Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love
by Will Roscoe
Suspect Thoughts Press
232 pages, $16.95 (paper)
THE RELIGIOUS-SOUNDING title of gay liberation scholar Will Roscoe’s important new book, Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love, might give anyone who has cast off Judeo-Christian monotheism the willies. But readers starved for better fare in gay discourse than the one served up by today’s approaches to gay life—political assimilation, New Ageism, postmodern deconstructionism—will find in Roscoe’s scholarly yet accessible book a preliminary taste (but just a taste) as to what shamanism and its connection to homosexuality are really all about in the first place.
Roscoe takes us back 2,000 years to the contentious, apocalyptic politics of a multicultural Jerusalem overrun with Roman rule, to the ministry, death, and deification of Jesus, and to the eventual rise of competing Jewish-Hellenic-Christian sects
