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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... suggested that to be religious was to cling to a rather restricted set of social and political views . The public voice of religion , as reflected in the supposedly liberal mass media , was deeply inflected with the accents of a largely ...
... suggests that those who have pushed religion to the right have done more to arouse enmity toward religion than to win adherents to faith . The most serious believers , understanding that they need to ask them- selves searching questions ...
... suggestion that believers rarely question themselves while atheists ask all the hard questions . History , as Michael Novak argued in a 2007 critique of the neo - atheists , suggests the contrary . " Questions , " he noted , " have been ...
... suggest that it seemed to me perfectly natural in the late 1960s and early 1970s , long before the rise of the religious Right , to take an interest in the relationship between religion and politics . This can serve as a reminder that ...
... suggested in the English adjec- tive ' faithful . ' " Surely these are virtues that believers and unbelievers alike would wish to see reflected more perfectly in our politics . Yet this is also at the heart of my argument with the ...
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 |