Оглавление
James Prothero. The Form of Faith
The Form of Faith
Table of Contents
Preface
One: Sunday School Jesus
Two: Summer Camp and Finding Another World
Three: Joy and Junior High
Four: Blessed Liberty and Gregg
Five: Bruce and Christ the Tiger
Six: High School and Farewell to California
Seven: Rambling and Joy
Eight: Jack Lewis Surprises Me
Nine: The Long Road Back
Ten: Anglicanism and What I Could Not Be
Eleven: Love Vindicated and Watercolor Paint
Twelve: There’s No Place Like Rome
Thirteen: Santa Ana and PhD
Fourteen: Christ and the Millennial
Fifteen: Recognition
Sixteen: Adelante
Bibliography
Отрывок из книги
Reflections on My Life, Romanticism, Meaning, and the Christian Faith in the Early 21st Century
James Prothero
.....
So this was my world where from an early age, I became well-acquainted with the stories and the content of the Bible through my mother and through my church. Fortunately for me, I never had the Sunday School teacher tell me that the earth was created in six days, something that would have made me uncomfortable. Like Don, I would have felt the need to correct the teacher, but however I lacked Don’s confidence to speak up. I got to know first the Sunday School Jesus. He was white, and had kindly eyes with a slight smile in all the art I saw. I have always been visual, so this was vital to my perceptions from the beginning. Also what was interesting from the beginning is that I felt a distrust for the images from the start. I lived a life fairly insulated from black, brown and red America, but I instinctively felt they were out there. So how did I begin to suspect that the safe, white, Evangelical, middle class world wasn’t everything? Perhaps it was the genial children’s television host, Captain Kangaroo, who did much to educate my young mind, (and to whom I am eternally grateful) who made a point of showing videos made of picture books that featured children of many races. And being the reader I was with access to Bibles—there were probably fifteen of them laying around the house at any given time—I read not only the passages where Christ was loving and reassuring, but the passages where he was severe, of which we heard less at Sunday School. And though I was too young to express it, I sensed even then that there was more than the world I saw and knew, and more than just the sweet and friendly Sunday School Jesus. Perhaps it was little hints in Sunday School songs like, “Red and yellow, black and white/ They are precious in His sight/ Jesus loves the little children of the world.” And why should this Jesus, who lived in the Middle East, look white? After all, wouldn’t Jesus look more like an Arab? My father’s endless supply of National Geographics had given me a visual clue what Middle Eastern people looked like. I wondered.
One thing Captain Kangaroo accomplished with me was to make me a researcher long before I knew what that was. I recall as a young boy discussing my “favorite subject” with my friends. I found myself surprised that I was one of the few that had a subject upon which I was reading everything I could get my hands on, and that this subject changed from time to time and that I considered that normal behavior. My parents surrounded me with books, but the Captain gave me my love of literacy, and the love of the intellectual and literary pleasures of exploring the world on the pages of a book. Of course, my parents knew what they were doing and were happy to park me in front of the television if the Captain was on. They did not allow me to watch just anything, but the Captain was a recognized blessing and I ate it up with my brothers, who were likewise bookish and born researchers. If there were any conflicts with my parents over television it was my love of Warner Brothers cartoons, Jay Ward cartoons and Tom and Jerry. But my folks needn’t have worried. From the wise creators of Bugs Bunny, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Tom and Jerry, I learned irony and just how odd the world is, and how laughter is pretty much the only thing one can sanely do with what life hands us. It gave me my love of irony which my students since have often remarked on.
.....
