Word: joseph
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...book is not high art, but it stirs a pang of recognition in any man who has rocked a sleepless infant or grasped a bedridden father's hand--as well as a tingly intuition of the special nature of those particular players. When the young Joseph muses that "when You settled into my arms it felt as if I were holding heaven," the Christian reader is meant to realize that he actually...
Protestants have never felt the kind of unease with Joseph that, in a kind of allergic response to Catholicism's elaborate exultation of Mary, inhibited their relationship with the Virgin. On the other hand, he doesn't particularly interest them either. There are exceptions. The neo-orthodox theologian Karl Barth championed Joseph's role of taking care of Jesus. The black church in the U.S., says Robert Franklin, an expert on that topic at Atlanta's Emory University, has long felt a connection between Joseph as patriarch of an unexpectedly blended family and African-American slave history, in which...
...Jenkins may be tapping into two relatively recent trends in the Protestant church, particularly in its Evangelical wing. The first involves his tight focus on the relationship between Joseph and Jesus. The attendance in most U.S. churches skews female, provoking a search for strong masculine Biblical role models and ways to create church-based male bonding, especially between younger men and mentors. Joseph is the original Promise Keeper. Also, Jenkins sees a shift in even conservative Evangelical preaching from stringent exegesis, or analysis of text, to more free-ranging storytelling. "There are guys who can spend an hour just talking...
That plays to Joseph's strengths. The more that belief strictly cleaves to "what the Bible says," the less will be heard of him. But the moment the believer imagines himself or herself into the biblical story, Joseph explodes back onto the scene. Scripture plain may not spend a sentence describing the Egyptian sojourn, but anyone reconstructing a narrative of the Bible will recognize it as an episode and Joseph as its hero. The same holds true for those extensive yet ill-chronicled Nazareth years...
...storytelling principle at work in Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, which is her version of the Holy Family's return from Egypt's Alexandria to Nazareth and a Holy Land rocked with violence following Herod's death. Rice is Catholic, but when she focuses on Joseph, she is writing not hagiography but a modern description of his leadership of a sizable clan and his reluctance to tell the boy Jesus too much of his backstory until he is more mature. "I think he was a resolute man, an unshakable man, but he had no need to make...