Jesus in America
Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession
-
-
3.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Distinguished historian Richard W. Fox presents a brilliant cultural history of Jesus in the United States, from the earliest European settlers to today. Jesus in America is a historical and multicultural assessment of Jesus as savior and exemplar in religious and secular America, from the earliest Spanish portrayals of Jesus to the Native Americans to the modern-day Jesus who is both a secular and sacred hero.
Jesus is arguably the most influential figure in American social history, and for the first time his influence throughout the years has been explored in depth. From the colonists and the founding fathers to Martin Luther King Jr. and the hippies, virtually every era and movement has tried to make Jesus their own. Exploring the many ways he has wielded powerful influence over the course of American history, Fox identifies the nine principal takes on Jesus -- savior, moral ideal, superstar, etc. -- that have persisted throughout American history.
Richard W. Fox (Ph.D., Stanford) has taught American intellectual and cultural history, with emphasis on religion, at Yale, Reed, Boston University, and the University of Southern California. He is the author of Trials of Intimacy, and Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography.
“An extraordinary blend of historical sophistication, theological discrimination, and spiritual understanding ... rich and fluent in the complexities of religious life.” -The New Republic
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jesus has been an astonishingly mutable figure in American culture, lauded by presidents from Thomas Jefferson to George W. Bush, pressed into service by both abolitionists and slaveholders and marketed by Broadway producers and T-shirt makers. USC professor Fox undertakes the daunting task of telling a roughly chronological story of how Jesus or the many versions of Jesus has animated American life from the days of Cotton Mather to the days of Mel Gibson. Precisely because of Jesus' evergreen popularity, some readers may find Fox's book an inviting entr e to the personalities and controversies that have shaped Christianity in America. Fox's scholarship is dependable, and he does a fine job of distilling the essence of figures ranging from Jonathan Edwards to Aimee Semple McPherson. But Fox's net is so broadly cast that the book ends up contributing little to a story that has been exceedingly well told, and more persuasively interpreted, by historians like Mark Noll (America's God). This book will undoubtedly be compared to, and confused with, Stephen Prothero's American Jesus, but the text lacks Prothero's deftness with historical sources and his interpretive boldness there is little here to challenge historians' conventional wisdom or mainstream readers' assumptions. Nor does Fox, unlike Prothero, give much attention to non-Christian encounters with Jesus. But Fox still does a very serviceable job of explaining why pollsters say Americans rank Jesus as the "thirteenth greatest American of all time."
