Patheos Book Club: Raised Right by Alisa Harris

I’m delighted to be participating in the Patheos Book Club!

Like Alisa Harris, journalist and author of Raised Right: How I Untangled my Faith from Politics, I once pretty much assumed that Christian = Republican. Also like her, I assumed that America was fundamentally  a “Christian” nation and the Best Nation on Earth. Like her, I no longer believe these things, but I still love my country–

“because it’s mine–because this is the community where God saw fit to plunk me and I have an obligation to its rancorous, disputatious, obnoxious and suffering members.”

Learning about the death penalty from Sister Helen Prejean‘s Dead Man Walking made me doubt a government’s right to take what only God can give.

amazing Sister Helen.

Reading Fast Food Nation (you know food had to be in here somewhere!) persuaded me that government has an obligation to protect workers and consumers from corporate greed.

Seeing children I knew and loved sorely neglected by most every adult in their lives and utterly impoverished convinced me that they needed every social safety net available to keep them from falling…and watching children like that go off to fight in Iraq brought me to tears.

But the solution isn’t found at the ballot box, or in holding campaign signs. Oh, no. Jesus, she writes, doesn’t call his followers “to oppose positions that are wrong, but to embody values that are heavenly.”

Harder than punching a chad, but ever so much more joyful–like maybe BEING someone’s net, EATING for change, and LIVING so as to affirm life for all.

About these ads

5 thoughts on “Patheos Book Club: Raised Right by Alisa Harris

Please Join the Conversation!

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s