Live From Golgotha

Timothy (later St. Timothy) is in his study in Thessalonika, where he is bishop of Macedonia. It is A.D. 96, and Timothy is under terrific pressure to record his version of the Sacred Story, since, far in the future, a cyberpunk (the Hacker) has been systematically destroying the tapes that describe the Good News, and Timothy's Gospel is the only one immune to the Hacker's deadly virus. Meanwhile, thanks to a breakthrough in computer software, an NBC crew is racing into the past to capture—live from the suburb of Golgotha—the Crucifixion, for a TV special guaranteed to boost the network's ratings in the fall sweeps. As a stream of visitors from twentieth-century America channel in to the first-century Holy Land—Mary Baker Eddy, Shirley MacLaine, Oral Roberts and family—Timothy struggles to complete his story. But is Timothy's text really Hacker-proof? And how will he deal with the truth about Jesus' eating disorder? Above all, will he get the anchor slot for the Big Show at Golgotha without representation by a major agency, like CAA 1,896 years in the future? Tune in.

A cyperpunk is destroying the tapes that describe the mission of Jesus Christ and his Gospel. Can Timothy save the day and the future of Christianity?.

Theological concepts continue to maintain political concepts well after those theological concepts are no longer supported by belief. Cities on the Plains examines some of these concepts in the light of five different times and places. It is both a response to theological concerns in contemporary political theory and broadly accessible examination of familiar political issues touched by the divine - such as gay marriage, 911, or the French tradition of laicité. Concerns of difference and the divine are pursued through broadly familiar texts (the Bible, and Gore Vidal), significant texts of political theory (Plato and Augustine), and less common texts (Averroes). Gods, or the intellectual territory they used to occupy, are treated as important features of the political; contesting with these gods can help us visit, defend, and desire, (to paraphrase Deleuze and Guatarri) new cities and new peoples.

Father Paul Mankowski, S.J. (1953–2020), was one of the most brilliant and scintillating Catholic writers of our time. His essays and reviews, collected here for the first time, display a unique wit, a singular breadth of learning, and a penetrating insight into the challenges of Catholic life in the postmodern world. Whether explicating Catholic doctrines like the Immaculate Conception, dissecting contemporary academic life, deploring clerical malfeasance, or celebrating great authors, Father Mankowski''s keen intelligence is always on display, and his energetic prose keeps the pages turning. Whatever his topic, however, Paul Mankowski''s intense Catholic faith shines through his writing, as it did through his life. Jesuit at Large invites its readers to meet a man of great gifts who suffered for his convictions but never lost hope in the renewal of Catholicism, a man whose confidence in the truth of what the Church proposed to the world was never shaken by the failures of the people of the Church.

For almost two millennia, Jesus' story has been retold in various forms and fashions, but in the last century a new way of reimagining the man from Galilee and rewriting the canonical Gospels has sprung up in the form of Jesus novels. While the novels themselves are as varied as their authors, this work aims at introducing readers to some common literary strategies and theological agendas found in this rewriting phenomenon by surveying a few prominent examples. It also explores the question of what happens when we examine the intertextual play between these Gospel rewrites and their Gospel progenitors as we allow these contemporary novels to pose new questions to their ancient counterparts. An intriguing hermeneutical circle ensues as we embark on our quest for the fictional Jesus and accompany his incarnations as they lead us back to reexamine the canonical portraits of Jesus anew.

Since his first novel with a homosexual topic, The City and the Pillar, appeared in 1948, Gore Vidal has been seen as an enfant terrible of American letters. Through his ongoing writing career, he has examined (homo)sexuality in the context of cultural, religious and socio- political developments, so that it is fascinating to revisit his critical, sometimes cynical and always wittily presented ideas which were formed at a time when Gay Liberation, Gay Literature and Gay Identity were still unheard of and to discover the meaning these ideas still hold for us today.