978-0-385-51664-8 (0-385-51664-9)

 

Washington, DC, USA. "It is," the Anglican Archbishop William Temple once remarked, "a mistake to suppose that God is only, or even chiefly, concerned with religion."

 

The prelate's words would resonate with Obery M. Hendricks Jr., who, in the beginning of his new book The Politics of Jesus , recalls a childhood spent in the church. He was, he puts it, "a son of the Christian Church. Raised in the Church. Nurtured in the Church." His family was thick with ministers and lay elders; he started singing in the choir at age 5, and accepted Christ five years later. The Jesus he offered his life to was a messiah drained of controversy, a kind of air-brushed savior. "I was raised on the bland Jesus of Sunday School and of my mother's gentle retellings," Hendricks writes, "the meek, mild Jesus who told us, in a nice, passive, sentimental way, to love our enemies, and who assured us that we need not worry about our troubles, just bring them to him."

 

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Hendricks's Christian manifesto for a politically liberal vision of America and of the world arrives at an especially rich moment in the long-running debate over the role of religion in the nation's public life. After roughly three decades of largely ceding the language of faith to political conservatives, liberals are mounting an aggressive and often intellectually stimulating counterattack. The Politics of Jesus joins John Danforth's Faith and Politics and Jim Wallis's God's Politics as essential reading for Americans trying to move beyond the corrosive standoff between the religious right and the secular left. One need not agree with Hendricks's liberalism to appreciate that his book is a useful contribution to a conversation that seems ever more urgent: how to manage and marshal religion's influence over our public lives.

 

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Jon Meacham, the managing editor of Newsweek, is the author of "American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers and the Making of a Nation."

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Read more at washingtonpost.com . . .

 

The Texas Freedom Network (TFN) has been monitoring efforts in Texas and other states where groups are trying to use public school Bible courses to promote primarily fundamentalist Protestant religious views not shared by people of most other faiths, said TFN President Kathy Miller.

 

 

Terryville, Connecticut, USA. Rosa Lee, feminist author and entrepreneur, has marshalled scientific evidence and mathematical proof to expose what she says are weaknesses in contemporary feminism.

 

Her first full-length work is called "Why Feminists Are Wrong" – How Transsexuals Prove Gender is not a Social Construction. Lee centers her arguments on the phenomenon of transsexuality, saying: "The transsexual is the exception that has the power to shake the foundation of binary sex to its core."

 

Lee says that feminists are still slaves to a system they can conceptually dismantle using simple logic and the scientific method. She offers a map of oppressive forces (she calls it “the patriarchitecture”), then explains how an application of quantum mechanics to feminism forces a rethinking of philosophical positions.

Overall, the book walks the reader through a wide range of topics from the construction of our universe, quantum mechanics and neuroscience, to economica, sociology, and entheogens (psychoactive substances used in religious or shamanic contexts).

 

The work includes extensive documentation, with citations to over 130 sources.

 

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Ordering Information. The book is available from the publisher, online at Amazon.com, or from Lee herself. Details are included on Rosa Lee's website for the new book. 

 

Illustrated. 469 pp.
St. Martin’s Press. $27.95.

 

Springfield, Virginia, USA. James Tiptree, Jr. (August 24, 1915 – May 19, 1987) was the pen name of American science fiction author Alice Bradley Sheldon used from 1987 until her death. Until 1977, no one knew that James Tiptree Jr. was a woman.

 

On May 19, 1987, at age 71, Sheldon took the life of her 84-year-old, nearly blind husband and then took her own, ending a life of great successes matched by greater personal torments.

 

Phillips’ biography shines a light on both the bright seductive surface of Tiptree’s short stories and the bleakness of Sheldon’s personal life that lies hidden in the stories’ undercurrents. Tiptree/Sheldon wrote powerful fiction that challenges readers' assumptions about sex and gender.

 

Most reviewers approach this biograghy as feminists, seeing the life of Tiptree/Sheldon as a parable of the the feminist movement. I too am a feminist but I also am a person born transsexual. Reading the pages of Phillips’ book I heard Alice’s own words strike deep inside me.

 

Stanford, California, USA. Since leaving office, Jimmy Carter has dedicated his life to the pursuit of justice and equal rights around the globe. The 2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner uses the Atlanta-based Carter Center as the hub for his humanitarian pursuits.

The 39th president of the United States is the author of more than 20 books. His latest, Our Endangered Values, America’s Moral Crisis (Simon & Schuster, 2005), details his concerns about the threat religious fundamentalism poses to America’s values.