Christ Actually, James Carroll
Christ Actually, James Carroll
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Christ Actually
The Son of God for the Secular Age

Author: James Carroll

Narrator: James Carroll

Unabridged: 13 hr 35 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 11/13/2014

Synopsis

An exploration of transcendent faith in modern times—from the author of the New York Times–bestselling Constantine’s Sword
 
What can we believe about—and how can we believe in—Jesus Christ in light of the Holocaust and other atrocities of the twentieth century and the drift from religion that followed? In this urgent and provocative work, award-winning author James Carroll traces centuries of religious history and theology to face this core challenge to modern faith and to rescue it for the secular age.

Far from another book about the “historical Jesus,” Christ Actually takes the challenges of science and contemporary philosophy, of secularism, seriously. Carroll retrieves the power of Jesus both as an answer to humanity’s perennial longing for transcendence and as a figure of profound ordinariness—his simple life, and his call to imitate him, all suggest an answer to the question “What is the future of Jesus Christ?” This book points the way.

About The Author

James Carroll is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Suffolk University and a columnist for The Boston Globe. He is the author of ten novels and seven works of fiction. He lives in Boston.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jonna on July 19, 2016

I wanted to like this book; I loved _Constantine's Sword_. And I must say that after writing this review, I find it more valuable that I thought I would. But it's a bit of a hard slog, for some reason, which is odd because much of it is historical Jesus scholarship, which I often enjoy. Perhaps it's......more

Goodreads review by Greg on December 06, 2014

A Review of James Carroll’s book, Christ Actually: The Son of God For the Secular Age By Greg Cusack December 6, 2014 James Carroll is a gentleman of my generation and, as my friend Ken Wolf has pointed out from his reading of Carroll, experienced similar rites of passage as most of us of that time and p......more

Goodreads review by Jim on August 17, 2015

Carroll, who wrestled so artfully with Christianity's, and particularly, the Roman Church's denigration of Jews throughout history, applies a similar treatment to what he calls a modern understanding of Jesus Christ. Carroll argues that the experience of the "Jesus people" changed radically in just......more

Goodreads review by Blair Hodges on July 06, 2015

A stirring and challenging attempt to find the meaning, history, and relevance of Jesus Christ in a secular age. Carroll seeks to recover a sense of the Jewishness of Jesus by investigating how the records of his life became distorted by the early Christians who wrote about him. Were this the book's......more

Goodreads review by Scriptor Ignotus on January 18, 2015

How do we believe in God in the post-religious twenty-first century? How do we follow Christ after the Holocaust and the Death of God? According to Carroll's beautifully written analysis, both Judaism and Christianity emerged out of just such faith-shattering events as the world witnessed in the twe......more

Quotes

Praise for Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age 
“With well-researched clarity, Carroll explores the question posed by anti-Nazi Lutheran pastor and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer: who actually is Christ for us today?... Because Christ actually is meaningful in some way to a billion Christians around the globe, this heartfelt investigation is of interest to many.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Carroll…strives to reconceive Christ for a secular, post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima era….readers
seeking a faith responsive to the zeitgeist will find it here.”
—Booklist
 
“An in-depth, thought-provoking challenge to two millennia of Christian interpretation.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Written in the brisk, argumentative style that has won James Carroll a broad popular readership, Christ Actually avoids the interminable maundering of academic prose, even as its extensive footnotes indicate attention to advanced, if radical, scholarship. Conservative Christians may well be shocked and annoyed at Carroll’s configuration of Jesus. Nevertheless, for its pushback against the boundaries of conventional interpretations and, above all, for its passionate presentation of the sinfulness of Christian anti-Semitism, his book deserves serious attention.”
—Commonweal magazine

 Praise for Constantine’s Sword
“Monumental…An eye-opening journey through twenty centuries of history..This is a book for everyone.”—Christian Science Monitor

“A triumph.”—The Atlantic Monthly

“A deeply felt work, a book that measures the sweep of history against [his] experience as a man of the church.”—Floyd Skloot, San Franciso Chronicle

“Remarkable . . . A book of a deeper sort.”
—Andrew Sullivan, The New York Times Book Review
 
“A masterly history . . . fascinating, brave.”
—Time
 

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