Author Rick James was in Colonial Hall of Squires Student Center at Virginia Tech to talk with students about his book, “Jesus Without Religion.” James is also the publisher of Crupress, which sells materials for campus ministries. James took time to speak with the Collegiate Times in a phone interview about reaching out to college students and sharing names with a certain chart-topping funk and 80s R&B singer.

COLLEGIATE TIMES: Why is the book Jesus Without Religion important when talking about Jesus and Christianity?

RICK JAMES: My background was advertising, I used to work in advertising many, many years ago. I’m an old man now, I guess; I’m 46. I left advertising to go into the ministry, and I’ve noticed, as probably you have, that in the last decade marketing has washed up on the shoresof Christian-dom. Everyone’s got Jesus in their title, and everyone seems to be using Jesus to sell books. People are just selling books and magazines and I think in the process making it very unclear what Jesus said, what he did. Because it’s marketing, you try to find the most obscure person you can find, or the most obscure scholarly perspective, that’s what sells, that’s the basis of marketing.

I wrote this little book, and I tried to keep it as little as I could, because while there are issues of faith, I thought it would be helpful to make it as clear as possible what are the gospels about, what is Jesus saying, what did he do, what did he claim, what do we know?

You can make your own decisions, but it shouldn’t be that abstract, that unintelligible, that difficult to figure out who this guy was or what he claimed.

For more, read here.