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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... fact , changed his party after all these years . On significant parts of the right and left , there is a sense that religion always has been and always will be a conservative force . There are Republican candidates and political opera ...
... fact that secular forms of dogmatism have been at least as murderous as the religious kind . Particularly bothersome is the suggestion that believers rarely question themselves while atheists ask all the hard questions . History , as ...
... fact about his own simultaneous commitment to orthodox Catholicism and to a life of spiritual questing . At that Catholic high school — then the Portsmouth Priory , now the Portsmouth Abbey — I was drawn to the writings of Dr. King and ...
... fact that the certainties of a traditional , pre - modern or non- modern society are not available to us . " Modern pluralism , Berger argues , presents us with " a challenge to hold convictions without either dissolving them in utter ...
... fact reflected in their scriptures and in the person of Jesus Christ . But I find the phrase less respectful to both traditions than it is designed to be . That is especially true in relation to Judaism , since the formulation is often ...
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 |