Profiles in Christian Courage

June 9, 2014
Riffing on Søren Kierkegaard’s rebuke of “respectable Christianity,” Walters (Giving Up god... to Find God), a philosophy professor at Gettysburg College, delivers up 18 profiles of contemporary Christians as models of physical, moral, and spiritual courage who are unafraid to go against the grain. Walters resists hagiography and focuses rather on the humanity of his subjects. In his account of the 2005 murder in Brazil of 73-year-old Catholic sister Dorothy Stang, who stood up to powerful ranchers, Walters eloquently evokes Stang’s final moments: “One of them held a revolver. Dorothy reached into the cloth bag she always carried with her and pulled out her well-read Bible. ‘This is my weapon.’” Two thousand people attended her funeral. Artful prose and elegant logic stand out in Walters’s writing. Christian courage, he writes, requires reconciling one’s own will to God’s will, which requires love. Love is developed by “letting go” of fear and “letting be” what is of God, skills only acquired through prayer, breaking “free of the me-centric universe’s gravity field.” Each of Kerry’s subjects lead lives replete with meaning, embedded in robust communities of faith. In this age of alienation, there is a hunger for Kerry’s invitation to courageous living, but how many will seek it out?