The book has been featured on popular news and media outlets, and praised by a number of eminent evangelicals. I continue to see friends of all ages quoting and recommending it as a vital resource. When it comes to Jesus and John Wayne, Wilsey finds areas to agree with and appreciate, and thinks that the book should be read, while he also laments that it reads “less as history and more as ideology, and an ideology with little in the way of faith, hope, or charity.From the second it came off the press, Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne has exploded in popularity. And learning from history is not for meting out moral judgments on other rather it is about how we can change to fit patterns of righteousness and moral excellence. Ultimately, our goal in history writing is truth-telling, not power-wielding.
She knows something about how to extend a pastoral imagination to her subjects, to commune with and love dead people even though many of them were guilty of truly heinous crimes against fellow human beings. Schweiger taught at the University of Arkansas for fifteen years and specializes in nineteenth-century Southern history. Instead, knowledge of past lives ought to foster a pastoral imagination which, as Schweiger describes, “views others not in terms of oneself, but in terms of themselves, ‘trying to sense their experience as they are experiencing it, seeing with their eyes, feeling with their nerves.’” When we write history, we must exercise humility and empathy. The dead are at our mercy-they cannot come back and offer their explanations, their justifications, their apologies, or their acts of restitution.Īs we increase in our knowledge of history, the temptation is to exercise power over those who are gone, render judgment on them, and emerge from the exercise justified, righteous, and pure. The dead are a source of contemplation for us in the present they offer us perspective, humility, and aid us in our own self-examination as we study their lives. And we love the dead for their own sakes, rather than for some utilitarian purpose we might have for them.
Loving the dead means we tell the truth about them, as far as it is possible given our limitations and the complexities of the past. This love is not sentimental, nor does this love absolve the subjects of their sins. Schweiger argues that the Christian historian has a duty to love the historical subjects she studies, who are now dead.
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