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How can Christians be the kind of people who are known, as Proverbs puts it, to "turn away wrath?" Scott Sauls's compelling new book shows Christians how to become people of "a gentle answer" in a politically, relationally, and culturally fractured world by helping readers: grow in affection for Christ, who answers our hostility with gentleness.
Rights are a sacred part of American identity. Yet they're also the source of some of our greatest divisions. We believe that holding a right means getting a judge to let us do whatever the right protects. And judges, for their part, seem unable to imagine two rights coexisting—reducing the law to winners and losers.
Sauls, Scott. A Gentle Answer: Our 'Secret Weapon' in an Age of Us Against Them (pp. xvii-xviii). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
“This generation is the first to turn hate into an asset.” When Dr. John Perkins, the eighty-nine-year-old Christian minister and civil rights icon/activist, said these words at a recent leaders’ gathering in Nashville, things I’ve been feeling about the current state of Western society came into sharper focus. For many years now, I’ve grown increasingly perplexed over what feels like a culture of suspicion, mistrust, and us-against-them. Whatever the subject may be—politics, sexuality, immigration, income gaps, women’s concerns, race, or any other social matters over which people have differences—angst, suspicion, outrage, and outright hate increasingly shape our response to the world around us. John Perkins knows suffering. His mother died when he was a baby. His father abandoned him when he was a child. His brother was killed during an altercation with a Mississippi police officer. As a black man during the civil rights era, he endured beatings and imprisonments and death threats. Since that time, Perkins has faithfully confronted injustice, racism, oppression, and violence while also advocating valiantly for reconciliation, peace, equality, healing, and hope. If anyone has a right to be bitter, if anyone has a right to turn hate into an asset and use it to his own advantage, it is John Perkins. Yet instead of feeding the cycle of resentment and retaliation, he spends his life preaching against these wrongs while advocating for forgiveness and moving toward enemies in love.
Putnam, Robert D.. Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (p. 1). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
In 1995 I published an article in a well-respected but somewhat obscure academic journal, summarizing a lecture I had given in Sweden on the topic of civic engagement in America. Throughout the previous year, I had been following a hunch, poking around in various data sets attempting to piece together a picture of how Americans’ participation in membership organizations and civic groups had changed over the preceding decades. My preliminary findings seemed to show a steep decline in participation. Based upon previous work I had done in Italy—which argued that healthy democracies depend upon social connectedness— I began to wonder if some of the challenges America was facing as we approached the end of the twentieth century might have their roots in a shrinking stock of social capital. At the time, I never expected the article to receive much attention. But before I knew it, I found myself in the middle of a deluge of discussion, debate, and dissent around the questions it provoked. Were more and more Americans indeed bowling— as well as worshipping, picnicking, politicking, and engaging in countless other “social” activities— alone (or not at all)? If so, why? And what could it mean for a nation that supposedly counted community and collective action as founding virtues? Suddenly social scientists, politicians, pundits, PTA presidents, and seemingly everyone in between were talking about social capital, “bridging” and “bonding,” and the fact that something palpable had begun to change in America.
James Davison Hunter. Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America (Kindle Location 39). Kindle Edition.
Introduction
A European friend of mine recently observed that Americans typically conduct their lives in private and with little controversy. He did not mean to deny that such issues as abortion, gay rights, funding for the arts, women's rights, child-care policy, church and state litigation, multiculturalism, and court-packing are followed in the press and even debated passionately among American families, friends, and coworkers. But, my friend asked, do these culture wars have practical relevance for them? The answer will no doubt become more apparent to him as his stay in the United States lengthens. Eventually, he will see that these issues frequently seem abstract to people only until a part of their own lives intersects an issue of the culture war: a daughter or a friend wants an abortion, a marriage ends in divorce, a cousin comes out of the closet, the local school teaches values they deeply disagree with, they can't find decent day care for their kids, art at a local gallery is censored, a local activist burns the American flag at an antiwar rally. All of a sudden, what had long been confined to the abstract becomes very real. Not only their passions but their very life commitments are drawn into a public controversy much larger than their personal troubles-controversies that seem to have a life of their own. As we will see, the contemporary culture war touches virtually all Americans; nearly everyone has stories to tell.