Prophetic Encounters

October 15, 2011
Examination of religion's place in American political radicalism. McKanan (Theology/Harvard Divinity School; The Catholic Worker after Dorothy: Christian Communities Transforming Society, 2008, etc.) explores the role of faith communities in movements ranging from abolitionism to environmentalism. He documents the individuals and organizations across the history of American radicalism, identifying and explaining links that may not be obvious to casual readers. Protestant Christianity necessarily plays the major role here, but McKanan goes to great lengths to discuss the radical aspects of Catholicism, Judaism and even such belief systems as Wicca. He begins with the nation-dividing anti-slavery question, illustrating not only white church involvement in the abolition movement but also the rise of historically black churches during this era. The author moves on to discuss the fight for women's rights, a decades-long process that witnessed a great deal of change in American Christianity. The energy of the suffragist and temperance movements, combined with mini-revolutions within the late-19th-century church, gave way to a new radical emphasis on urban needs and the labor movement. McKanan explores American socialism and especially its tie to immigrant Catholics in the era before the Great Depression and World War II. After the war, American radicals of faith turned their attentions to race relations and the civil-rights movement. With the deflation of mainstream Protestantism, the post-1960s era provides a new and changing template for faith involvement in radical politics. "Radicalism thrives in times of crisis," writes the author. So too does religion. An illuminating book.

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October 15, 2011

In the current U.S. political environment, it's easy to forget the prominent role that the religious Left has played in our history. McKanan (Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer, Harvard Divinity Sch.; The Catholic Worker After Dorothy: Practicing the Works of Mercy in a New Generation) comprehensively chronicles the history of the "sibling" rivalry and relationship between religion and radicalism in the United States. Covering religious groups as diverse as Protestants, Catholics, humanists, Jews, and neopagans and radical causes such as labor, abolition of slavery, civil rights, women's rights, and opposition to war, McKanan highlights the important religious threads within the fabric of the Left over time. As "siblings," the connection between religion and radicalism has drifted between cooperation and combativeness through the years, but almost never reflects indifference as the two have found themselves intimately linked at many key historical moments. VERDICT A fine storyteller, McKanan may inspire readers to seek out more on many of the topics he covers here. An excellent starting point for those interested in learning about a frequently overlooked aspect of American history.--Brian T. Sullivan, Alfred Univ. Lib., NY

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2011
This sweeping survey demands more reading time than its page count seems to promise, for the amount of information purveyed in fairly small type is immense. Scholar of religious social activism McKanan begins in the 1820s with the Working Men, a movement for the political and economic rights of skilled workers. Organizing through local church congregations and employing religious rhetoric, it thereby anticipated succeeding nineteenth-century crusades for abolition, women's rights, labor unions, temperance, and the burgeoning urban poor. Such religious social movements expanded by having people with grievances and those who would help them encounter one another. As McKanan sees it, this practice remains characteristic of religiously motivated radical social movements, although the congregations those movements now advance through are no longer primarily Protestant. Indeed, they're significantly non-Christian and nonstandard Christianhave been from 1830s Transcendentalism down to 1970s Wicca, for radicals have been as innovative in religion as in social activism. Though McKanan only briefly characterizes particular religious developments, his packed chronicle stands to be the book-of-first-resort on the intersection of religion and radicalism in America.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)