Catching Up with Jesus A Gospel Story for Our Time

This book lays the challenge at your feet - the real message of Jesus is how to live fully a human life while focusing on the divine within you and every human being. Father O'Murchu's point is looking at God's incarnation from the beginning of man's existance and seeing Jesus' role as the fulfillment of this. I found that the challenge is the same reiterated by G.K. Chesterton - Christianity should not be condemned, it's never been tried. And the book's central theme - Jesus came to show us a radically new way of living our human life in the Spirit of God.

An eyeopener as to how we need to have Loving Kindness fill our lives.

Billed as a sequel to "Quantum Theology," this book is as refreshing as O'Murchu's other work. His argument for updating our understanding of the message of Jesus - catching up with Jesus - is necessary in our 21st century world. The message O'Murchu conveys is one which is in tune with other contemporary thought - living on a shrinking planet with diminishing resources. The second half of the book, written as monologue/dialogue is a little tedious and sanctimonious but can be forgiven knowing what O'Murchu is trying to convey.

In liberating the Jesus story for our times, O'Murchu follows a model used by the feminist theologian, Anne Clifford -namely intelligently critique the conventional story, try to recover the elements of the original story and reconstruct as best as possible a timeless story. O'Murchu does a fairly good job at the critiquing; the recovery section of the book focuses on important, if selected and a somewhat limited view of Jesus' identities. The reconstruction represents an exhausting attempt to practically rewrite the gospels. Because of the size of the task, O'Murchu jumps to some conclusions that seem more fictional with little scholarship to back them up. O'Murchu also tends to repeat some good insights/themes over and over again. At the same time,in love with evolution, he practically skips over trying to explain suffering, the imperfections of this cosmos and other deep mysteries. Many of his challenging insights were left a bit open-ended for me to the point that I wished I lived around the corner from him to be able to ask things like what kind of afterlife does he believe in? He also seems to vacillate as to whether we should move beyond the institutional churches or whether we should re-work them into being prime movers of the Kingom and centers for ritual/liturgies that help stir us in that direction. All in all there's a lot of mind-stretching new ideas about Jesus that do resonate in a new world order that understands how quantum science frees us from a mechanistic world and leads us to a world of unlimited possibilites as could really pursuing the Kingdom