Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316579289 ISBN 13: 9780316579285

Publisher: Little Brown & Co., 1997

Synopsis

A collection of remarkable and wonderfully eclectic original essays and meditations--by Madison Smartt Bell, Benjamin Cheever, Kim Wozencraft, and other notable writers--offers a fascinating range of probing and very personal interpretations of what Christianity means today.

About this title

About the Author

Rick Moody (born Hiram Frederick Moody, III on October 18, 1961, New York City), is an American novelist and short story writer best known for The Ice Storm (1994), a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973. His first novel Garden State (1992) won the Pushcart Editor's Choice Award. His memoir The Black Veil (2002) won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. He has also received the Addison Metcalf Award, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, the Paris Review, Harper's, Details, the New York Times, and Grand Street. He grew up in several of the Connecticut suburbs where he later set stories and novels, including Darien and New Canaan. He graduated from St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, Brown University, received a master's degree in fine art from Columbia University and has taught at the State University of New York at Purchase and Bennington College. According to The Writer's Almanac, Moody dropped out of graduate school at Columbia after a year because he spent most of his time drinking and had a hard time paying his rent or holding a job. Moody stated, "I was a clerk at [a bookstore] and I got fired after one month. They said, 'We really like you and we respect you as a writer, but this cash register thing is just not working out.'" Moody finally checked himself into a mental hospital, got sober, and then he wrote his first novel, Garden State, about young people growing up in the industrial wasteland of New Jersey. He lives in Brooklyn and Fishers Island.

From Kirkus Reviews

A bid to shed fresh light on the New Testament, weighed down by a disappointingly predictable party line: Jesus-as-radical-moral-teacher. These baby boomer writers have mostly ``revisited'' only a fraction of the New Testament, the Gospels, which novelist Moody (Purple America, p. 164, etc.) sees as ``great liberal documents in strong support of ethical universals.'' In rescuing the New Testament from the Christian Right, though, these writers don't realize that by almost exclusively using the Gospels, they've ceded some of the richest territory to the fundamentalists. That's why Joanna Scott's marvelous essay on Revelation is nothing short of a revelation (her discussion of symbols as ``masks'' in the text is truly stunning), and why Ann Powers's contribution, ``Teenage Jesus,'' falls flat. In her zeal to make Jesus culturally relevant to bohemian boomers, Powers utterly trivializes his message and mission. Portrayals of Jesus as a rebel with a good cause, or a misunderstood ethical teacher, are beyond prosaic. Several of the writers mention that their views of Jesus were heavily influenced by the rock-opera movie Jesus Christ Superstar, which helps explain this book's unidimensionality. Why not try new turf and explore the irascible Paul? Aside from one obligatory essay on 1 Corinthians 13 (de rigueur at American weddings), Paul is completely ignored. Standout essays include bell hooks's creative offering on the transformative power of love; Benjamin Cheever's offhanded appeal to ``judge not,'' and Jeffrey Eugenides's witty portrayal of the Holy Ghost in Acts: ``Jesus gets all the attention, all the reviews,'' Eugenides wryly observes. The editors of this anthology should have heeded his remark. In its narrow purview, this New Testament revisited is considerably less juicy than the original. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little Brown & Co.
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0316579289
• ISBN 13: 9780316579285
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 250
• Editor: Moody Rick, Steinke Darcey