DISSENTER IN A GREAT SOCIETY: A Christian View of America in Crisis

by William Stringfellow ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 11, 1966

Mr. Stringfellow in this new book returns to the theme which has been at the heart of all his published works: the place of Christianity in a de-Christianized society. Here, specifically, he is concerned with the a-Christian values of present-day, i.e., Johnsonian America, and his targets are the three great problems of the ""Great Society"": poverty and its eradication, politics and its corruptions, and equality and its enigmas. Devoting a chapter to each of these, Stringfellow fights a good, and delightfully dirty, fight, citing incompetence and self-seeking in the War on Poverty (Paul Screvane, for example, and Congressman Powell are flayed by name) excoriating the WASP syndrome in politics, and attacking official deceit and hypocrisy in the fight for civil rights. A concluding chapter enunciates the thesis of ""the orthodoxy of radical involvement"" -- a thesis more than adequately demonstrated and defended in the foregoing chapters. This book must, in the natural course of events, attract the wrath of those whom he classifies as the pharisees, the pietists, the do-gooders, the phonies. Yet, though its natural audience is a Protestant one, Dissenter in a Great Society must be recommended to every intelligent reader, of whatever persuasion or of none at all, who may have begun to suspect that morality has given way to expediency, truth to propaganda, and idealism to self-aggrandizement, in our ""Great Society.

Pub Date: Aug. 11, 1966

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Holt, Rinehart & Winston

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1966

Categories: NONFICTION