Medieval Institute Fellow Robin Jensen consulted about "Our Many Jesuses" for the Wall Street Journal

Easter is the peak time for searching for “Jesus,” according to the Google Trends website, which measures the popularity of online queries. But this February, interest ran higher than at any other time of year including Christmas. The reason seems to have been a pair of unusual ads that ran during the Super Bowl telecast.

Both were almost exclusively montages of black-and-white still photographs, with musical soundtracks and no narration. One featured children showing kindness to each other or to animals, as Patsy Cline sang about seeing the world through the eyes of a child. The other, in sharp contrast, showed Americans confronting each other angrily, and in some cases violently, to the accompaniment of Rag’n’Bone Man’s plaintive and pounding song “Human,” mingled with sounds of shouting and a siren.

The message of each was explicit only in written words at the end: “Jesus didn’t want us to act like adults” for the first one and “Jesus loved the people we hate” for the second. Both ended with the slogan: “He Gets Us. All of Us.”

This is an excerpt from "Our Many Jesuses," by Francis X. Rocca, published in the Wall Street Journal on April 7, 2023, with contributions from Medieval Institute fellow Robin Jensen. Read the full article (if you are Notre Dame faculty, staff, or student, you can access this online through the Hesburgh Libraries).