Addendum to "Secular Self-help in Seminary?"

Well, I discussed the training material with my professor via e-mail. He assured me that he has found it very useful personally and that it is designed in such a way that you can customize it with your own values and your own action steps. Having now read through about a third of the book, I remain unconvinced that it is the best resource around which to build a significant portion of a Christian ministry training course...it is not as horribly materialistic as the included publicity literature made it sound, but it is built largely on humanistic self-help presuppositions (you can do it if you just think about it, you are entitled to all that is best in life now, if you follow this advice you WILL succeed-guaranteed, etc.).

I guess as I get farther along in the book I'll see whether it really is customizable to Christian values and actions. Hopefully it won't be like taking a map that tells you how to get to New York City, scribbling out the words "New York City" and writing "Philadelphia" over top of it and then calling it a map that tells you how to get to Philadelphia...if you follow that map guess where it's gonna take you? Okay, it probably won't be that bad, but that analogy popped into my head and it amused me so I decided to share it.