BTT (#31) ~ currently reading

Deb @ Booking Through Thursday asks:

"One of those quick, easy questions that I ask periodically because the answer is always changing:  What are you reading right now?  And, is it good?  Would you recommend it?  How did you choose it?"

Saving Jesus from Those Who Are Right: Rethinking What It Means to Be Christian ~ by Carter Heyward, 1999

In radical opposition to the Jesus of the Christian Right, Heyward presents Jesus as our brother and us with him in the commitment to embody right relation, which she calls mutual relation.  She envisions a counter-cultural force, which she names christic power, that can help save American culture from its greed and domination and save the figure of Jesus from culture-generated distortions.

The Rev. Dr. Carter Heyward is an Episcopal priest, professor, liberation theologian, activist, writer, and pioneer in the areas of feminist liberation theology and the theology of sexuality.

I first became aware of her when she and ten other women were ordained Episcopal priests on July 29, 1974.  I watched the uproar with fascination as the Episcopal Bishops held an emergency meeting to invalidate these ordinations.  Nevertheless, at the General Convention of 1976, the Episcopal Church officially approved the ordination of women into the priesthood.  Wow!

When I ran across this book at the huge used-book store in my town, I grabbed it.  I'm slowly working my way through it.  Slowly, because I'm taking so many notes.  Slowly, because I stop to ponder her words.  But slowly and surely go together, and I've already quoted parts of it in two classes I'm teaching.

Would I recommend this book?  No, not if you are a confirmed, conservative, right-wing, Christian literalist.  Yes, if you are a liberal thinker open to hearing...

"...that mutuality, rather than obedience, is the basis of our life in the Spirit, and that learning to share our power in mutual relation is the most redemptive response we can make to the power of evil" (p. 82).

So far, this book is garnering a high rating from me.