A learned academic study whose appeal will be limited to fellow scholars.
How the diversity of religion in America has furthered democratic ideals throughout the past century.
Wuthnow, former director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton, offers a detailed look at religion’s role in American democracy, particularly from the New Deal era onward. The author asserts that, despite many challenges, the varied contours of the American religious landscape have been beneficial overall to democracy. He structures his argument around a handful of wide-ranging historical issues and corresponding movements. First is the New Deal and the long-running Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Wuthnow explores the level of resistance many religious leaders and communities raised against Roosevelt’s social policy, balanced by the support of urban faith leaders who influenced policy and politics in significant ways. Wuthnow then examines issues of conscience, with a focus on World War II–era pacifism, expressed by a vocal minority of American faith communities and leadership. Then he moves on to freedom of assembly, describing how the conformist religious and social organizations of the 1950s set the groundwork for the organized activism of the following decade. Finally, the author explores human dignity, welfare, and wealth distribution, demonstrating the politicization of religious communities in recent decades and the widening rift between right and left. Wuthnow praises the role of diversity in allowing voices of dissent to find outlets amid transformative social and cultural issues. He warns, however, that “while diversity is present, it is overshadowed by polarization,” which “hasn’t been healthy either for religion or democracy.” The text is dense with evident scholarship and plenty of historical examples, but Wuthnow’s thesis is strained. In declaring diversity in religion good for democracy, the author seems mainly to argue that dissent in religion is good for democracy. The book is largely a history of dissent, and Wuthnow champions those religious traditions that spurn convention and the status quo.
A learned academic study whose appeal will be limited to fellow scholars.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-691-22263-9
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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