American - Writer | April 2, 1948 -
God is God, but he has various names in different languages, and each strand of monotheistic religion has multiple ways of describing the godhead.
Jay Parini
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Within the Christian tradition, fundamentalism arose in the 19th century as an effort to push back against modern' readings of the Bible that suggested everything in the text wasn't true in some literal sense.
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Beginning in the late 18th century, some German scholars began to regard Holy Scripture not as a single revelation but a sequence of inspired texts that occurred in specific times and places and were subject to varied and multiple meanings.
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American fundamentalist thought connected strongly to reactionary political ideology as nervous Christians pushed back against liberal reforms on many fronts.
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What I'm trying to argue, as passionately as I can, is that the Jesus story isn't worth dying for, it's worth living for. Jesus presents a third way, a way of being in the worth that embraces the Sermon on the Mount, with its challenge to violence and greed.
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I regard Jesus, like the Buddha, as a figure with the power to shape our lives.
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I argue that the resurrection was not the Great Resuscitation. It was a total transformation. I just don't accept the black-and-white thinking that goes along with needing to regard the gospels are literally true.
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The gospels were, in fact, written anywhere from forty to a hundred years after Jesus, and their authors attempted to demonstrate that Jesus could be seen to fulfill various Old Testament pronouncements.
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So who is Jesus? For me, he's the central character in the greatest story ever told. It's a story about a gradually realizing kingdom that lies inside of us.
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In truth, Jesus did not, in his own time, attract much notice.
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Who was Jesus anyway? After twenty centuries, there is not much anyone can agree on. The four canonical gospels don't measure up to modern standards of biographical writing, and - outside of this material - there is precious little contemporary evidence, apart from a few glancing mentions of Jesus or the movement centered on him.
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I've spent a good deal of time in the Middle East over the years, lecturing at universities in places like Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and Morocco.
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