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Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte
Titel
Jesus Made in America: A Cultural History from the Puritans to The Passion of the Christ by Stephen J. Nichols (review)
Ist Teil von
  • Christianity & Literature, 2009, Vol.59 (1), p.161-164
Ort / Verlag
Malibu: Johns Hopkins University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2009
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Literature Online (LION)
Beschreibungen/Notizen
  • In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: BOOK REVIEWS 161 As Taylor has been doing in recent works, his final chapter attempts to put his theories directly into practice. His histories of Western philosophy, the death of God, the Protestant Reformation, speculative science, and himself, lead to the philosophical-biographical assertion that he is "a committed relativist or, perhaps more accurately, relationalist, who firmly believes that the future depends on displacing religious foundationalism and exclusive moralism with a religion of life and an ethics without absolutes" (254). Although there is always a danger in expecting theory to translate into immediate practical action, this is exactly what he sets out to do, providing "guiding principles for negotiating conflicts that often seem nonnegotiable" (354). While his The Moment of Complexity (2001) turned to education, After God turns to ethical issues surrounding clean water and global warming. Taylor's work continues to provide an important intervention in trying to redefine where we are in an age that seems to be moving too fast, a time, he warns, where "midnight may be approaching" (xii). Perhaps the most difficult task for readers of After God is to mentally hang on to all the parts and their connections and to still be aware of the larger themes. To that end, Taylor proves a helpful if occasionally heavy-handed guide. Whether readers are convinced by Taylor's narrative or not will depend greatly on how they read the meaning of his title. Just what does he mean by after God? For Taylor,we are after the God of Nietzsche, after Thomas Altizer's "death of god:' after the neofoundationalist God of Jerry Falwell, and the self-help God of Joel Osteen, after, even, the God of deconstruction. The only path, for him, is to move toward new constructions-more plural, more relational-of God, religion, history, science, and ethics within uncertainty, complexity, and insecurity. Is such a shift possible? For Taylor-for whom this possibility also means confessing impossibility-it is our only hope. Gregory Erickson New York University JesusMade in America: A Cultural History from the Puritans to The Passion of the Christ. By Stephen J. Nichols. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Academic, 2008. ISBN978-0-8308-2849-4. Pp. 240. $20. Stephen J. Nichols's new book would seem to be a welcome corrective to the consumer emphasis of contemporaryevangelical culture. From the openingchapter on the Puritan imagination, informed as it was by an orthodox image of Jesus as both fully divine and fully human, to the finalchapters on the visually-oriented, movie-viewing and TV-watching modern evangelical whose Jesus is more often "a friend" who cares about Republican platforms, Jesus Made in America brings 162 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE together a historical patchwork of anti-intellectual American religious perspectives. These are perspectives that we have always understood were there; but perhaps we had concluded that they were not ours. Indeed, one important point to emerge here is that American evangelicals not only do not have traditions; they lack the capacity to value them. This discussion alone would seem to warrant a wide audience for this book. The subtitle, A Cultural History from the Puritans to The Passion of the Christ, suggests the plan here. The first four chapters focus on two or three representative figures for each of the last four centuries of American history. This constitutes the first halfof the book. The first chapter on the Puritans is followed by a second on the rationality of Thomas Jefferson in the early American republic. Chapter 3 explores Jacksonian democracy in nineteenth-century America and the sentimental, feminized Jesus of the Victorians. A fourth chapter contrasts the preaching of Harry Emerson Fosdick with J.Gresham Machen in the early twentieth century. The second halfofJesusMade in America shifts to a narrative of the commercial emergence of evangelical Christianity following the late 1960s Jesus movement. Where Nichols spends the first four chapters on textual analysis of representative sermons and articles, he moves in the second half to individual chapters on each of the following: Christian popular music, Christian movies, Christian bookstore trinkets, and the Christian right in politics. In these chapters, the sudden rush of artifacts deluges the argument, with many references receiving a paragraph and...

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