Schmidt offers a creative and engaging look at the artistry, the imagination, and the beauty of one particular event: the death of Jesus. He concentrates on what might be called the aesthetics of God, or "a neighborhood Christians rarely visit, where pictures and metaphors touch the imagination, where God expresses his style." Representative chapters include a story weaving Jesus into a modern-day parable of how so much depends on God working in the details; a depiction of how Emperor Nero�s Roman triumphal parades influenced and were contrasted by Mark�s account of Jesus�s passion; and a creative rendering of Jesus in a therapy session which punctures modern misunderstandings about the Messiah�s emotional life. A Scandalous Beauty packs biblical truth and extraordinary imagination into a look at the death of Jesus, just in time for the Lenten and Easter seasons.