God's Politics

I wanted to write just a few words about the last book-on-tap (or rather CD) that I finished. It's titled God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong, and the Left Doesn't Get It. It was written by a man named Jim Wallis, a Reverend deeply committed to social justice who I believe identifies as Evangelical, and who also serves as editor of Sojourners magazine. The book criticizes both extreme leftest secularism and hard right religious exploitation, and proposes a new Christian 3rd way (actually according to the book its a 4th way, Libertarianism is the 3rd way) in politics. Perceptive and thought provoking, it offered some real word solutions for harnessing the energy of the religious feeling in politics for productive purposes. As such its a good follow up for American Theocracy, the audio book on the dangours of fundamentalist religion (among other things) to American politics, that I started listening to on my previous trip to Utah in August (I listened to about half of this one on my Utah trip of a couple of weeks back). Anyway this material combined with the book on Quakers I'm currently reading, has me thinking about a form of progressive faith-based politics that I'm becoming quite enamored with. Next time you see me, this might be a good topic for conversation.