Time Magazine notices St. Joseph

(and cites Sandra Miesel!)

Accompanied by a photoessay on St. Joseph in art

Protestants have never felt the kind of unease with Joseph that, in a kind of allergic response to Catholicism’s elaborate exultation of Mary, inhibited their relationship with the Virgin. On the other hand, he doesn’t particularly interest them either. There are exceptions. The neo-orthodox theologian Karl Barth championed Joseph’s role of taking care of Jesus. The black church in the U.S., says Robert Franklin, an expert on that topic at Atlanta’s Emory University, has long felt a connection between Joseph as patriarch of an unexpectedly blended family and African-American slave history, in which men "found their own wives full with child and at the birth discovered the child was a mulatto." But for the most part, explains David Steinmetz, a religious historian at Duke Divinity School in Durham, N.C., "Joseph plays a very small role in Protestantism, aside from cameo appearances in Advent and on Christmas."

But Jenkins may be tapping into two relatively recent trends in the Protestant church, particularly in its Evangelical wing. The first involves his tight focus on the relationship between Joseph and Jesus. The attendance in most U.S. churches skews female, provoking a search for strong masculine Biblical role models and ways to create church-based male bonding, especially between younger men and mentors. Joseph is the original Promise Keeper. Also, Jenkins sees a shift in even conservative Evangelical preaching from stringent exegesis, or analysis of text, to more free-ranging storytelling. "There are guys who can spend an hour just talking about one verse, and that happens to be my favorite form of preaching," he says. "But there is a marketplace of ideas. People now have access to iPods and TV and movies." Christian fiction is booming, and "if you go to a good, big, Evangelical church now, you’ll hear a guy weaving a story."

That plays to Joseph’s strengths. The more that belief strictly cleaves to "what the Bible says," the less will be heard of him. But the moment the believer imagines himself or herself into the biblical story, Joseph explodes back onto the scene. Scripture plain may not spend a sentence describing the Egyptian sojourn, but anyone reconstructing a narrative of the Bible will recognize it as an episode and Joseph as its hero. The same holds true for those extensive yet ill-chronicled Nazareth years.