New Hampshire family doesn't think Jesus drank wine. Or something. I'm confused.

So, last month the story broke. A 16 year old kid in a New Hampshire high school was assigned to read Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich. It's a first-person account about minimum-wage jobs and struggling financially in America.

Well, the 16 year old student, Jordan Henderson, didn't quite like the book. According to this FoxNews story quoting his mother quoting him: "'I'm not reading this book, I'm done reading this book, I am not reading any more of this book," and he slammed it down and said, 'This is junk!'"

In other words, it's hard to get his opinion on things.

Mom read the book and was incensed, too. Dad followed suit. The issue? Ambiguous "language used" and one depiction of Jesus. The infuriating passage about Jesus?

It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth. 

Specifically, according to FoxNews, what Mom, Dad, and little Jordan are up in arms about is that Jesus is called "the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist."

Let's break that description down word-by-word to see if this anger is warranted.

(All definitions from dictionary.com.)
wine: The fermented juice of grapes.
guzzling: to drink...greedily, frequently, or plentifully.
vagrant: a person who wanders about idly, and has no permanent home or employment.
precocious: unusually advanced or mature in development
socialist: an advocate or supporter of socialism.
(defined deeper--socialism: a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.)

I'm going to guess Jordan and his parents are using 21st-century pop culture assumptions about words and not their actual definitions. That means...
a.) "vagrant" becomes angry, dirty homeless person 
b.) "guzzling" becomes sloppy drunk
c.) "precocious" becomes infantile
d.) "socialism" becomes godless, Stalin-esque Communism.
Sure, Ehrenreich could've written the sentence differently to avoid all this. But it's not her responsibility to be responsible for the reading abilities of others. Last I checked from all my years of Catholic school, Jesus drank wine, wandered about hillsides, was immensely intelligent by all accounts, and divided any bounty of food or possessions equally with his disciples. In other words, what Ehrenreich said.

In the end, Jordan is being home-schooled now. According to Jordan's mother (don't stop her now, she's on a roll):

"We've eliminated Christmas, we've eliminated all these things because we don't want to step on anyone's toes but here we're going to hand out this book? … This is anti-God, anti-religion, it's racial, I mean it crosses a wide spectrum of very touchy and very insulting issues to most human beings and I think that even with a parental consent it's not enough. They need to boot that book out of there."

So, in other words, she's asking for everyone to take a deep breath.