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My New Book Is Coming!

My New Book Is Coming!

Title: How to ruin your education and TV viewing: Five easy lessons[1]

Spencer D Gear PhD

What will you do as a parent if your 14-year-old comes home from school and says, “You and the teachers have been telling me Columbus discovered the Americas? You’ve lied to me because that isn’t true. There are no such things as facts and I decide the meaning of what is written in my text books? I’m the one who chooses the interpretation of any writing, including history.”

How are you going to answer, especially in light of what the Encyclopaedia Britannica states about Columbus?

Enter John Dominic Crossan

This leading historical Jesus’ scholar provides a creative definition of history: “History is the past reconstructed interactively by the present through argued evidence in public discourse.”[2]

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Chew over that definition at dinner tonight as you discuss its application or rejection to the terrorism and what happened with the twin towers in New York City on 11 September 2001, the Nazis slaughter of 6 million people in World War 2, and who won the Super Bowl in 2000.

Another piece of information grabbed my attention and that is Crossan’s belief that Jesus’ resurrection was not a bodily resurrection but an apparition.[3]

An Application

Are these details fact or fiction? Can we create other versions of these incidents that are as valid as the information above, by introducing deconstructionist free play? This book investigates why this traditional model of history is being questioned and pursues an alternate view promoted as outdated. The key question is: Should the historical evidence be deconstructed?

The book is a critique of the danger of free play and the need to return to a traditional version of history.

Notes

[1] Wipf and Stock Publishers, https://wipfandstock.com/.

[2] Crossan, “Historical Jesus as risen Lord,” 3, emphasis in original.

[3] Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, xxviii-xi. An apparition is a ghost or ghostlike appearance of a person or “a remarkable or unexpected appearance of someone or something ” (Oxford English Dictionary 2021, “apparition.”)

Copyright © 2021 Spencer D. Gear. This document last updated at Date: 30 September 2021.

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