Reddit mentions: The best easter holiday books

I don't know about "must-read", but Rowan Williams has produced Lenten reflections based on Paul's letters and the Gospel of Mark.

• Meeting God in Paul
  
  
• Meeting God in Mark
  
  Walter Brueguemann, the Old Testament scholar-theologian, made a Lenten devotional too: A Way other than Our Own.
  
  NT Wright has also produced Lenten devotionals called Lent for Everyone.
  
  Beyond devotionals, since Lent is a time to focus on the Cross and the atonement (well, all times are, but Lent especially), John Stott's The Cross of Christ is well-regarded and would reward anyone reading it.

Okay, thanks! I hoped your answer would be something along those lines!

Also, I wouldn't hesitate a moment to highly recommend Alison to....anyone who enjoys intellectually-stimulating books. I've got The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin through Easter Eyes on my desk currently, and it's fascinating.

My heart is with you... forgiveness is one of the hardest things we are called on to do... it is so difficult. The beauty of the idea of forgiveness though, goes to the heart of the desire you have for inflicting pain and retribution... we all WANT that... we WANT our righteous anger to PREVAIL; but...it is ONLY through forgiveness that we BREAK the cycle of violence and escalation. It is SUCH as counter-cultural idea... it seems insane to people... foolish.

A book you might consider to help guide you through this desert... and that's what you're in... is "Free of Charge; Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace" by Miroslav Volf http://www.amazon.com/Free-Charge-Miroslav-Volf-ebook/dp/B002U80FU0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1398122923&sr=8-1&keywords=Free+of+Charge.

He lays out the very difficult path, not just to forgiveness, but back to a state of reconciliation. Worth the read....

Bingo! Jesus was a radical who worked very hard to upend religious teaching, social stratification and popular culture. He was polarizing enough that the Jewish leadership had to make sure he was taken out.

There's currently a discussion in protestant churches that emasculating Jesus has caused men to walk away because they really don't want to be like the wimpy person they see in all of the literature.

The Renegade Gospel by Mike Slaughter is a good reference on the subject. Mike wants christians to radicalize (in positive ways)

I am currently reading Free of Charge. It's about forgiveness from the Christian perspective. Why and how should we forgive? It's written by Miroslav Volf, a theologian at Yale. So far it's interesting.

You could try the Oxford Companion to Philosophy.
Frederick Copleston wrote a fantastic history of philosophy in 11 volumes.
Anthony Kenny has done a somewhat more concise history.
Brian Magee has done it in one volume

Will Durant is also a good bet and a segue into history.

Read a People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn and/or Lies my History Teacher told Me.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is also good.

Read some theology. Not many people do. Try Rowan Williams. I'd recommend his Resurrection, but he's also written a book on Dostoevsky.

Read Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment. Notes from the Underground. Brothers Karamazov. Take your pick.

Might check out Edward Said's Orientalism. Maybe some Foucault.

Learn about economics. Naked Economics is a good start. Hazlitt's Economics in one lesson is also popular.

If you want a MIND BENDING (and pretty hard to read) exposition on it, read Hans Urs Von Balthasar's Mysterium Paschale.

This book.

I once took a class with the fairly-brilliant historian of church architecture, Elizabeth Lev, and she had a one-sentence explanation:

>"We live in an iconoclastic age."

The rest of this post is a loose paraphrase of the lecture that followed (Dr. Lev gives wonderful mini-lectures when she's angry about something). I hope that it is more or less accurate.

Modernist, gnostic-lite theology is unable to cope with the Incarnation as a fleshy, concrete human being, and cannot tolerate the rich sensuality of an authentic Catholic faith. This isn't the first time iconoclasm has infected the church and injured its architecture. To name just one example: if you tour Europe, you'll see many, many once-great Gothic and Baroque churches, which were long ago decorated with powerful, dramatic frescoes and statues and paintings. These decorations were literally whitewashed during the spiritualist miasma of the 18th century, destroying centuries of invaluable Catholic art and leaving the faithful with nothing to look at besides plain white walls.

It seems to happen in cycles. There will come a time in the future when we once again get a little bit too fleshy and elaborate in our theology (and our church architecture), and then there will be another reaction against it that will send us back the opposite direction.

The new testament still scores pretty good compared to other ancient writings/writers.

Most of the items he listed as discrepancies between the gospels fall in the category of "an omission by one author isn't a contradiction". The timing issues have been explained by the gospel writers using different calendars and methods of measuring time, and multiple sabbaths (Therefore multiple days of preparation) during the passover week.

He touts Mark as an example of fine Greek written by a very educated man, but it's written in a Greek spoken by commoners and slaves; even approaching the ungrammatical at times.

In short, it seems that he quickly goes through a list of one-line statements that represent his side of the argument and never touches on the opposing view; when entire books have been written on many of these topics.

One Catholic theological heavyweight of the 20th century associated with this idea is Hans Urs von Balthasar, who has creatively reimagined Christ's descent into hell in ways that have provoked a lot of conversation. (Personally, while I find Balthasar's theology of the descent fascinating, I have very serious reservations about it.)

Traditionally, Christ's descent has been understood as a "victorious" one in which he frees hell's righteous inhabitants. "Inhabiting" hell could be understood spacially, but also in terms of the souls' interim state in death while still deprived of the beatific vision.

Balthasar, on the other hand, imagined Christ's descent as one in which Christ, taking on the sins of the world as our substitute, literally became sin itself, the object of the Father's wrath (at one point Balthasar compares him to a "lightning rod") and thus sank to the deepest reaches of God-forsakenness and alienation, beyond any precedent. Yet, paradoxically, Balthasar held that Christ, amidst this alienation from the Father, remained united to him via the Holy Spirit.

Balthasar's purpose for this depiction of the descent, in which Christ is a victim rather than a victor, is two-fold. First, it situates Christ in the midst of alienation from God, so that even there no sinner can turn away from the Redeemer. Second, it paradoxically takes the totality of sin (which Jesus becomes) into the of exchange Tri-Personal, intra-Trinitarian love, incinerating sin itself in the process. Balthasar's vision is one in which the exchange of Trinitarian love encompasses everything, including the farthest reaches of hell.

If you're interested in reading the primary sources for this, see Balthasar's Mysterium Paschale as well as vols. IV and V of his Theo-Drama series. For a very critical evaluation of Balthasar from a more "traditional" perspective on this topic, see Lyra Pitstick's Light in the Darkness.