What Would Jesus See

What would Jesus see if he looked at the world around us today?

In these pages, Aaron Rosen, one of the world’s leading experts on art and religion, tackles this question by considering Jesus as a visual thinker. He invites readers to use their imagination to explore with him how Jesus saw, what he saw, and why it is important today.

Rosen brings a fresh lens to the Gospels, informed by his experience as an art curator and scholar, as well as his life as a practicing Jew married to an Episcopal priest. He examines Jesus’s eye for spectacle, his strategies for attentiveness, and his tools for discerning truth amid the flurry of false appearances.

As Rosen applies Jesus’s unique ways of seeing the world to key challenges facing society today, he taps a surprising trove of examples drawn from art, current events, and popular culture. At the core of Jesus’s ministry, Rosen finds, is a call to look at our world–especially those who are most disadvantaged–with radical empathy. In a time when our eyes have grown weary and unfocused, Rosen argues, Jesus offers us the chance to see the world with renewed vision, focused on those who need us most.