In Memory of Jesus blends imaginative conversation and the author’s own personal journey of coming to know Jesus as friend to produce a realistic human picture of the person at the heart of Christian faith. Morwood maintains that Christianity must return to focusing on the human Jesus and his message if it is to have relevance in the modern world.

Michael Morwood speaks for many who have struggled to adopt the religion of their childhood to the realities of the 21st Century. As one who was forced to exam his belief system by the actions of his local Bishop who declared a community’s response to help the marginalized as being to “protestant for a Roman Catholic Parish” , I found solace in authors like Morwood who challenged the clericalism of the Catholic Church and even its doctrines. As Morwood so eloquently put forth in his book through an imagined conversation with Jesus, God is Mystery, and always will be. But unlike the Institutional Church which interprets mystery as a way of demanding obedience without question, Morwood invites us to find this presence in others and in our surroundings. This approach echoes in a way the Buddhist’s greeting “Nameste”— The divine in me salutes the divine in you.
I would recommend this book to all who wonder what this first century Mediterranean Jew we now call Christ was all about, and how he understood the mystery of God. — Joe Shveima