{"id":8215,"date":"2004-01-09T08:21:09","date_gmt":"2004-01-09T08:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/american_jesus.html"},"modified":"2004-01-09T08:21:09","modified_gmt":"2004-01-09T08:21:09","slug":"american_jesus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/american_jesus.html","title":{"rendered":"American Jesus"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/01\/08\/books\/08APPL.html\">Notre Dame&#8217;s A. Scott Appleby reviews a new book about the ways American culture has imaged Jesus<\/a><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>More than one-third of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0374178909\/qid=1073654407\/sr=2-1\/ref=sr_2_1\/102-5613830-6979317\">American Jesus<\/a> is devoted to the appropriation of Jesus by Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, the Dalai Lama and the Nation of Islam. In itself, this is fascinating and instructive material. For Prothero, the diffusion of Jesus into the thought worlds and sensibilities of non-Christian Americans constitutes the great triumph of the protean Jesus. Unfortunately, the celebration of Jesus&#8217; ubiquity occasionally echoes a tired mantra: &#8220;Church bad, American individualism good. Religion bad, spirituality good. Christianity oppressive, other religions lighthearted.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Tellingly, Catholics, who constitute the largest single denomination, do not fit Mr. Prothero&#8217;s version of &#8220;the good news.&#8221; Dogmatic to a fault, they insist that the doctrine of the Trinity, for example, far from being a metaphysical abstraction, roots Jesus&#8217; self-giving nature, character and personality at the very center of the Godhead. The love of the other, which Americans find so endearing about Jesus, says something definitive about Jesus, of course. But Christians also hope that it says something definitive about the nature of reality and the meaning of existence, not least about human nature created in God&#8217;s image. The ancient creedal affirmations that attempted to link Jesus to &#8220;being itself&#8221; were on to something.<\/p>\n<p>Throughout most of American history, the Catholic Jesus has been the suffering servant, the compassionate victim and wounded redeemer whose identification with the poor and the forgotten is an act of identity, not charity. Yet the suffering Christ makes few appearances in Mr. Prothero&#8217;s account. One worries that this Jesus, the Lord of the marginalized and forlorn, may soon become the man nobody knows in 21st-century America.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Notre Dame&#8217;s A. Scott Appleby reviews a new book about the ways American culture has imaged Jesus<\/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-8215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>American Jesus - 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\/2004\/01\/american_jesus.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"American Jesus - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Notre Dame&#8217;s A. Scott Appleby reviews a new book about the ways American culture has imaged Jesus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/american_jesus.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2004-01-09T08:21:09+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"American Jesus - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/american_jesus.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"American Jesus - Via Media","og_description":"Notre Dame&#8217;s A. Scott Appleby reviews a new book about the ways American culture has imaged Jesus","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/american_jesus.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2004-01-09T08:21:09+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/american_jesus.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/american_jesus.html","name":"American Jesus - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2004-01-09T08:21:09+00:00","dateModified":"2004-01-09T08:21:09+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/american_jesus.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/american_jesus.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/american_jesus.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"American Jesus"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. 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\/8215","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=8215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}