#stephen prothero

[magica-pseudoacademica]

Womanist theologians were particularly wary of the flirtation of some radical feminist theologians with goddess worship. Virtually all womanist theologians had grown up in the black church, and moving "beyond Christolatry," as [Mary] Daly put it, was to them unthinkable. Sojourner Truth, the ex-slave and abolitionist orator, often began her lectures by invoking Jesus, whom she described as "a friend, standing between me and God, through whom, love flowed as from a fountain." Womanist theologians invoked Jesus too and, like Truth, they saw him as both a personal Savior and a political Messiah, an incarnation of God who came into the world to save individuals from sin and deliver his chosen people from captivity.

Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (2003)

[theoceanislikeyou]

"I decided as well to try to be in the world for a while after the manner of a Mary Oliver poem—to wake early, to look and to listen, to attend to nature, to slow down, to be grateful, to live simply, to love recklessly, to sit with my losses, to take what is given rather than what is desired, to attend to the presence of death in the midst of life, to venture out into storms rather than taking refuge from them. " Joy Before Death: Following the Path of Mary Oliver by Stephen Prothero

[pussyluvr2000]

Currently reading American Jesus by Stephen Prothero. Mentally filing it in the same cabinet as Du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne. I sure do love a good book about American Christianity. Shoutout to the previous owner for underlining the exact same shit i would've underlined. Cutest part of shopping only at secondhand bookstores is that the annotations make me feel like I have a buddy.

[tibaert]

Christelijke idioterie

Engelen bestaan… Even voorstellen, de godsdienstwetenschapper Stephen Prothero… God the Bestseller by Stephen Prothero   “EIN LAND BIBLISCHER IDIOTEN” Jeanne d’Arc war die Frau von Noah: Der Religions-Wissenschaftler Stephen Prothero warnt vor gefährlichem “religiösen Analphabetismus” der US-Amerikaner.   Anne-Catherine Simon   Neun von zehn Amerikanern deklarieren sich als gläubig, und zwei…

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[magica-pseudoacademica]

[F]or the overwhelming majority of Victorian Americans a female Jesus was literally unthinkable. No one during the evangelical century seriously contested Jesus' maleness. What evangelicals and liberals did was nuance his undeniable maleness with a heavy dose of femininity. In sermons and novels, prayers and hymns, lithographs and half-tones, evangelical and liberal Protestants alike depicted Jesus as a feminine male - what we would now call an androgyne [...] Especially during the heyday of separate-spheres ideology, it simply did not make sense to find the masculine and the feminine cohabiting in one body. One of the great mysteries of Jesus has been his ability to bring divinity and humanity together in one person. To Victorian Americans his ability to display feminine virtues in a male body must have been almost as mysterious. Eventually it would become disquieting too.

Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (2003)

[magica-pseudoacademica]

An aging Jewish woman finds herself in a Catholic hospital with a huge picture of Jesus facing her bed. A passing nun, aware that the woman is Jewish, offers to have the picture removed. "Oh no," the woman replies, "such a success by one of our boys. Leave it up!" Perhaps humor is not to be taken seriously. But these jokes, and their proliferation outside Jewish circles, suggest [...] important things about the American history of Jesus the Jew. They suggest [...] that efforts to reclaim Jesus for Judaism persist. The project of proudly claiming Jesus for Judaism began in the United States in the 1860s, ramped up in the 1890s, and peaked in the 1920s and 1930s. Though popular interest in Jesus the Jew waned following World War II and the Holocaust, it did not go away in either the U.S. Jewish community or American culture at large. Americans now laugh at these jokes not because a Jewish Jesus is an anomaly but because he is commonplace. Everyone now knows that Jesus was a good Jewish boy.

Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (2003)

[magica-pseudoacademica]

From the first settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth, immigrants have shaped their identity as Americans by adapting their religious beliefs and practices to American soil. When Vedantists referred to Jesus as an Oriental, they were saying something not only about his character but also about theirs. Like us, they were saying, Jesus lives in America, but his spiritual home is in India. As they relocated and reinterpreted Jesus, Indian-American swamis and their American-born followers staked a claim to participate fully in the drama of American religion. By calling into question widespread stereotypes of Hinduism, the Vedantists asserted their right to define their own religious heritage, rather than having hostile missionaries define it for them. If Christ was an Oriental, then perhaps Western stereotypes of Hinduism were suspect. At the very least, they were not the first and final word. But these Vedantists were doing something more bold than asserting a right to define themselves and their religion. They were asserting a right to define Christianity too.

Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (2003)                

[magica-pseudoacademica]

Social Gospel thinkers initially described Jesus in the sentimental language of domestic piety, focusing on his self-sacrifice on the cross. After the century turned and the new cult of masculinity emerged in full force, however, their Jesus muscled up. Sentimental hymns that appeared in early YMCA hymnals disappeared in a revised hymnal issued in 1904. A 1910 songbook called Manly Songs for Christian Men praised "the manly man of Galilee." Gradually the story of Jesus' cleansing of the Jerusalem Temple became the paradigmatic gospel story. "There was nothing mushy, nothing sweetly effeminate about Jesus," Walter Rauschenbusch insisted. "He was the one that turned again and again on the snarling back of His pious enemies and made them slink away. He plucked the beard of death and He went into the city and the temple to utter those withering woes against the dominant class."

Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (2003)