A well-researched and timely work of journalism geared toward like-minded readers.
The role of the modern "Religious Left" in American politics.
Religion reporter Jenkins delves deeply into the origins, activities, and leadership of the Religious Left, a movement he describes as “an amorphous, ever-changing group of progressive, faith-based advocates, strategists, and political operatives.” The author highlights the widespread—though not always widely recognized—role that progressive faith communities have long held in political and social causes. Jenkins illuminates these causes through stories of individual leaders of specific movements. After an introductory chapter discussing how faith communities were essential in the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the author segues into a discussion of Barack Obama’s own expressions of faith in public discourse. He then covers a number of well-known movements from the past two decades and important leaders associated with them. Examples include the Rev. William Barber with North Carolina’s Moral Mondays, the Rev. Traci Blackmon with Black Lives Matter, and Sioux activist Chase Iron Eyes with the Standing Rock protests. Jenkins goes on to cover a number of other topics, such as the Religious Left’s role in LGBTQ activism, the influence of Roman Catholicism in the environmental movement, and interfaith organizing to support the Muslim community. Beyond providing stories of the Religious Left, Jenkins attempts to determine how it has operated in politics and society. For example, he writes, “to understand the New Sanctuary movement [which advocates for immigrants] is to understand how the Religious Left builds power through a mixture of moral arguments, liberation theology, and the art of protest.” Throughout, Jenkins analyzes as well as reports, adding further value to his work. The author has provided a contemporary history that will be useful to students of the intersection of politics and religion in our current era.
A well-researched and timely work of journalism geared toward like-minded readers.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293598-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2020
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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