Years ago, during Holy Week, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus preached on the seven last words of Christ. He decided to expand the sermons into a book.
Death on a Friday afternoon is one of the most profound meditations on the death and resurrection of Jesus. This book can be read anytime of the year, however, once read, you will find yourself drawn back to it again and again. It is an amazing piece of theological reflection and thought. ( )

Hmm. I was torn about how to rate this book; I guess I'd give it a 3 1/2 if I could. It was the first Neuhaus book I read, and, to be honest, I now think I enjoy his thought as a cultural commentator more than as a theologian.

I was looking forward to reading it during Holy Week, and it truly did contain some wonderful meditations on the Cross, which alone made it well worth reading. However, I felt that Neuhaus veered off his meditative course rather distractingly at times, and I found some of his thoughts on universalism and soteriology troubling. Occasionally he just went on too long.

For someone who worked so closely with evangelicals, he sometimes sounded, to my admittedly ultra-sensitive ears, a bit straw-mannish in his appraisals of Protestant theology. And I just don't really feel like debating what happened on the Cross when I'm reading this book on Good Friday. Still, for all that...an undeniably rich and well-written book by a godly man with a pastoral heart. ( )

An absolutely beautiful and punchy meditation on the Seven Last Words of Christ. Neuhaus has a sledgehammer style which is fairly unusual in meditative works, but highly effective when reviewing the Passion of Christ. Excited to read other books by him and to follow up on references he made in this work. Highly recommend. ( )

Read this book for the first time about 10 years ago and have pulled it out most holy week's since to look at it. This year was the first time I re-read it. A lot of insightful stuff here. I think this is Neahaus's best book. ( )

I've read this book every Lent for three years and I don't intend to stop doing so anytime soon. While my search has been far from exhaustive, I've yet to find a better book than Fr. Richard's deep meditations on the last words of Christ from the Cross.

Each year I find new passages that strike me. It seems that someday the entire book will be highlighted and every page tabbed. His proposal, and reasoning that, in the end, all will be saved is both comforting and challenging. But this is not a "feel good" Christian book. Far from it. And, yet, it's also not a book aiming to pile on the guilt for being the fallen human beings we are.

Fr. Richard tells reminds us that, "the worst that could possibly happen has already happened." But that is not where it ends. The crucifixion of Christ was a glorious event! "We preach Christ crucified," as St. Paul wrote. Surely, in this life, we'll not understand even a fraction of a fraction of the totality of what was done on that Friday afternoon. But there are dimensions of it that can understand, and Fr. Richard helps us to do that better than anyone else that I've read.

There are so many passages worth sharing, but this is my favorite:

"The Christian life is about living to the glory of God. It is not a driven, frenetic, sweated, interminable quest for saving souls. It is doing for his glory what God has given us to do. As with the Olympic runner in the film "Chariots of Fire," it is giving God pleasure in what we do well. Souls are saved by saved souls who live out their salvation by thinking and living differently, with a martyr's resolve, in a world marked by falsehood, baseness, injustice, impurity, ugliness, and mediocrity." ( )