Customer Reviews

Progressive Christians Speak: A Different Voice on Faith and Politics

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This book provides a great resource for progressives who want to learn the moral underpinnings for their point of view. This is done on a whole wealth of issues such as globalization, abortion, the environment and gay rights among many others. If you are a christian and a progressive and want to stand up to the "religious right", then I recommend this book!

This is a great resource. I wasn't sure if I was a true progressive, but I knew I appreciated fact based opinion. This book provides a well informed factual basis for so many of the items identified with progressive Christianity. R Cobb is brilliant and voices he's chosen to the following topics are well chosen. The titles include Religion and Public Schools, Basic rights of Children, Abortion, Human and civil rights, Homosexuality, Social Security, The Penal System, War on Drugs, Immigration, Corporations, Sweatshops, Globalization, Debt, Environmentalism, Food Security, and Global Population. This book is everything a good liberal arts education should be. It is extremely well written and brilliant in it's insight and scope.

Wow, was I surprised by this book! I thought it would have useful information and thought-provoking conclusions. Instead, I find a mass of half-truths and, at best, hyperbole. The book is nothing more than sensationalism. There is little data, few references, and little understanding of the truth. When a "fact" is presented, there are no references to back it up, and upon checking, it is too often found to be in error or only part of the story. I checked several of the "facts" presented, and I believe this book will serve me better in the trash than continue to waste my time. How can I talk with my friends about my positions based on this data? Anyone working from this text will be quickly embarrassed by real data that Google will be quick to retrieve.

Another thing I found amazing is the extreme lack of Bible references. I would have expected the positions taken here to be with respect to God's. Instead, there is nothing Christian about this book at all -- it is simply a collection of man-centric reasonings and calculations. I believe that I am not alone, as a Progressive Christian, to read a book like this and come away feeling that something is missing. As a Progressive, I want to see facts; as a Christian, I want to see God. In this title, I found little of either.

I suppose this book will appeal to those who don't care about facts, but are already so convinced about what they know that facts are no longer necessary. As a cheerleader, the author does well to rally the troops. The language is forceful and authoritative. It is a good book to reinforce what one believes, but not good if you want to learn anything or be changed by the experience. I strongly suggest that anyone considering this book take a moment to look at the SearchInside feature Amazon has provided and see for yourself what kind of book this is. I wish I had.