Seeing as Jesus sees.
For those of a certain age, it would be easy to misread the title of Aaron Rosen’s new book as “What Would Jesus Do?” In fact, Rosen, a Cambridge PhD in Theology who has taught at Oxford and Yale, predicted the mistake. “Growing up in rural America in the nineties,” he writes, “I remember this phrase was ubiquitous: bedazzled onto t-shirts, stitched into friendship bracelets and scrawled across baggy jeans and backpacks with Sharpie markers.” For Rosen, it is an inherently radical question, but its ubiquity has resulted in a lack of depth. His worry is that the plausible and important question of what would Jesus do has been supplanted with what would I do, an exercise in “the logic of self-justification”.
