Tips for
Small Group Study

1. Use Death by Suburb as an 8-week study on the spiritual disciplines.

2. Each week study one of the 8 chapters that explain the suburban toxins and the spiritual practices that counter them.

3. Download the free discussion guide for a list of questions to guide the discussion for each chapter.

4. Download Dave's Favorite Writers for additional resources on Christian spirituality.

5. Sign up with your email address to receive regular blog updates by the author.

6. Add your suburban story of The Thicker Life to the blog.
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Practice 4

ENVIRONMENTAL TOXIN: Thinking that the good life is supposed to be an easy life.

SPIRITUAL PRACTICE: To stop fighting against that which we cannot change – the suffering that God has allowed into our life.

KEY QUOTE: In Chapter 5 (Remembering Laughter), Goetz writes, “I want the thicker life in Christ, but I don’t want to address the hard reality of my life. Even in suburbia, life is hard.”

KEY DISCUSSION POINTS:

* The good life is not contiguous. It ends badly for everyone.

* The path to enjoying the immortality symbols that you do have is to embrace the deep suffering in your life, accepting that all things, ultimately, come at the permission of God.

* True inner peace (from God) comes after I stop fighting against the things I cannot change – the divorce I didn’t want, the career that never fully materialized, the collateral damage from the affair I had, the fourth child with Down syndrome.


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DeathBySuburb.net
Copyright © 2005 David L. Goetz
Advance Praise for
Death by Suburb

"Death by Suburb ... addresses and overcomes the split in our religion, our lifestyles, and even our consciousness."
—Fr. Richard Rohr, O.F.M., author of Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer

"With a compassion born of his own experiences of suburban unreality and dysfunction, Goetz effectively evokes a thicker sense of our social and religious worlds."
—Leigh Schmidt, Princeton University, author of Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality

"Goetz sees the parched lives, the truncated spirits beneath the suburban bliss, and the grace too. In his gracious eyes suburbia begins to look like an outbreak of the Kingdom of God."
—William H. Willimon, author of Sinning Like a Christian