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A New York Times bestselling and widely admired Catholic writer explores how we can retrieve transcendent faith in modern times Critically acclaimed and bestselling author James Carroll has explored every aspect of Christianity, faith, and Jesus Christ except this central one: What can we believe about—and how can we believe in—Jesus in the twenty-first century in light of the Holocaust and other atrocities of the twentieth century and the drift from religion that followed? What Carroll has discovered through decades of writing and lecturing is that he is far from alone in clinging to a received memory of Jesus that separates him from his crucial identity as a Jew, and therefore as a human. Yet if Jesus was not taken as divine, he would be of no interest to us. What can that mean now? Paradoxically, the key is his permanent Jewishness. No Christian himself, Jesus actually transcends Christianity. Drawing on both a wide range of scholarship as well as his own acute searching as a believer, Carroll takes a fresh look at the most familiar narratives of all—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Far from another book about the “historical Jesus,” he takes the challenges of science and contemporary philosophy seriously. He retrieves the power of Jesus'profound ordinariness, as an answer to his own last question—what is the future of Jesus Christ?—as the key to a renewal of faith.

A “masterful” history of the city and its holy wars past and present, from the New York Times–bestselling author of Constantine's Sword (The Boston Globe). How did this ancient Middle Eastern city become a transcendent fantasy that ignites religious fervor unlike anywhere else on earth? Jerusalem, Jerusalem journeys through centuries of conflict among Jews, Christians, and Muslims, right up to the present-day Israeli-Palestinian struggle—with fascinating examinations of how the idea of the holy city has shaped not just the region's history but the world's.

James Carroll's urgent, masterly Jerusalem, Jerusalem uncovers the ways in which the city became a transcendent fantasy that ignites religious fervour unlike anywhere else on earth. He shows how the conflicts within this holiest of cities underscore an important point of history: that religion and violence fuel each other. In Carroll's provocative reading of the deep past, the Bible came into being as an act of resistance to the violence that threatened Jerusalem from the start. Tracing the richly intertwined threads of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim history, Carroll illuminates the European fixation on a heavenly Jerusalem as the spark of both anti-Semitism and racist colonial contempt. The holy wars of the Knights Templar burned apocalyptic mayhem into the Western mind; now, heavenly Jerusalem defines the American imagination — and always, the earthly city smoulders. Jerusalem fever, inextricably tied to Christian fervour, is the deadly third party to the Arab–Israeli wars. Understanding it is the key that unlocks world history, and gives us our best chance to re-imagine peace. Jerusalem, Jerusalem is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the current disharmony of modern-day Jerusalem and its historical underpinnings. To the standard set by Constantine's Sword, here again is a ‘rare book that combines searing passion … with a subject that has affected all our lives'(Chicago Tribune).