My generation first met the happy, hippie “Jesus” in our 1970s and ’80s CCD classes. He was a super-nice dude, not scary or stern or particularly demanding. This was a new, enlightened era, after all, and the old paradigms would no longer do. As I’ve often described of those vacuous catechetical times, “the God presented to us was a God who hardly needs to be worshipped, since he’s our pal…
