Reviews for When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today

The average rating for When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-01-08 00:00:00 Spencer Cooreman Jesus? Harvard? An unlikely connection, but a very interesting one. It's an account of twenty years of teaching a course, beginning in the early 80's, as a part of a "moral reasoning" division of the undergraduate curriculum. But the idea was not to present ethics in an philosophically impersonal and abstract way, but rather to show how moral decisions are made in a specific context, that of the life of the founder of one of the great monotheistic religions of the world. The course became a examination of Jesus and the moral life. Cox is what I suppose could be called a liberal interpreter of the life of Jesus. He emphasizes that Jesus, after all, was a Jewish rabbi firmly embedded in Jewish law and tradition. His approach, in the best rabbinical tradition, to questions about the good life, the morally responsible life, was to tell stories and parables which usually end by raising more questions that challenge traditional formulaic thinking . In this sense, there is a similarity with Zen stories at their most provocative. Is the life and teachings of a Jewish rabbi, dead for 2000 years, relevant to making moral decisions today? At its most simplistic, people ask, "What would Jesus do?" But in Cox's view, there are never any simple answers forthcoming from Jesus. He quotes Oliver Cromwell's 1650 letter to the Scottish Church Assembly, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." There are no infallible pronouncements. The meaning of Christ's life is open-ended enough that anyone can "claim" Jesus as supporting their views, as long as they recognize that their version of the truth is never necessarily the definitive one. Too relativistic an approach? No doubt, for some, maybe most Christians, but that's what Cox has to offer.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-01-15 00:00:00 Banan Rama I was hoping for more from this book.