First Things RSS Feed - J. A. Gray https://www.firstthings.com/author/j-a-gray en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:52:39 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/j-a-gray 60 Angels and Demons and Point Guards and Centers https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2009/05/angels-and-demons-and-point-guards-and-centers https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2009/05/angels-and-demons-and-point-guards-and-centers Thu, 14 May 2009 00:02:40 -0400

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]]> Hopping Back Over the Wall of Separation https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2009/05/hopping-back-over-the-wall-of-separation https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2009/05/hopping-back-over-the-wall-of-separation Wed, 13 May 2009 10:13:25 -0400

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]]> The Conversion of Michael J. Fox https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2009/05/the-conversion-of-michael-j-fox https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2009/05/the-conversion-of-michael-j-fox Mon, 04 May 2009 22:59:34 -0400

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]]> Beauty Is as Beauty Does https://www.firstthings.com/article/2006/11/beauty-is-as-beauty-does https://www.firstthings.com/article/2006/11/beauty-is-as-beauty-does Wed, 01 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 On Beauty
by zadie smith
penguin, 464 pages, $15 (paperback)

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]]> Ordinary Idols https://www.firstthings.com/article/2005/10/ordinary-idols https://www.firstthings.com/article/2005/10/ordinary-idols Sat, 01 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400 Death of an Ordinary Man: A Novel
by Glen Duncan
Grove. 320 pp. $13 paper.

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]]> Christ and Casserole https://www.firstthings.com/article/2005/03/christ-and-casserole https://www.firstthings.com/article/2005/03/christ-and-casserole Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500 Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 247 pp. $23.

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]]> Extended Conversation https://www.firstthings.com/article/2005/01/extended-conversation https://www.firstthings.com/article/2005/01/extended-conversation Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500 Artistic License: Three Centuries of Good Writing and Bad Behavior
 by brooke allen
ivan r. dee, 244 pages, $26

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]]> Jesus in America https://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/06/jesus-in-america https://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/06/jesus-in-america Tue, 01 Jun 2004 00:00:00 -0400 The America of the title is the United States, from colonial times to the present. The Jesus of the title is all the things the subtitle says and more. To Jesus’ question “Who do you say that I am?” Americans have offered seemingly numberless and often contradictory replies. In Jesus in America , Richard Wightman Fox undertakes to “document the diversity””or at least “a fair sample” thereof”while “throwing some light on basic historical patterns and particularities,” and in his four hundred pages of text covering four centuries Fox manages, remarkably, to display no condescension toward the favored Jesus of any American (although he does take a sour tone toward one American, as we shall see).“This book is for believers and nonbelievers alike. It is not a book about whether one should believe in Jesus, but about how Americans have believed in and portrayed him.” To open it is to see at once that this is a popular history for the general reader, an historical narrative of “the national infatuation with Jesus,” a primer on Jesus in America written in a friendly prose that undergraduates could easily handle. Fox’s tone is that of a teacher inviting students to imagine sympathetically, with his expert help, how people lived and thought in times that preceded our own”specifically, Christian people, with whom Fox seems to expect the reader to have at best an imperfect sympathy. “We can overcome our blindness about others, past or present, only if we try to see and feel things as they did.” Beneath this cordial classroom manner is considerable scholarship, of which readers can avail themselves in Fox’s generous and well-written endnotes, which are designed also to be a guide to further reading. In addition to a teacherly solicitude for students and an historian’s enthusiasm for his subject, there is also evident here a kind of reportorial detachment (now and then as the cavalcade of personalities and religiosities passes, one thinks of Herodotus genially reporting to the Greeks about Egyptian lore). Fox “keeps his ear open” to the many voices in America’s “collective cry for Christ,” but frequently expresses a kind of agnosticism that may not be just a pedagogical device: “I do not know whether believers are right about Jesus’ being a divine Comforter who sends them his spirit. I do think that their belief in him makes perfect sense, and I know that their belief has profoundly shaped American and world history.”

Fox warns early on that because he is writing a history of American Jesuses and not of American religions, he will perforce “lean to the Protestants.” Catholics, though “a major force in America from the beginning,” have not contributed as heartily to the continual reconceiving of Jesus that is our national pastime. “Protestants did much more innovating in their conceptions and experiences of Jesus.” Why haven’t Catholics kept up? “On the whole Catholics have been satisfied that they already have complete access to the real Jesus.” (That is one way of putting it, although to advert merely to felt satisfaction and lack of felt desire, with no mention of adherence to creed, submission to authority, or acceptance of magisterium, is surely to state only part of the case about Catholics.)

Fox’s report is chronological, beginning with Jesus’ entry into the New World with the French and Spanish missionaries and explorers. (He duly notes the Mormon claim that Jesus was here much earlier, among the Nephites.) Ensuing are one chapter on the seventeenth century, one on the eighteenth, two on the nineteenth, two on the twentieth, and a twenty-first-century epilogue, with political, economic, and demographic “intersections” pointed out as occasion warrants. The main outline of the chronicle soon becomes evident and, indeed, predictable”all sides in every debate laid claim to Jesus”but Fox’s summaries of the changes rung on the Jesus theme are astute and pithy:

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