Spiritual Defiance

Starred review from April 13, 2015
Pastor and social gospel prophet Meyers (The Underground Church) adapted his 2013 series of Yale Divinity School Lyman Beecher Lectures into this explosive call to religious progressives to resist cultural and economic injustice. Building up from the populist red dirt of his 30-year Oklahoma pastorate of a United Church of Christ congregation, and on to the lectern endowed by a 19th-century pillar of the American religious establishment, Meyers skillfully builds an argument of the church as a "beloved community of resistance."Using three poems by 20th century Polish poet Anna KamieÅska, Meyers explores the necessity of "falling off a horse" like Saul on the Damascus road, to disorient the ego; of resisting ossified theologies and a rapid-set faith and instead embracing the particularities of small, ordinary things ("ââIt's not from the grand/ but from every tiny thing/ that grows enormous'â"); and of waking up to acknowledge how we have been flattened by American political empire into soul-weariness. Meyers writes, "If the Body of Christ has become just one more peculiar gathering of loyal subjects of empire... then we have no Good News to offer, just religious propaganda." His writing is knowledgeable, engaging, and provocative.

Starred review from May 15, 2015

Meyers's (philosophy, Oklahoma City Univ.; Saving Jesus from the Church; The Underground Church) call to action is based on his Lyman Beecher lectures, hosted each year at Yale Divinity School, and given its title this work is a suitably bracing and even fiery summons, what Meyers terms orthopraxy (right action). He is inspired in part by the writings of 20th-century Polish poet Anna Kamienska but has little need of borrowed eloquence as he movingly asks for resistance to the tyranny of the self, to orthodoxy, and most especially to the indignities and outrages of militarism and capitalism. The author also calls for and preaches the true Social Gospel; he urges readers to contest the Church's own staid, repetitive, exclusive status quo, the church as "a boys club, or a heavenly pyramid scheme." VERDICT Meyers's ideas might upset and alienate the comfortable yet will also enlighten and inspirit a thoughtful readership of seekers and pastors.

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