Jesus for President

Starred review from January 28, 2008
Here is the must-read election-year book for Christian Americans. What should Christians do when allegiances to the state clash with personal faith? Haw and Claiborne (The Irresistible Revolution
) slice through politics as usual and well past the superficial layers of the culture wars with their lucid exploration of how Christians can and should relate to presidents and kings, empire and government. Their entertaining yet provocative tour of the Bible's social and economic order makes even the most abstruse Levitical laws come alive for our era. They also provide a valuable political context for Christ's life, reminding readers that Jesus did not preach the need to put God back into government—he urged his followers to live by a different set of rules altogether, to hold themselves apart as peculiar people. The compelling writing is enhanced by a lavish, eye-popping layout. The pages are a riot of textured callouts, colors, photos and fonts—the perfect packaging for a message that must compete in a world of sound bites. With this second book, Claiborne emerges as an affable, intelligent, humorous prophet of his generation, calling people out of business-as-usual in a corrupt world and back to the radically different social order of the biblical God.

April 15, 2008
Claiborne ("The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical") and Haw, a graduate student of theology at Villanova University, here lay out an action theology in which Jesus commissions his disciples to become, collectively, a new humanity filled with a contagious love that spreads to communities, nations, and the world with grace. In following him, his disciples partake of his "cup" and will possibly die as sheep among wolves. The authors describe an action theology that boldly confronts social injustice, violence, and war with weapons of grace, sharing, peacemaking, and acts of love, substantiating their position with examples from both the Old and the New Testaments. "Like Abraham and Sarah," they write, "disciples would be a humanity born again in a dysfunctional world]to infect nations with grace." The book ends by illustrating the outworking of this action theology both in history and especially in our present day. Examples include Martin Luther King, war protesters, and "new monasticism" communities such as inner-city Philadelphia's The Simple Way, of which Claiborne is a founding member. This is a good read even if you personally question the theology, idealism, or practicality it espouses. Recommended for large libraries.George Westerlund, formerly with Providence P.L.

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.