JC called it "Hallmark" Christianity; for the most part, I agree with that analysis. Some things she wrote seemed to resonate with me but too much seemed less profound than I had been led to believe.

I have been reading spiritual literature as part of my morning routine. Freeing Jesus by Diana Butler Bass was an exploration of the various roles Jesus plays in the Bible and in our lives. Bass is a progressive theologian who uses her evangelical past to inform her current understandings of Jesus. The book was refreshing and joyful even as Bass grounds her ideas firmly in Scripture. ( )

Diana Butler Bass' secular friends often ask her “How can you still be a Christian?” In "Freeing Jesus," she explains that her experience of Jesus has changed over the years, and that she isn’t the same kind of Christian she used to be. Freeing Jesus explores the many images of Jesus we encounter and embrace through a lifetime—and how we make theology from the text of our lives in conversation with scripture and tradition. Check it out!

Note: This is kinda a cute review. Holds up relatively well for my Christian period. A little long, now that I feel like….

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Although certainly there’s the element of an interfaith book here—specifically a Christian dialogue with the world—and as people have noted also elements of a Christian memoir, since she talks about herself and her story, I think that really this book is actually more on the popular side of Christian theology, nature of God theology, Christology. That is, it asks that most Christian of questions, that most cute of questions, Who is Jesus?

[N.B. At the very end she confirms this—memoir theology, not theological memoir.]

And remember team: we’ve got to talk as though he’s good, and act as though he’s bad. Lol. Jk.

I don’t know. On the one side, I have a Fra Angelico book, (Renaissance monk painter), you know, with all those pictures of my girlfriend, Mary, so, it’s not like I’m the biggest iconoclast. But certainly a lot of people don’t want to see a new side to Jesus as people change, which is ultimately just a lack of love for their neighbor, so….

Did I mention I see Jesus as a duck? I don’t see lambs on a regular basis, and anyway they’re more colorful, lol. I never met a Nazi who didn’t think that they were a lamb, hahaha. Sorry, lambie. I know it’s not your fault. Free the lambs! Go vegan! All right!

…. It’s a great book. I hate to be one of these narrow band of acceptability types, but it seems to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of grumpy theology (few fi foe fum I smell the blood of an American), and Emma or Mr Woodhouse theology (sure I had a great education, but it just didn’t “take” because I just want to skip to the part where I buy expensive furniture).

She is kinda delightful, but she has a goal, and it’s not to delight in the gilded cage.

…. I think it’s sad that some people only quote Jack when he felt he had to shock the pedants into action, and almost never when he said something that to us would be very surprising, such as those occasions when he was broad-minded and tolerant.

…. While midcentury comfort and tepid indifference to religion etc is certainly a problem, and there are some good things to village evangelicalism, it’s amazing to me (coming years later I know) that you could preach uprightness and not see fit to do something about familial rape, you know. I guess that doesn’t fit into heaven/hell/family television!

…. I guess I should just read Black theology (although a lot of it is probably just hymn lyrics), but although I think that the conservatives can be too macho, the liberals can inhabit this space where suffering is wrong because God wants me to have a pony, just like everybody always told me, things are bad because they feel bad, blah blah blah. (Ironically this would not be the way of hymnal theology.) I don’t know, it’s just very reactive. I guess I’m a freak, but I think that if you’re raised conservative, you have to leave one corner of your heart conservative in some way, because we continue our ancestors and parents, and that’s acceptance. The other way is just blah blah blah I want a pony, mommy kill mister macho. Bitch, I want a pony too, but do you think I can’t wake up in the morning because God made a Mistake by not giving me one? Even many of the Austen freaks couldn’t afford to have a pony.

…. But sometimes it’s good.

Authoritarian Literalist: How can a dead Jew be “Lord”? I find this both confusing and threatening. The military ruler is Lord, dammit.

…. *guy actually lugging a giant cross around* for a crazy literal thing, that’s not so bad, because it’s actually just literal and (probably) not cover for The Irish War Chief Is Lord, you know—it’s actually kinda cute. He’s like a cartoon character. What’s that guy doing. Oh that guy. He’s carrying a giant cross. I know but why. Well. I guess that’s his reading of the gospel.

…. You just have to remember who you trust; it’s not the Irish War Chief, it’s Jesus.

…. I do think she’s a little cray though. Here she is nit picking her theology about “Jesus owns me”—oh noes that Sounds Bad, what will the Angry Teenagers say—and here she is talking about herself at that time, when she was 19 and trying to help prostitutes and street people, it’s like Bitch, if that’s what you think, then obviously it’s working for you.

Right? I don’t know if I could help prostitutes if I were a girl.

…. Incarnation is the only way for us, and since we know the general through the particular, we know incarnation through Jesus.

…. “But the more constricted my doctrine became, the more constrained my heart felt.”

…. I read part of the thing on the Fearless Girl statue on Wall Street Diana mentions and it’s a trip. First you have the cracker capitalists who are ready to denounce the market and the system and take to the barricades to bring down capitalism so that they don’t have to let their mom into their investing class, (and economic development has to be opposed, if it leads to protection for the environment, blood is thicker than water, people, white man’s blood, no peace with the Jew), and then the Leninists for whom gender is a distraction, sorry the feminists, the Fearless Girl might as well be the Frightened Boy, for all they care—Don’t you dare try to be good! I’m still going to destroy you! Don’t you make it harder on me; you’ll just make me mad! Etc.

Diana likes the statue. If everyone were an Episcopalian or whatever, an Episcopalian of today, there would be a lot less Just To Spite You Ism, you know…. You convinced the Orangemen not to protest the annual Leprechaun Parade? How infuriating! You KNEW that would make the IRA look bad when the bomb blows up tomorrow at Effeminate Chauvinist Square! You deserve to be punished by GOD for making me look bad! This is Much Worse than just assaulting the useful furniture people, you know. 4 reel!

…. But in the end, we do not know, for what we understand is a mystery. To our exploring, there can never be an end…. Infinity cannot be used up….

And it cannot be hurt. Fire cannot burn it, crosses cannot kill her, you are safe with him, all is well….

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Afterword: It is funny, though, since it’s sorta good, despite it all. In most systems of Christianity and classification, not only is memoir and memoir-influenced-things inferior to ‘theology’ (disgust and rage are theology’s ravens; they fly over the face of the earth every morning and bring him news), they literally don’t acknowledge—say in Dewey, to say nothing of a school library—Christian memoir or Anything like that as a thing. To them, being human, it’s just crap. Squishy, inferior crap. Well, Christian, I regret to inform you…. 🤖

…. Afterword 2: It’s a character flaw: I get angry easily when people make Blair and her (Harvard-bound) minions look good—as Christians are wont to do—but it is a useful example of what church people usually believe. The average church thinker is so disgusted with the ordinary person, that they also have to hate the intellectual who can make herself understood by a good-faith non-specialist, you know. Another case study in Christian forgiveness for the file…. I’m sorry, and not for your sake, Christian, but maybe one day I’ll change my mind, but for right now I just want this episode (so to speak) to end with Blair Waldorf giving a snide speech that ends with, “So just get out of my life.”

…. Afterword 3: I guess you could say Serena is the good one; she had a classic spiritual experience when she saw that boy die; she experienced penitence, practically the only spiritual experience Christians seek to have. Blair isn’t a bad person though, and the church for all its conformity-mindedness has noticed extraordinary little about ordinary people who aren’t bad (and especially if they’re girls). Blair is just an ordinary, once-born girl who is Not a senseless unsympathetic bitch, you know; not the shit swamp that Luther and even parts of the Bible would make her…. Serena experienced guilt, and that’s what we trust, you know: guilt and pain. So much of the Christian life seems to revolve around the idea that only if you could be there when Jesus died and watch him die and feel his pain and pretend like you ‘killed someone’ like Serena, you’d be saved, from…. happiness, I guess? Saved from inner peace? Saved from thinking well of your neighbors? It works somewhat sometimes, of course; but it can royally screw someone up, this penitence thing—more often than it should, even in a world like this. There has to be a better way.

In Freeing Jesus, Bass challenges the idea that Jesus can only be understood in static, one-dimensional ways and asks us to instead consider a life where Jesus grows with us and helps us through life’s challenges in several capacities: as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence.

Freeing Jesus is an invitation to leave the religious wars behind and rediscover Jesus in all his many manifestations, to experience Jesus beyond the narrow confines we have built around him. It renews our hope in faith and worship at a time when we need it most.