Episode 43 – Redeeming Love
The Worst Bestsellers
Worst Bestsellers
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 29 February 2016
⏱️ 103 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kait, Renata, and their guests Ally (of Join the Girl Gang) and Katelyn (of Women of Library History) read the classic evangelical Christian romance novel Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers. It’s AU Bible fanfiction based on the Book of Hosea, a minor prophet’s story of a fallen woman and the man who loved her, and also Israel. Francine Rivers has transformed it into the story of a good Christian cowboy who marries a soiled dove because God told him to (although it took her awhile to get the memo, possibly due to the Lord’s confusing font choices.) In the end, they all live happily ever after, except for the bad prostitutes who died in a fire, and also the podcasters who had to read this.
Content warning: This book contains child abuse, rape, racism, religious prejudice, and Satan, and so does our discussion of it.
Readers advisory: Here.
Footnotes: Beautiful Cinnamon Roll Too Good For This World, Too Pure
Hugh Jackman’s Australia shower scene
Candy pairing: Ally says Testamints, Kait says Bible verse chocolates, Katelyn says soiled Dove promises, Renata says milk.
Coming up next: Stories I Only Tell My Friends by Rob Lowe.
* Worst Bestsellers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
(But no pressure, we’re also happy if you get these items from your local library or independent bookstore.)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the worst bestsellers, where we read about soiled doves so you don't have to. |
| 0:17.6 | I'm Renata. |
| 0:18.8 | And I'm Kate. |
| 0:19.9 | And for this episode, we read Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers. |
| 0:24.5 | Joining us to discuss this evangelical Christian romance novel are Allie and Caitlin, two librarians who broke their promise to their teenage selves to never read this book again. |
| 0:35.7 | Oh, no. Hi, Ali. Welcome. Hi. Hi. Hi, Caitlin. Hi. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for |
| 0:43.9 | breaking your vow. Thanks for having us. Yeah, I guess. I guess. |
| 0:50.7 | Hopefully we can redeem you. |
| 1:27.6 | All right, so real quick, the way that this episode came about was I was reading some reviews of upcoming young adult books, and there was one that said that it was based on the story of, what is the Bible story even called? Is it Josea and Gomer? Yeah. So it was based on that. And I was like, I don't know what that is. And then I looked it up and it was about like a fallen prostitute and all this. And I was like, wait, what? And so I was just tweeting, well, that's a funny thing to like base your young adult book on. |
| 1:33.0 | And then Allie and Caitlin and a bunch of other people like, oh, it's like, it's like redeeming love. |
| 1:34.7 | And I was like, I don't know what that is. |
| 1:43.5 | And I guess that this is a hugely popular phenomenon among evangelical Christians of a certain times. |
| 1:46.6 | I don't know. Why don't you guys jump in and tell me about redeeming love? So basically what we referred to it as the twilight of the evangelical |
| 1:55.0 | Christian set. It is hugely, hugely popular among especially teenage girls in evangelical churches and youth groups. |
| 2:08.0 | Yeah, so it was originally written. |
| 2:10.1 | The author of Francine Rivers was what we in the evangelical world would call a secular romance novelist. |
| 2:17.1 | And this is really her transitional book. |
| 2:19.5 | It was she read the book of Hosea and felt very inspired by it to write this 500-page book |
| 2:25.9 | based on like literally two chapters in the Bible. |
| 2:29.3 | And she published it for the secular world with Bantam, I think, in the very early 90s. |
| 2:36.0 | And it did like fine there. |
| 2:38.4 | But then she continued to develop her relationship with God and she was born again. |
... |
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