Redeeming & Re-imagining Easter Resurrection for the Modern World: Finding a Jesus worthy of an Atheistic Age
Redeeming & Re-imagining Easter Resurrection for the Modern World: Finding a Jesus worthy of an Atheistic Age First published, 4/4/2021; Undated 9/18/2024 Happy Easter everyone. Today we reach the most problematic moment in the annual cycle of Christian holidays. On Christmas, we celebrate "Peace on Earth, Goodwill to all Humanity," as metaphorically imagined in the incarnation of the sacred in the birth of a poor Jewish peasant child, resting in a feed trough for domestic animals, accompanied by poor herdsmen from the hills, the utter antithesis of the prosperity gospel spouted in some evangelical megachurches today. This is, of course, still an anthropocentric creed which had not arrived at the needed expansion of the moral circle to embrace non-human life, as taught to us by St. Henry (Thoreau), St. John (Muir) of the Mountains, and St. Aldo (Leopold), and that most mischievous eco-saint of them all, Cactus Ed (Abbey), but still a step in the right direction. In...