Professor Obery Hendricks comments from MSNBC’s The Ed Show on 12-7-11:
President Obama’s speech at Osawatomie High School in Osawatomie-,- Kansas “was akin to love your neighbor as yourself.”
1. He laid claim to the biblical tradition of justice.
2. He held up the importance of regulatory protections.
3. He held up the importance of responsibility to the whole society.
In these passionate and wide-ranging essays Obery Hendricks offers a challenging engagement with spirituality, economics, politics, contemporary Christianity, and the abuses committed in its name. Among his themes: the gap between the spirituality of the church and the spirituality of Jesus; the ways in which contemporary versions of gospel music sensationalize today s churches into social and political irrelevance; how the economic principles and policies espoused by the religious right betray the most basic principles of the same biblical tradition they claim to hold dear; the domestication of Martin Luther King s message to foster a political complacency that dishonors King s sacrifices. He ends with a stinging rebuke of the religious right s idolatrous patriotism in a radical manifesto for those who would practice the politics of Jesus in the public sphere.
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