Progressive Christians and secular activists alike will find this a useful handbook in battling the religious right.
A lawyer and religious activist squares off against Christian nationalism and its far-right-wing tenets.
“A large and diverse community of people is eager to challenge the political ideology of Christian nationalism,” writes Tyler. This community comprises many faith traditions. In the case of her former Southern Baptist alignment, one argument against nationalism holds that “every person must have the freedom to respond to God and that no governmental authority should interfere with that relationship.” Speaking from that tradition, Tyler argues that the conflation of Christianity and government is idolatrous, and in its us-against-them stances, with “us” being able to tell “them” how to live their lives, it violates what Tyler holds to be the most important tenet of Christianity: that one should love one’s neighbor as oneself. Tyler depicts Christian nationalism as an effort to impose state-backed theocratic authority on the entire nation; nationalists, she holds, believe a range of propositions from the sanctity of the Second Amendment to the relegation of women to subservient positions, to say nothing of suppressing religious minorities. Tyler holds that these views have come as part of a package that has dogged Americans from the earliest days but has gathered force in the past few decades, including white supremacist assumptions and the insistence that God favors the United States above all other nations—more idolatry, that. With each prose narrative chapter closing with biblical readings and workbooklike exercises, Tyler’s book offers both good news and bad. The good news is that “large and diverse community.” The bad news, she allows, is that it will take generations to entirely root out Christian nationalism, beginning with one central task: “to directly confront a persistent myth: that the United States is a Christian nation.”
Progressive Christians and secular activists alike will find this a useful handbook in battling the religious right.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781506498287
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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