I know what I am doing is nothing new. . .well, not exactly new. . .

So, I'm not the first to have thought that this would be important (imagine that! There really is nothing new under the sun!). In fact, even before I started this I could go way back to the beginning of the common era (St. Augustine pops immediately to mind) and find people who used the teachings of Christ as a foundation for their "critical theory," a tradition that would take us through some of the greatest poets and thinkers in history, right up through modern times--Peter Abelard, Dante Alighieri, Thomas More, John Milton, Nathaniel Hawthorne--with the he most obvious respected modern critical voice being C. S. Lewis (perhaps the preeminent model to imitate in this regard?).

But my chief concern was finding a contemporary place for a Christ-centered critical perspective, a place for Christ within the contemporary academic landscape that sees Jesus not as a mythic concept, or a political flash-point, or as a knee-jerk ideological rallying cry, but as a teacher whose insights into the human condition have at least as much to value as the insights of a Freud or a Marx or a Derrida, and so are equally valid as a foundation for a critical theory.

Truth be told, knowing I'm not alone really relieves a lot of anxiety. If I'm not alone in this, then that means
1.) I don't have to start from scratch (whew!)
2.) there are others who think this is an thing to be talking about (so I have a potential audience, potentially receptive audience). 

Basically, there's already a conversation here, I'm just coming into the parlor to add my voice to the conversation.

What do I have to add? Ah, there's the rub.

I guess I'm looking for cross-over appeal. While the majority of religious people in the world are Christian, and the majority of people in the world are religious, the academic world still seems to view a religious critical perspective as overly biased and unscientific. Nevermind that feminism is unscientific and biased. Nevermind that Marxism is biased and unscientific. Nevermind that historicism and performance studies and semiotics are all biased and unscientific. Nevermind that most secular humanists are not "scientists" in the strict sense of the word (and,one could argue, neither are most "scientists") but they are biased, agenda-driven human beings whose prosaic stylistics are merely structured to convey the illusion of detached objectivism. 

So can Christ's teachings be utilized in the same way? The same way that a scholar or an educator or an artist might use Marx, or Freud, or Hegel, or Derrida, or Butler, or any other secular-humanist prophet? Just because a person doesn't name their belief system or their philosophical perspective a "religion" doesn't mean it isn't one--I mean, we're much too rhetorically sophisticated by this point to fall for that, aren't we?