Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious RightPrinceton University Press, 2008 - 251 pages The religious and political winds are changing. Tens of millions of religious Americans are reclaiming faith from those who would abuse it for narrow, partisan, and ideological purposes. And more and more secular Americans are discovering common ground with believers on the great issues of social justice, peace, and the environment. In Souled Out, award-winning journalist and commentator E. J. Dionne explains why the era of the Religious Right--and the crude exploitation of faith for political advantage--is over. Based on years of research and writing, Souled Out shows that the end of the Religious Right doesn't signal the decline of evangelical Christianity but rather its disentanglement from a political machine that sold it out to a narrow electoral agenda of such causes as opposition to gay marriage and abortion. With insightful portraits of leading contemporary religious figures from Rick Warren and Richard Cizik to John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Dionne shows that our great religions have always preached a broad message of hope for more just human arrangements and refused to be mere props for the powers that be. Dionne also argues that the new atheist writers should be seen as a gift to believers, a demand that they live up to their proclaimed values and embrace scientific and philosophical inquiry in a spirit of "intellectual solidarity." Written in the tradition of Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, Souled Out will help change how we think and talk about religion and politics in the post-Bush era. |
From inside the book
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... approach to providing for the old , the sick , and the desperate . Religion becomes less relevant to public life when its role is marginalized to a prede- termined list of " values issues , " when its voice is silenced or softened on ...
... approaches to spirituality . Much of what is interpreted in contemporary American Chris- tianity as specifically ... approach to worship , faith , church member- ship — and their attitudes toward those who do not share their own com ...
... approach to spirituality is anything but authoritarian . The builders of the new megachurches , notably the most successful such as Rick Warren , are closely attuned to the demands of the new believ- ers . In a 2005 conversation with a ...
... approaches to three of the thorniest moral issues facing us today : abortion , the battle against teen pregnancy , and gay marriage . It concludes with a discussion of the new directions in evangelical life bravely pioneered by Cizik ...
... approach typically used by Italian writers about the Vatican , not out of disrespect , but because other forms of reference ( " for- mer Cardinal Ratzinger " ) seemed clumsy and seriously cluttered the text . Second , while this book is ...
Contents
Is Religion Conservative or Progressive? Or Both? | 25 |
Why the Culture War Is the Wrong War Religion Values and American Politics | 45 |
What Are the Values Issues? Economics Social Justice and the Struggle over Morality | 71 |
Selling Religion Short When Ideology Is Not Enough | 92 |
John Paul Benedict and the Catholic Future | 126 |
What Happened to the Seamless Garment? The Agony of Liberal Catholicism | 151 |
Other editions - View all
Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right E. J. Dionne Jr. Limited preview - 2009 |
Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right E. J. Dionne Jr. No preview available - 2009 |