I have come across some good reading lately. Am still absorbed in Kearney and Mark Taylor, but am also digging into John Carroll's, The Existential Jesus, and Sacred Matters: celebrity worship, sexual ecstasies, the living dead, and other signs of religious life in the United States (a long, but fabulous subtitle), by Gary Laderman. Laderman's premise is that alongside traditional expressions of the religious impulse, are a treasure trove of often overlooked expressions of the sacred in the culture. He finds traces of the spirit in everything from celebrity to our ongoing fascination with the undead---not new on some levels, but well presented and some nice redefining of what is holy and sacred.
Carroll takes an entirely different approach, offering up a new reading of Mark's gospel, stripping Jesus of lots of baggage and attempting to redefine him. I was reminded of Nick Cave's vision of Jesus in his introduction to Mark's gospel in the Pocket Canon series, although Carroll goes much, much deeper. Part of the blurb in the book from the publisher declares, "The existential Jesus has no interest in sin, and his focus is not on an afterlife. He is anti-church, anti-establishment, anti-family, and anti-community; a teacher, with himself his only student, he gestures enigmatically from within his own torturous experience, inviting the reader to walk in his shoes and ask the question, Who am I? This book argues that Jesus is the West’s great teacher on the nature of being." Something like that deserves a read as far as I am concerned.
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