Recent Reads

Eli, by Bill Myers. Myers postulates that in a parallel universe, Jesus comes to earth in the modern era rather than in the time of the Roman empire. His protagonist -- an aging, morally flawed newsman -- encounters "Eli", the Messiah of this alternate-universe, while his body lies in a coma back home in his own universe. The story of the Messiah's ministry proceeds in a fashion directly paralleling the one we know in "our" universe, and this makes the story more than a little predictable to anyone who's familiar with the Gospel story. Myers gets in some amusing and insightful digs at evangelical megachurches and "respectable churchgoing folks" and their all-too-frequent social biases, and he slightly reshapes some of Jesus's parables to apply them to twentieth-century situations. He even manages to show, to some degree, just how fundamentally radical basic Christianity is. But he never does explain how western civilization managed to develop in a nearly identical form without the influence of Christianity, nor does he ever explain exactly what God the hypocritical churchmen in his alternate universe are worshiping. We know it's not the God of Judaism, since Myers hints that Jews are an ethnic and religious minority in this parallel universe., and some of Eli's listeners harbor anti-Jewish prejudices. Nor do the hypocritical megachurches seem to worship Zeus, Jupiter, Mithra, or Mammon.

Well, maybe the latter.

Interesting, but I wish that the author had gone further in developing his alternate universe. A world in which Christianity and all related developments did not occur could have gone in a thousand different directions, and I wish he had been more adventurous in exploring them.