Product Description

Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever. In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant "The Shack" wrestles with the timeless question, "Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?" The answers Mack gets will astound you and perhaps transform you as much as it did him. You'll want everyone you know to read this book!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
"The Shack" is a one of a kind invitation to journey to the very heart of God. Through my tears and cheers, I have been indeed transformed by the tender mercy with which William Paul Young opened the veil that too often separated me from God and from myself. With every page, the complicated do's and don't that distort a relationship into a religion were washed away as I understood Father, Son and Holy Spirit for the first time in my life. --Patrick M. Roddy, ABC News Emmy Award winning producer

Finally! A guy-meets-God Novel that has literary integrity and spiritual daring. "The Shack" cuts through the cliches of both religion and bad writing to reveal something compelling and beautiful about life's integral dance with the Divine. This story reads like a prayer--like the best kind of prayer, filled with sweat and wonder and transparency and surprise. When I read it, I felt like I was fellowshipping with God. If you read one work of fiction this year, let this be it. --Mike Morrell, zoecarnate.com

When the imagination of a writer and the passion of a theologian cross-fertilize the result is a novel on the order of "The Shack." This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" did for his. It's that good! --Eugene Peterson, Professor Emeritus of Spiritual Theology, Regent College, Vancouver, B.C.

About the Author
William P. Young was born a Canadian and raised among a stone-age tribe by his missionary parents in the highlands of what was New Guinea. He suffered great loss as a child and young adult, and now enjoys the 'wastefulness of grace' with his family in the Pacific Northwest.

Customer Reviews

A healing work
This is one of those books that you would love to give a five star rating, but cannot. The strengths of the book are many and include identification with the sorrow of the main character Mac, who goes through "the Great Sadness" over his daughter. The story is a moving story and very intriguing. The idea of going to the place of your greatest pain for healing is very important and was for me the strongest part of the book. The book has some strong theological strengths such as the emphasis on God redeeming his creation and about new creation. So often we think everything is about going to heaven when you die and that is it and so "new creation" is often forgotten. The book deals parabolic with the problem of evil and even defines evil as the absent of good, which is good theology.
At first it was difficult to get passed God as a large black woman. I was a bit disappointed thinking that the book was going to go down the line of "Bruce Almighty", but it really does not do so. The idea is that Mac had a poor relationship with his Father and so the Father (papa) manifests himself in a manner that would help Mac relate. This is both a strength and a weakness of the book. The fact that Satan is never mentioned in any way whatsoever was a weakness. Another weakness, as has been pointed out by other reviews (see the top three reviews), is the fear of the Lord aspect is missing. A final weakness is Sarayu. Why is the Holy Spirit represented as a Chinese woman named Sarayu? The author explains that it is a foreign word for wind, but still, I found it to be a weakness.
Even with these weaknesses, I would recommend this book to everybody. It is a faith builder and a healing book.

A insightful and healing journey
The Shack was a riveting and emotional journey. As a born-again Christian, I recommend anyone and everyone read this book. It creates a visually stimulating collection that puts skin on the greatness of God. Young magnificently molds an image of the Trinity in a remarkable and unique way that for this mature Christian was amazing. Young does what many "religious" writers and speakers fail to do: make God real.

The Shack is a misleading book on Christianity.
The Shack uses emotion to teach wrong doctrine. I personally feel that this book is trying to cleverly teach a Christ that is not of the Bible.

First, the trinity is presented as Morman gods or people, see pgs 88 -89.
The Father is represented as a woman. God being male is important to our belief system. Jesus calls the Father, Father. We pay "Our Father," and "We bow before the Father, upon whose name every Father in heaven and on earth are named. If we do not keep this relationship, we will have toubles in our beliefs, because our relationship with God will be wrong.

Page 177 presents a Mormon heaven speaking about pearls and Jesus.

Page 177 describes Church as a man made institution rather than the Body of Christ given to us by Jesus.

Wisdom is described almost as a god. Wisdom is a feminine form of a name but Jesus is Wisdom, and Wisdom is not a separate person or entity.

Lastly, Jesus is one hundred percent God and one hundred percent man. He does not choose to be man moment by moment as the books says. In fact "Jesus is a Divine Person with an integral divine nature who exercises his dinity through a human person."

I recommend not buying this book.