An extended review of a 2025 book by Josh Nadeau
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Thomas Nelson, 2025. 288 pages. $26 (e-book $20)
“What if you took the first step of thousands toward becoming a Saint?” I picked up Room for Good Things to Run Wild expecting another hipster-Christian life story (of which there are many these days), but I kept stopping and thinking, “This is really good.”
I’d call it a hagiography, the biography of a saint. It tells the story of how B.C. author Josh Nadeau recovers from alcoholism and other things that made his soul sick, starting with a double of bourbon at 5 a.m. in a life bathed with success and darkness.
This book will serve well as tinder to ignite a spiritual awakening for post-Evangelicals struggling with holiness. Nadeau helps readers recover the beauty of being a Christian-in-progress, or as he calls it, discovering how to “follow the call of the Hidden Music.”
Nadeau’s book is a bricolage of Christian authors, drawing from CS. Lewis, Augustine, Chesterton, patristics and especially the form of John Bunyan (or perhaps, Dante?) as he shares his pilgrimage towards Christ.
His journey begins by leaving a job that had become soul-deadening and follows his move toward a more creaturely pace of life. Along the way, he spends time in England learning to number his days and worship Jesus through beauty, cathedrals and Guinness included, before returning to the Canadian West coast to write, make art and attend more carefully to the shape of his life.
Room for Good Things to Run Wild is written with five acts.
The Anatomy of Anguish is where Nadeau introduces himself at rock bottom, and eventually discovers that his spirituality had been disembodied, keenly articulated through the story of a friend inviting him for food only to bait-and-switch him with a Bible passage.
In The Shape of Immanence Nadeau discovers confession and repentance as rhythms of divine expansion, where God shows himself clearly in contrast to dogmatics that hide Him as if we were “Brains in a vat.”
In The Architecture of Incarnation, Nadeau encounters Jesus through vivification – coming alive, even in his body – to the new life of Christ after dying to sin.
For The Symphony of Embodiment, Nadeau invites the reader into a new way of living where “Longing isn’t a one way street” – Jesus becomes our archetype for life.
Lastly, The Melody of New Beginnings explores the kind of thinking that leads further into truth – a saint’s sanctified imagination.
A friend who read this before me said, “I did hit a point when I was like, ‘I get it, you had an alcohol problem,’” because Nadeau’s alcoholism sits at the centre of his broken relationship with desire.
Nadeau keeps circling the same wound in order to show how deep sin runs, not only in him, but in all of us. Nadeau is slowly retracing the nuances of his recovery from alcoholism so we can slowly retrace the nuances of our own death and resurrection.
If I’m being honest, reading him serenade his stout sometimes made me want to find a pint, fast. On top of that, the general style of the book is a gritty-hipster wash of moody scenes that flirt with being trendy, which is only ameliorated by the fact that his work is carrying a loaded right-hook-to-the-jaw of substance.
Nadeau writes, “I had come full circle, but my vision had expanded. And that’s the same invitation I now lay before you.” Not only does he locate himself in the same wandering pilgrimage of figures like Dante and Augustine, he invites us to join them.
What I love about Room for Good Things to Run Wild is Nadeau’s Thomistic commitment to naming himself as a desiring creature, and he does this over and against a therapeutic or moralistic impulse to erase his draw towards beauty. This is as truly a theology of art as it is only a theology that an artist could write.
He does not take up his sword against desire as something crass or animal. His story is that Christianity is where good things run wild, and that the Church, at its best, teaches us how to enjoy those things well. If you want to once again taste and see that the Lord is good, take up and read.
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