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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... thought from it . " Wieseltier made clear by implication why it is easy for the nonbeliever to insist upon religious freedom and pluralism . Since the nonbeliever sees faith as an irrational " preference " among many other preferences ...
... thought all kids were children of God . How could one possibly imagine that the reception of the Eucharist should be organized by race ? When I was in high school , I was taught by a remarkable group of Benedictine monks . The head of ...
... thoughts on these subjects . I mention the papers to 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 ...
... thought . That is certainly their mission . VI This book is organized with the aim of developing these arguments about religion's role in American public life while also offering an account of our current political moment . Readers who ...
... thought reflected by Clinton , Barack Obama , and other prominent progressives is now in the ascendancy . Chapter 4 grapples with the politics of moral issues in the Bush years , and the specific role played by George W. Bush himself ...
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 |