{"id":6369,"date":"2005-12-14T11:26:29","date_gmt":"2005-12-14T11:26:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/12\/st-joseph.html"},"modified":"2005-12-14T11:26:29","modified_gmt":"2005-12-14T11:26:29","slug":"st-joseph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/12\/st-joseph.html","title":{"rendered":"St. Joseph"},"content":{"rendered":"

Time Magazine notices St. Joseph<\/a><\/p>\n

(and cites Sandra Miesel!)<\/p>\n

Accompanied by a photoessay on St. Joseph in art<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

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."<\/p>\n

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."<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSt. Joseph - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/12\/st-joseph.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"St. Joseph - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"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. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6369\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}