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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... insisting , wrongly , that religious faith is irrational and reactionary in all its forms and by denying the good works and the great intellectual achievements that our faith traditions have called forth . IV The decision to believe or ...
... insisted that believ- ers were inevitably ignorant , blind , culturally backward , or intellectually unsophisticated . Here were some of the most intelligent and sophisticated people I would encounter who could speak of faith — and also ...
... insist with Novak that believers usually get around to thinking seriously about whether what they believe is true . Does God exist ? How do we knon ? What was the nature of the covenant between God and Moses ? What is the meaning of the ...
... insist that the schools teach atheism or exotic forms of New Age spirituality . It never crosses the minds of these right - wing religious critics of liberalism that many of their own evangelical forebears were at the van- guard of ...
... insistence of certain strands of neo - atheism that belief cannot escape becoming dangerous , fanatical , and destructive . Yet if I do not propose a creed , certain beliefs are at least implicit in the text : that we know God by faith ...
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 |