Marylinne Robinson

Our next meeting is this Sunday at 7:00 in the church building. We will be discussing two articles from Marilynne Robinson's book The Death of Adam: Facing Reality and Puritans and Prigs.

Christianity and Democaracy

For this meeting I have selected two readings dealing with the relationship between Christianity and our surrounding culture, in particular, liberal democracy. They are:

1) A series of brief excerpts from Christianizing the Social Order, by Walter Rauschenbusch. Rauschenbush was a protestant theologian, active in the early 20th century. He was one of the founders of the social gospel movement, which called for greater Christian involvement in issues of social justice. Rauschenbusch in particular espoused democracy as the most Christian form of government, and called for Christian political involvement. The document can be found here.

2) Stanley Hauerwas' article A Christian Critique of Christian America. Hauerwas is an active theologian at Duke university. He supports a neo-Anabaptist approach to faith-culture interactions. That is: Christianity has long been relegated to a mere supporting institution for the state, and in order to recover its distinctiveness and primacy in Christian life, there must be a significant rethinking of Christian activity in the political domain. Unfortunately, this article is not available in electronic form, so I will distribute physical copies.