19 December 2006, 12:32 AM
spoonboyGiovanni Papini's Life of Christ
http://amazon.com/Life-Christ-...5237?ie=UTF8&s=books http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/papini http://www.britannica.com/eb/a...58343/giovannipapini http://www.litweb.net/biograph...Giovanni_Papini.html http://experts.about.com/e/g/gi/giovanni_papini.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Papini The single reviewer at amazon.com, a theology student, met Christ in a new way upon reading
Papini's Life of Christ. Is it that good? Yes, it is, in my humble opinion. This is a very masculine
yet tender treatment of the life of our Lord. He deliberately shocks and jars the reader's sensibility in an attempt to rescue The Life from
dry scholarly interperetations and two dimensional piety. He speaks in the introduction of the errors of the enlightenment and 500 years of disinformation.
Prolific as he was controversial, he wrote some eighty books. He is known for this one, and his book on the Devil which was banned by the Church.
It is claimed that he was anti-Semitic, and I did
find a few anti-Zionist paragraphs early in the book, which kind of struck me as out of character with the rest of the work. He also joined the fascists in the thirties. Well considering the alternative at the time...
I like him because of his grasp of the many facets
and his writing ability. This fellow could write.
Not a mystic, but a poet for sure. A bit like early Thomas Merton.
I picked this up from an Anglican Catholic priest who was selling off his library in the basement of the church. I think I paid a buck for it and it gathered dust for eight years. What a find!
caritas, mm <*))))><