The Divine Magician
The Disappearance of Religion and the Discovery of Faith
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Peter Rollins knows one magic trick - now, make sure you watch closely. It has three parts: the Pledge, the Turn, and the Prestige. In The Divine Magician, each part comes into play as Rollins describes the way God works in our world today, and how this connection helps us understand the truly radical message of Christianity.
The Divine Magician interrogates traditional religious notions from a refreshingly original perspective, undermining the commonplace debates involving dogma, doctrine, and tradition.
Rejecting our preconceptions of what the spiritual and the religious mean, Rollins argues for a deeply material faith that finds meaning not in a set of beliefs, but in a passionate commitment to the world.
This incendiary reading of Christianity breaks the boundaries of religion and overturns the tables of conventional wisdom. It offers hope for those seeking a depth and density in life, calling for the existing church to disappear, only to reappear in a fundamentally new and dynamic form.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
More-traditional Christians will undoubtedly find Rollins's book a theological provocation, as he takes familiar parables, characters, and terms in this case, the Crucifixion of Jesus and the tearing of the curtain in the temple and rewrites their conventional interpretations. Yet Rollins (The Idolatry of God) also disturbs the theologically liberal, and even the avowedly secular, revealing that behind the "magician's curtain" Jesus is a trickster who rebels against rules and revolutionizes religion. While affirming the Crucifixion and its language of faith, hope, and love, Rollins also exposes its limitations. He redefines these concepts to a degree, but he is not in the business of total reconstruction; he leaves that to the reader. He is philosophical throughout, and at times enigmatic, but he clarifies his points with pop-culture references, everyday parables, and illustrative diagrams. This book is unsettling, as intended, but anyone who wrestles with big theological questions in a post-secular world will find Rollins' work as exhilarating as it is disquieting.
