of novels and films, observed that roads play a special role in plots. For the writer they are a useful way of creating meaning within complicated circumstances. For example, it would be hard to write a novel that captures the complexities and breadth of the giant country that is China. It is much easier to write a novel about two friends who decide to bicycle across China. Of course the people that they will meet on their journey and the events and places they experience will offer us a window of understanding into China. One which is palatable and does not leave us overwhelmed. In the same way we apply the motif of the road or the journey to our lives as a manageable way of understanding and processing our experiences in a world which has said good-bye to the culture of home.

HOW THE ROAD CREATED CHICKEN NUGGETS, PREMARITAL SEX, AND CHURCH SHOPPING

Initially Kerouac’s vision of the road gave a new and controversial language and name to the way that postwar culture was reshaping the contemporary person. Over the coming decades Western culture would rearrange itself around the motif of the road. Watching hordes of young backpackers in Thailand, novelist Hari Kunzru observed that Kerouac’s vision had moved from a radical countercultural statement to a “middle-class ritual.”[4] The road is now woven into our culture’s structures. We fail to notice this because we are so accustomed to the symbolism and narrative of the road, the most powerful cultural values are those which remain unnoticed. It is only when you stand at a distance, or leave your own culture, that you are able to recognize your own values for what they are.

The average person in the West carries around in their head a set of assumptions that are culturally imbibed. Assumptions such as the idea that spirituality is preferable to organized religion, that love is a feeling not a discipline, that if something is mundane it must be boring, that individual freedom trumps the collective, that travel broadens the mind, or that we can do what we like as long as it does not hurt anybody. All of these cultural ideas are elements that could fit into the worldview of the road. None of these values and ideas are taught in school; rather one picks them up the way we pick up a head cold. Philosopher James K. A. Smith reminds us that it is not just religions that disciple—our culture disciples us. According to Smith every structure of a culture carries a worldview and a form of teaching that “shape and constitute our identities by forming our most fundamental desires and our most basic attunement to the world…. They prime us to approach the world in a certain way, to value certain things, to aim for certain goals, to purse certain dreams … to be a certain kind of person.”[5]

Of course, where there is a road, there are cars. The motor car, which gave Kerouac’s characters their sense of personal freedom, was one of the key formational tools in shaping the contemporary person of the road.

HOW THE CAR CHANGED SEXUALITY IN THE WEST

Cultural critic Daniel Harris[6] points out that the motor car created youth culture, allowing young people the freedom to socialize outside of the family unit. Harris notes that the postwar popularity of the car created the space for the rise in premarital sex. Before the car, young people socialized cross-generationally in the family home. The rituals of courtship happened primarily within the home, and were done in community. Before the car, the social dynamics of home and community made premarital sex a logistical nightmare. Hotels and rooming houses would not allow unmarried couples to rent rooms. The arrival of the car created an accountability-free space in which teenagers for the first time in history could engage in intercourse outside of community. No longer was sex the apex of a communal process based on covenantal commitment, a reward for delayed gratification; intercourse could now happen in the back of a car on the first date.

HOW THE CAR CHANGED HOW WE EAT

The culture of the car would also lead to the invention of fast food, a portable, quickly delivered snack to be consumed either at a stop on the road, or in the car. The invention of the chicken nugget was the result of a fierce battle between rival fast food chains to find a form of chicken that could be eaten safely by a driver.[7] Food had traditionally been a communal affair, in which community and/or family stopped to eat and socialize. Just as sex had been transformed by the possibility of individualism and instant gratification, food would be changed by the car. It is interesting that in France, which places a cultural value upon slow cooking and communal eating with local fresh produce and where children are taught as early as kindergarten to sit down for formal meals, obesity levels are minimal, whereas countries such as the United States which have embraced fast food are experiencing epidemics of obesity.

HOW THE CAR CHANGED HOW WE WORSHIP

The car also created the phenomenon that we know today as church shopping. Before the car, the parish and the neighborhood church dominated the religious landscape. However, the coming of the car meant that people could travel distances to find a church that suited their needs. Robert Schuller created a new kind of church when in the fifties, smack bang in the middle of the car culture that is Southern California, he started a church that was a combination of drive-in and worship service. Participants did not even have to leave their car: Schuller encouraged worshipers to “come as you are in the family car.”[8] Schuller’s church had been planted out of the Reformed tradition; however, when positive-thinking advocate Norman Vincent Peale would guest preach at his church, the drive-in service would be overflowing. Schuller responded and changed his preaching approach from a traditional gospel presentation to reflect Peale’s Christian positive-thinking message. This move would radically alter the landscape of contemporary Christian culture in the coming decades.

Can we draw a line from the “car culture” of fifty years ago to the “always connected” culture of today? I think we can. In our day the Internet and social media offer what playwright Richard Foreman calls “the technology of the ‘instantly available.’”[9] These technologies rewire our brains at a neurological level, making it difficult to concentrate, so that we graze over information and are permanently distractible.[10] Twenty years ago at an airport or at a train station people would talk to each other, or work their way through the long-form narrative of books. Now we sit in our electronic bubbles, headphones on, looking at our screens, scanning worlds of information, mental and emotional nomads. Thus our following of the culture of the road is not an intellectual decision; it is a habit of the heart which we have acquired through osmosis. We follow the culture of the road because it is everywhere, and as author Jon Tyson notes, “It’s this ‘everywhere’ that shapes our lives.”[11]

PART TWO:

THE JOURNEY

“The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.”

William Least Heat-Moon

Recently I watched an interview featuring a B-grade celebrity who had toiled away for fame through her rather mediocre music career. The interview followed her personal journey. The story began in stage one. Through a series of flashbacks we were shown the starlet in her younger days. She burst onto the scene with a pop song that garnered her initial fame. Then, however, a public backlash was followed by a time out of the media spotlight. Several relationship breakdowns and the supposedly horrifying arrival of the age of thirty had resulted in our starlet finding herself in stage two and facing obstacles.

Finally, according to the video montage, the starlet reached stage three. She gave up singing, instead focusing on hosting a reality TV show. Most importantly she had also met her “true love.” She made sure everyone knew that this was all possible through the support of her close family and true friends who “believed in her through thick and thin.” She then regurgitated out the jargon of the third stage. “I am now truly comfortable in my skin.” “I feel centered.” “I am happy being me.” And so on. The sycophantic interviewer then ended the interview by telling our beaming starlet that she had “truly found happiness.” The audience exploded into a sustained ovation. Watching, I half-expected the TV studio’s roof to open and our starlet to ascend to the third heaven, or perhaps morph into the Buddha. Instead, the only visible personal transformation in our starlet seemed to be the way that her anatomy had been “augmented” since her early videos.

THE ROAD AS SECULAR PILGRIMAGE

The starlet’s life was communicated to the audience as a form of journey. The motif of journey is everywhere in our culture—in film, in celebrity autobiographies, in advertisements for physical fitness, in reality TV. Throughout history various religious traditions have used the imagery of pilgrimage or journey to describe spiritual development. These journeys were focused on an eternal destination, a spiritual transformation of the individual. Today, however, the “pilgrimage” is all about the individual’s own life journey. In the past the individual gained a sense of solace knowing that despite life’s disappointments and inevitable suffering, meaning was still found in God’s will for every individual. Sociologist Francesca Collins wonders, “Perhaps the ‘journey’ is a secularized version of ‘God’s will.’ It allows us to make sense of the utterly unfathomable without resorting to God or some sort of compensation in the afterlife.”[1] By seeing life as a journey we can enjoy the moral cost-free benefits of secular living, but then later can Photoshop a layer of meaning over our lives by recounting our experiences as part of our “life journey.” The confusion, fragmentation, and randomness of living in a secular culture loses some of its sting when we apply the “journey” tag to our messy lives.

The notion expressed in Paulo Coelho’s mega-selling novel The Alchemist, in which the experience of the journey trumps the importance of the destination, permeates the contemporary mind-set. In his book The Art of Travel[2] philosopher Alain De Botton points out that the attraction of travel is not so much in the arriving at your destination, but rather the anticipation of destination. We are addicted to the thought of leaving, to tantalizing possibilities of where we could be going, rather than the concrete reality of actual arrival. We are addicted to being on the road, of having that next destination hovering over the horizon. Thus life, identity, and faith are now viewed as things in process, not yet fully formed. The security of knowing, of arriving, kills the buzz of the contemporary life journey.

The excellent research of Graham Cray, Sylvia Collins-Mayo, Bob Mayo, and Sara Savage illustrates for us the way that the symbol of the road has come to dominate the minds of young. The researchers discovered that traditional, transformative religious worldviews that gave a greater sense of meaning were not only missing from the lives of young people, but not missed:

Lack of … religious sensibility did not appear to result in our young people feeling disenchanted, alienated or lost in a meaningless world. Instead, the data indicated that they found meaning and significance in the reality of everyday life, which the popular arts helped them to understand and imbibe. In this respect, we found a coherent narrative that underpins our young people’s worldview. In essence, it states: “This world, and all life in it, is meaningful as it is.” … There is no need to posit ultimate significance elsewhere beyond the immediate experience of everyday life. This means that … young people had no obvious need for what we call transformative spirituality.[3]

The team found that young people were not interested in overarching stories that explained the world. Instead a smaller, coherent personal narrative that gave a sense of meaning to the individual was what the young people centered their lives around. Ideas like the eternal, heaven, or an afterlife were of little importance. Instead, real-time individual happiness and well-being was the ultimate goal. The journey has replaced the traditional religious means of processing and approaching life.

THE THREE STAGES OF THE ROAD

The young people surveyed perceived the life journey as a three-stage process. First, the individual aspires to be happy, to experience enjoyment and pleasure, and generally have fun. One did not need to look beyond the individual and the visible world to the spiritual for meaning; rather, purpose was found in experiencing all that the world had to offer. The wider implication of this belief is that if each individual pursued such a goal, everyone would be happy, and then society would be peaceful and unified.

Second, it was inevitable that the individual’s journey toward happiness and well-being would be blocked. Blockages could be low self-esteem, negative body image, sexual abuse, lack of recognition, or the mundane. Through the unconditional acceptance and support of close friends and loved ones, through creativity, freedom and choice, and the collation of enriching experiences, the individual could move past the blockages. The obstacles of the second stage are the lessons of the road, the teachings of the journey of life. If the individual could overcome, or personally transcend, the obstacles to happiness, the last stage of the road was theirs. The final destination was the elusive quality of “personal growth.” The person was now an “authentic individual”—one who had finally achieved happiness.

THE ROAD IS PERMANENT ADOLESCENCE

We like the idea of the road because it enables us to remain emotionally adolescent. Yet other cultures do not share our aversion to “settling down.” Quite the opposite: After living with tribes of nomads, travel writer Bruce Chatwin discovered that one of the greatest tragedies of tribal life was to not be initiated into adulthood. Death was preferable. Uninitiated persons would remain on the outer edges of the community, never to be safely ensconced under the umbrellas of tribe or marriage. The uninitiated would never be seen to mature into men or women but were condemned to purposelessness. While the tribe traveled together, the uninitiated were left to journey alone—to eke out an existence on the edges of society, stuck in a permanent adolescence.

In our culture of the road, this situation is reversed. We are living in the midst of a grand social experiment in which we are encouraged to live in a perpetual adolescence, one that keeps us on the road, wandering individuals cut off from the tribe. Behind us is home, with the comforts of the familiar and a childlike sense of security. Yet we also want to leave home because of the restraints of parental authority. Ahead over the horizon is the potential of adulthood. The possibility of a mature life is appealing. Yet the responsibility and commitments of adulthood strike fear into the hearts of people raised in an adolescent culture. So instead of moving forward, or backward, many choose to stay on the road, accepting the permanent in-betweenness of the adolescent.

HOW OUR LOSTNESS CREATES THE ROAD

There are two migrations occurring in our world today. In the two-thirds world, countless people find themselves displaced from home, fleeing war, famine, natural disaster, and environmental catastrophe in search of safety. For millions, home is now the road, or the refugee camp. For these people movement is a terrible necessity. These people find themselves with little control over their lives; rather, they find themselves on the move. Looking for a safe place to call home.

Then there is another group. This group is not only separated from actual refugees and displaced people by geography but also by wealth, opportunity, and privilege. In their book Beyond Homelessness,[4] Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian J. Walsh contrast the genuine refugee with the contemporary Westerner traveling the world, fleeing relationships, changing jobs, and always on the move—yet suffering a poverty of meaning, a loss of true home, identity, and place. Bouma-Prediger and Walsh declare this rootless lifestyle as a kind of psychic homelessness in which individuals lack a spiritual home.

BEING ON THE ROAD IS A MENTAL STATE

The contemporary self does not have to literally be on the move to be on the road. Being on the road is primarily a state of mind, one that constantly is dissatisfied, looking for the next best thing, living in incompleteness, always engaged in a quest for a sense of significance. This search for meaning becomes even more problematic in a culture which flees from objective truth, which fears authority and the holding of belief too strongly. The contemporary person finds themselves engaged in a quest for a truth they are told that they cannot find. In which the act of questing itself is given more importance than the completion of the quest. In such an environment the worldview of the road is triumphant.

JESUS’ VISION OF THE ROAD

The road has made us fickle. It has made our faiths weak. It has made us spoiled. To state it in its most brutal and blatant form, the road is ruining our lives and it is ruining our culture. It has left us lost and directionless, consumers not followers of God. When we open the pages of Scripture we find a different kind of person from the person of the road. A person of the way. The way of Christ. A pilgrim of a road that does not lead to the tantalizing potential of a future destination but instead to a wooden cross. A way that promises life eternal but that also demands total obedience, complete surrender, and death to self.

Jesus Himself taught that there are two roads. One road is wide and leads to destruction and death. The other road, although narrow, leads to life. Life is about those two roads. It is about what road you are going to follow. To find out how to take the narrow road, we must understand how we find ourselves constantly taking the wide road to destruction; we must explore how our culture sabotages our efforts to take the road to life.

NOTES

Part 1: From Home to the Road

1. The discerning reader should be made aware that On the Road contains strong adult content, and it would be wise to approach it with appropriate caution. Neither the publisher nor the author endorse the book.

2. William S. Burroughs quoted in “America’s king of the road.” The Observer, August 5, 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/

2007/aug/05/fiction.jackkerouac.

3. Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 31.

4. Hari Kunzru cited in “America’s first king of the road.” The Observer, August 5, 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/

aug/05/fiction.jackkerouac.

5. James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2009), 25.

6. See Daniel Harris, Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism (New York: Basic Books, 200).

7. See Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).

8. See http://www.crystalcathedral.org/about/history.php.

9. “The Pancake People, or, ‘The gods are pounding my head.’ Edge, March 8, 2005. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/

foreman05/foreman05_index.html.

10. See Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).

11. “Breaking the Mold.” Leadership Journal, June 13, 2011. http://www.christianitytoday.com/

le/2011/spring/breakingmold.html. Make sure that you check out Jon’s book written with Darren Whitehead, it’s a must read. See Darren Whitehead and Jon Tyson, Rumors of God: Experience the Kind of Faith You’ve Only Heard About (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011).

Part 2: The Journey

1. Cited in “Travels with Myself.” The Age, January 17, 2010. http://www.theage.com.au/national/travels-with-myself-20100116-mdji.html

2. See Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel (New York: Vintage, 2004).

3. Graham Cray, Sylvia Collins-Mayo, Bob Mayo, and Sara Savage, Making Sense of Generation Y: The World View of 15-25-Year-Olds (London: Church House Publishing, 2006), 37.

4. See Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian J. Walsh, Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement (Grand Rapids: MI, Eerdmans, 2008).

BEFORE YOU GO

If you found value in this portion, please take a look at the full-length book by Mark Sayers, The Road Trip that Changed the World. Read the full-length book to learn more about Kerouac’s influence on Western Christianity and other topics such as:

• How Kerouac and Freud Made Some Sins Cool for Christians

• Why Abraham Was the First Countercultural Rebel

• Why It Used to Almost Be Impossible Not to Believe in God

If you are interested in hearing more from the team that facilitated this adapted content or would like to give input into the future of our books, please visit www.moodycollective.com/site/contact.

www.MoodyPublishers.com

WRECKED

Wrecked is about the life we wish we lived.

It’s a life of radical sacrifice and selfless service—and how we find it in the midst of suffering. Wrecked is a look at how we discover our life’s purpose in the least likely of places: in the tough spots and among the brokenhearted. Wrecked is a manifesto for living like we mean it; it’s a guide to growing up and giving your life away. This book is for us. A generation of young adults pursuing our life’s work both responsibly and radically—how to live in the real-world tension of sacrificial living and the daily mundane.

www.MoodyPublishers.com

WHY HOLINESS MATTERS

Our generation has little or no regard for holiness. And this makes sense given our misunderstanding of:

• Sin (we view it as either inevitable or we just go with it)

• Holiness (we view it as unrealistic or we ignore it because there’s no immediate payoff)

• Innocence (we view it as subordinate to “experiencing the world”)

• God (we often think He’ll probably let us down—just like people do)

Instead of playing the “guilt/shame” card, Tyler Braun examines Jesus’ example to recognize how His way of life contrasts with the world’s promises.

www.MoodyPublishers.com

Table of Contents

Part One: From Home to the Road

Part Two: The Journey

Notes