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Pastordan's First Book Coming Out in September
When I was cobbling together what became Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America, one of the first people I asked to contribute was Rev. Dan Schultz, best known as pastordan, one of the leading religion bloggers at the time. He was one of the original writers here at Talk to Action and went on to co-found Street Prophets.
It had been the thinking of many of the contributors to Dispatches that a more authentic and robust Religious Left than the milquetoastery that had been the standard fare for some time was necessary -- not only as a counter to the Religious Right, but also in order to advance a host of progressive concerns. The conversation we had hoped would be sparked by Dispatches has generally happened more quietly and subtly than we thought, but it has been happening.
Indeed, building on his essay in Dispatches, Dan has recently completed a full length book: Changing the Script: An Authentically Faithful and Authentically Progressive Political Theology for the 21st Century. It will be out in September from IG Publishing, but you can pre-order at Amazon.com. (See the book description on the flip.) |
In recent years, and in particular since the election of Barack Obama, the religious conversation in America has been dominated by calls for progressives to move beyond "partisanship" by reaching out to evangelicals in order to create a "big tent" on social issues such as abortion and marriage equality, despite the lack of evidence that such a strategy can or ever did work. This misguided notion that we can build a shared political and religious center has for the most part shut out true progressive voices, allowing a small conservative minority to control the political and religious debate in this country, with only the most tepid of moral criticism from the religious centrists who claim to desire bipartisan consensus.
In Changing the Script, Daniel Schultz, one of the leading progressive religious voices in America today, builds upon the insights of Old Testament scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann to identify five "scripts" that exercise unseen power in our society: the therapeutic, technological, consumerist, militarist, and conformist. Confronting each of these scripts and the actions of both the Right and the Left that have allowed them to take root in our culture, Schultz voices a perspective that shows what an authentically progressive and authentically faithful religious ideal would truly look like.
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