The Radical Middle Path: Jesus According to Ingersoll, Herron, and Debs

The Radical Middle Path: Jesus According to Ingersoll, Herron, and Debs July 23, 2013

The twentieth of every month is about to get a whole lot less interesting for readers of this blog. That’s because instead of getting a dose of historian extraordinaire Ed Blum, you’ll get to read words typed by a first-year doctoral candidate whose last name doubles as an old-timey derogatory term. If you’re a regular reader, then you’ll finally know how Chicago Bulls fans felt when Pete Myers replaced Michael Jordan in 1994.

By way of introduction, I suppose I should mention my area of research (Gilded Age/Progressive Era religion in emerging American West urban settings), my school (Baylor), my favorite rap album (Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides), my previous occupation (high school social studies teacher in Omaha, Nebraska), and my most annoying habit (using parenthesis way too much).

Now onto more interesting things, like David Burns’ The Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus (Oxford, 2013).

At the heart of Burns’ work is a seeming paradox, an argument for what he calls the “radical middle path.” This path was trod by “secular-minded religionists” of the late-19th and early-20th century who sought to find some way to balance the demands of reason and religion, and ultimately found their answer by infusing a secular worldview with religious imagination, or, as Burns puts it, “finding divinity in Jesus’ humanity.” These freethinkers, socialists, and anarchists, Burns claims, have been overlooked by previous historians of religious history partly because the standard interpretation is that religious modernism was a movement controlled by the liberal professional theologians and academics embedded in elite universities and seminaries. Thus, radical modernists who were outside the stratosphere of the elites have been neglected. Burns believes that his book serves to correct the standard narrative. 

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