Word: pope
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Doggerel aside, Neusner, 74, lives by the story's moral: confrontation is part of his makeup, take it or leave it. One might expect many Christians to leave it. But at least one has not. In his new book, Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday; $24.95), Pope Benedict XVI devotes 20 pages to A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, a 161-page grenade Neusner lobbed in 1993. In that volume, the professor (now at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.) and noncongregational rabbi projected himself back into the Gospel of Matthew to quiz Jesus on the Jewish law. He found the Nazarene...
...Roman Catholic teaching that Jews were Christ killers and John Paul II acknowledged Jews' ongoing presence by visiting a synagogue, postwar papal discourse has focused on Christianity's view of Judaism, not the reverse, and steered serenely around fundamental controversies. Jesus of Nazareth takes the next huge step: "a Pope taking seriously what a Jew says--and says critically--about the New Testament," marvels Eugene Fisher, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' liaison for Catholic-Jewish relations. "Wow. This...
...choosing Neusner as his muse, Benedict selected a man as formidable and controversial in the field of Jewish studies as the Pope is in Catholicism. An expert on the sprawling literature of the 1st through 6th century rabbis who shaped modern Judaism, Neusner is an empire builder, a central figure in wrestling an examination of Judaism into America's universities. He accomplished this through brilliance (he developed his own secularly comprehensible synthesis of rabbinics), superhuman productivity (he has written more than 950 books, although he will admit to a certain reprocessing of material) and a knack for grooming gifted prot?...
...fact, with communism gone as an historical antagonist to the Church, there may be more room for social activists and the Roman hierarchy to seek solutions together. It seemed only natural this week for the Pope and Brazil's leftist president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a longtime ally of the liberation theology movement, to agree on making a central priority of shrinking of the gap between rich and poor, and challenging the "mercantilization" of human beings in an age of globalization. Benedict, on Friday, led the canonization ceremony in Sao Paulo for the first-ever Brazilian-born saint...
...Duncan MacLaren, the executive director of Caritas, the worldwide Catholic charity, says Benedict's message is a subtle departure from the Church's tradition of social teaching, which has been about changing unjust social structures. MacLaren told TIME: "The Pope is saying that there is something inside us, that there should be a Christian transformation within the process of people serving others." But it remains to be seen whether Benedict's emphasis on a personal spiritual response to poverty and inequality will satisfy those in his church who emphasize the fight for social justice outside of its walls...