"American Jesus"

Paper Summary:

The paper explains that the book sets out, in its introduction, to show how the image of Jesus in America has always reflected the hopes and fears of the nation. The writer explains that the first half of the book, while an informative history lesson, fails to show the promised insight. The writer states that the second half of the book is less informative than the first half and gives examples to substantiate this. The writer states that the conclusion did not supply a concise statement of the book's message, as is expected from a conclusion in an historical work. The writer suggests that this book should not be recommended to historians, to students of history, or to anyone trying to understand America. In conclusion, the writer posits that Prothero vastly overstated his case in the introduction, and that he seems to have been aware that he had no intention of keeping his promises.

From the Paper:

"Unfortunately, the second half of American Jesus does not make up for the first half. In fact, it cannot even boast the limited merits that the first half could. Prothero's discussion of non-Christian portrayals and uses of Jesus is organized only vaguely chronologically. Rather than reading like a history lesson, then, it reads like a disjointed and unnecessarily long laundry list of anecdotes about Jesus' cameos in public life. These are engaging up to a point, but the anecdotes are so many that one eventually becomes weary and gets the sense that Prothero included every single instance of a "cultural Jesus" that he could find. This on its own seems odd, given the previous section's odd lack of Catholic commentary. An expansion of the first section at the expense of some of the more repetitious tales in the second might have served Prothero well."

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