Bernard Shaw, Paul Ricoeur, and the Jesusian Dialectics of Redemptive Living

This book explores a heretofore unremarked linkage between Bernard Shaw, the twentieth-century French thinker Paul Ricoeur, and Jesus of Nazareth. The ties that bind them are a foundational interest in the social teachings of the Nazarene and their use of a shared dialectics with respect to living the kind of compassionate life that holds out the promise in our contemporary world of achieving something approximating universal wellness on a healthy planet at peace with itself. This work argues that the three principal subjects of the study—independently of one another—used the same dialectical method to reach the same dialectically derived conclusion about how humans can live redemptively in a fractured world. Howard Ira Einsohn was a part-time instructor at Middlesex Community College and Wesleyan University’s Institute of Lifelong Learning for a combined total of 15 years (2004-2019), most of which were spent at the former institution. During this period, he taught courses in writing, advanced writing, technical writing, literature surveys, drama and the short story, as well as courses on Ibsen, Flannery O’Connor, and Tim O’Brien.