Interfaces: My Name is Legion The Story and Soul of the Gerasene Demoniac

. . . competent, suggestive and interesting.

Newheart's book is filled with real, and fragile, life. It is profoundly at the service of this most important of tasks.

Newheart brings his Afro-American life experiences, adding a different dimension. He also brings his poetic expertise to his writing. It is perhaps in showing the variety of analytical perspectives in criticism that Newheart's book will be most valued. His clear, conversational style will also be appreciated.

Readers of Michael Willett Newheart's exploration of the Markan story of the Gerasene demoniac will find both scholarship and passion in full measure in these pages. Newheart writes in a lively and unusual style, and students using this book will be introduced to biblical studies in a unique and enjoyable (even entertaining!) fashion.

No one else has contributed this kind of collection of ideas about the story of the demoniac.

Personal, political, poetic, powerful. Newheart's little book has big aims: to introduce students and laity to biblical narrative criticism and psychological criticism—with touches of reader-response criticism, cultural and post-colonial criticism, and an European American's appreciation of African American experience and poetry thrown in at the end—and all through the telling and retelling of Mark's story of the Gerasene demoniac. It's a tall order, but a whale of a tale! As Newheart warns his readers, ‘don't get the impression that biblical studies in general is this much fun!'—though I think it can be, as people allow themselves to take the text more seriously, and therefore play with it.

This first book-length treatment of the Gerasene Demoniac is a page-turner. Armed with the tools of narrative criticism, reader-response criticism, autobiographical and psychological criticism, Michael Newheart invites the reader to probe the ‘deep human stories' at work in the story of the demoniac, the story of Mark the evangelist, the story of the reader, and of Newheart himself. Working in the vanguard of psychological biblical criticism, Newheart demonstrates lucidly how the psychoanalytic theory of Freud, the archetypal psychology of Jung, the scapegoat theories of René Girard, and the social-psychological theories of Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, help us understand the first century world of the demoniac and our own.

Michael Newheart brings the richness of African American culture and diverse biblical methodology to bear on the gospel versions of the cure of the Gerasene demoniac.