The Return of the Warrior Jesus
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54640-2004Mar12?language=printer Bookshelf Cultural Icons and Alternative Religions
By Bill Broadway
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 13, 2004; Page B09
>... In "American Jesus," Stephen Prothero examines Jesus as folk hero, a model of faith and action whose image has been shaped by the attitudes of his religious and nonreligious admirers.
"Jesus in America," by Richard Wrightman Fox, demonstrates how religious leaders and politicians for 200 years have embraced and interpreted Jesus's teachings to validate diametrically opposite views on civil rights, prohibition, war, marriage and other societal issues.
Other new books probe the spiritual life of Ronald Reagan, a different kind of American icon, and explore ways that varied spiritual currents continue to affect America's religious landscape. Except where a publication date is indicated, these selected titles are available now through bookstores and Internet retailers.
• AMERICAN JESUS: HOW THE SON OF GOD BECAME A NATIONAL ICON, by Stephen Prothero (Farrar Straus Giroux, $25). The 1998 PBS series "From Jesus to Christ" examined the historic and mythical underpinnings of Jesus's evolution from man to savior. This book takes the transformation a step further -- from man to messiah to celebrity. Prothero, who heads Boston University's religion department, argues that Jesus is an American everyman. He is central to Christianity, but he also enjoys cultural prominence (the secularization of Christmas is one example) and has been adapted in various forms by Hindus (Christ as yogi), Muslims (Jesus as prophet) and Buddhists (his Buddha-like teachings).
• FAITH IN THE FUTURE: HEALTHCARE, AGING AND THE ROLE OF RELIGION, by Harold Koenig and Douglas M. Lawson with Malcolm McConnell (Templeton, $24.95). One of the biggest religion stories at the turn of the century was increased evidence of a link between spirituality and health. At first, the discussion of how to use that connection focused on introducing spirituality into treatment programs. Now, with hospital costs soaring for a growing elderly population, talk has turned to ways that religious communities can supplement the work of traditional social and health-care institutions.
• GOD AND RONALD REAGAN: A SPIRITUAL LIFE, by Paul Kengor (ReganBooks, $26.95). As governor of California, Ronald Reagan told interviewer David Frost that Jesus was the person in history he most admired; as president, Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" and helped dismantle it. Kengor doesn't mention how George W. Bush later echoed those comments -- by calling Jesus his favorite philosopher and describing three countries as an "axis of evil" -- but his examination of Reagan's spirituality makes it hard not to draw comparisons. The author portrays Reagan as the spiritual man he always said he was, following the model of his mother, an ardent Disciples of Christ member, more than his father, a Catholic. Reagan believed that God had called him and the United States to bring down communism -- and to that end saved his life after an assassination attempt.
• GOD'S SACRED TONGUE: HEBREW AND THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION, by Shalom L. Goldman (University of North Carolina, March 29, $34.95). In researching the role of the Hebrew Bible and language in American history, Goldman made a remarkable discovery. One of the leading 19th-century Hebrew scholars was a Presbyterian minister and professor named George Bush, an ancestor of President Bush. Bush the scholar called for the restoration of the Jewish people to Palestine and wrote "The Life of Mohammed" (1830), an anti-Muslim polemic and the first American book on Islam. Goldman weaves Bush's story among that of other contributors to the United States' image of itself as the new promised land and protector of the old.
• JADED: HOPE FOR BELIEVERS WHO HAVE GIVEN UP ON CHURCH BUT NOT ON GOD, by A.J. Kiesling (Baker, $9.99 softcover). Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Christians are turned off by institutional church, numbed by dull or overly exuberant worship services and the increasingly corporate mentality of megachurches, according to the author. Not to worry, she tells these "real-life 'sheep' who are tired of barnyard Christianity." There are alternatives that allow you to have your spirituality and enjoy it, too -- from home worship groups to Internet churches and coffee houses.
• JESUS IN AMERICA: PERSONAL SAVIOR, CULTURAL HERO, NATIONAL OBSESSION, by Richard Wightman Fox (HarperSanFrancisco, $27.95). Like Prothero, Fox says it's difficult to be American without confronting the image of Jesus, either accepting it as a believer or using it as a foil to solidify a different religious expression. But Fox, a historian at the University of Southern California, willingly gives up his objectivity to become an apologist for Christianity. He asserts that, for the foreseeable future, a "large majority of Americans will continue praising Christ [and] will find ingenious ways to do [it]."
• THE LOST ART OF COMPASSION: DISCOVERING THE PRACTICE OF HAPPINESS IN THE MEETING OF BUDDHISM AND PSYCHOLOGY, by Lorne Ladner (HarperSanFrancisco, $23.95). Buddhism continues to expand its presence in the American imagination, sometimes more as philosophy than religion. In "The Lost Art of Compassion," Ladner, a Washington area psychologist, seeks to combat stress and depression by combining Buddhist tenets with Western psychology. Another work, "The Tibetan Book of Yoga" by Arizona resident Geshe Michael Roach (Doubleday, $15.95), provides -- for busy Americans with little time to read -- an illustrated, simplified guide to ancient yoga techniques.
• NEW RELIGIONS: A GUIDE [TO] NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS, SECTS AND ALTERNATIVE SPIRITUALITIES, by Christopher Partridge (Oxford, May 13, $40). Since her death in 1997, Princess Diana has become the focus of spiritual devotion and her grave a pilgrimage site -- following, as it were, in Elvis's footsteps. This illustrated guide to alternative religion places these cultural icons in the category "Celebrity-centric Spirituality," one of 200 listings of new and alternative spiritual expressions that have emerged in recent decades.
• ONE EQUALL LIGHT: AN ANTHOLOGY OF THE WRITINGS OF JOHN DONNE, compiled and edited by John Moses (Eerdmans, $28). Many people know Donne only for the famous phrases "for whom the bell tolls" and "no man is an island, entire of itself." But the English writer's influence runs deep in Western Christianity, and interest in his works has surged in recent years, especially in North America. Moses, dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London -- where Donne also was dean and is buried -- will speak about this new anthology of sermon excerpts at 6:30 p.m. Monday at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, 2430 K St. NW, and at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday at Washington National Cathedral.
• RELIGIOUS REVOLUTIONARIES: THE REBELS WHO RESHAPED AMERICAN RELIGION, by Robert C. Fuller (Palgrave, $27.95). The United States has a long-standing revolutionary religious spirit, beginning with Puritans and other radicals (to European eyes) and continuing with individualists who defied the status quo established on these shores. Fuller recounts the stories of 10 religious upstarts, among them: Anne Hutchinson, a Puritan dissident who helped found Rhode Island; Andrew Jackson Davis, America's first trance channeler; and James Cone, a black liberation theologian and professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
• WHAT'S RIGHT WITH ISLAM: A NEW VISION FOR MUSLIMS AND THE WEST, by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf (HarperSanFrancisco, May 11, $23.95). Rauf, a Sufi teacher and imam of a mosque 12 blocks north of the World Trade Center site, says the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks pulled him from his "warm mahogany pulpit" into public discussions -- and defense -- of Islam. Rauf opposes critics who view Islam as inherently flawed and insists that the tenets of Islam and Western democracy are compatible. Religious conflict is largely the result of "religiously illiterate people" who wave the banner of religion without understanding their own tradition or that of others, he writes.
Michael Pugliese