A couple weeks ago my writing buddy and good friend, Nathan Marchand, tagged me in a FB post about a new nerdy devotional. Finding God in Anime Vol. 2 one is entirely focused on anime and includes around 2 dozen contributors. That is a ton of writers.
I emailed the editors and had them send me a PDF so I could give you some details on this. I counted about 46 entries in the Table of Contents. That is even more entries than in each of our 42 Series installments. (Hint, our number of entries is in the title of ours).
I was surprised to find out how short the entries are. No one had told me the devotionals were “bite size” as the image above says. I think they tried to keep them around 600 words, which is about half of what we shoot for with our devotional books. I found some great gems in there but a few clearly needed a higher word count and felt a little more like introductions than full devotionals. Some of the anime that came up the most included Attack on Titan, Cells at Work, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and Violet Evergarden but there are many other anime represented in this book. Here are some of my favorites.
Kayla A. Green has a devotional entitled “You Don’t have to be Afraid” on page 76. She uses Kakuriyo: Bed & Breakfast for Spirits to help us look for Christ in our scared times and even points us to the sacraments (such as Communion) to keep in step with Christ.
Laura A. Grace uses the anime Komi Can’t Communicate to look at the fear of sharing Christ and how to take some steps in telling others about your experience with Him. Find “It Starts with One” on page 44.
The first entry to really jump out at me was “Beautiful Cruel World” by Simon Barbu. He pulls out thoughts on how we see our world from Attack on Titan‘s Mikasa Ackerman. This was probably my favorite entry in the book and I’m not a big AoT fan.
Other writers include Daniel Andrade from Geeks Under Grace, as well as Kathleen Bird, Joshua Reid, and many others.
If you love Jesus and enjoy anime…or if you enjoy anime and want to further explore who this Jesus guy is…or if you just want to get a new view of religion with the help of anime, this book is for you. Find it here on Amazon.