MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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God bothering
GORDON PARSONS doubts that the person of Jesus should be separated from the legacy of Christianity
POLITICAL MOVE: The Taking of Christ, by Caravaggio, 1602
[Public Domain]
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
I Judge No One
By David Lloyd Dusenbury
Hurst, £25
READERS of this book will be drawn to it principally by its subtitle, A Political Life of Jesus. Could anyone doubt, given the role that Christianity has played in world power-politics throughout the last two millennia, that the founder of the religion was essentially a political figure?
David Lloyd Dusenbury, philosopher and historian, would agree but claims that “we tend to confuse the person of Jesus with the legacy of Christianity.”
Rejecting what he terms the “modern theory of Jesus” first promulgated by the17th century Enlightenment philosopher, Reimarus, for whom Jesus was “a Zealot-style aspirant to sovereignty in a last-days kingdom of Israel,” Dusenbury, like Spinoza, Neitzsche and Kant, considers Jesus to have been an ethical revolutionary.
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