Politics

What happens when a newspaper editor gives his primary editorial slot on Sundays to a pastor? In the case of Bob Cornwall, a pastor in Troy, Michigan, the result is a series of relevant, interesting, and challenging essays that go well beyond the local scene while still managing to be relevant to Americans in their local situation.

Now extensively revised and organized as to theme, these essays form a coherent statement of progressive Christianity at work in the public square. At the same time they are seasoned with a look at how the public square influences the spiritual life of a Christian living in mid-America. The 52 essays in this collection go well beyond one place and time. You will find yourself, your community, your state, your nation, and your world in each.

Can a person of faith be involved in the public square with integrity? Is public policy made better by this action? Can faith remain whole and genuine following the encounter? Read these essays to discover the answers, and perhaps find a new optimism for the future as you do.

Like an aging monument, democracy itself is crumbling.

An ever increasing government threatens both freedom and a financial collapse.

• Judges are acting more like kings themselves than interpreters of the law
• Redistricting, voter fraud, campaign finance controls, and an uninformed electorate threaten the integrity of elections.
• The values that made America the greatest country in the world are being supplanted.
• Government’s attempts to make people’s lives better often have the opposite effect

What is causing this decay? What can we do?

Preserving Democracy was written to answer these questions.

Elgin Hushbeck, Jr. defends American constitutional government by:

1. focusing on specific ideas rather than personalities,
2. being ideologically sharp, yet non-partisan in tone
3. using clear and simple, but never simplistic, arguments.

Are you equipped for the task of Preserving Democracy?

July 5, 2010:  The new, expanded paperback edition has been released.  Take a look!

Like an aging monument, democracy itself is crumbling.

An ever increasing government threatens both freedom and a financial collapse.

• Judges are acting more like kings themselves than interpreters of the law
• Redistricting, voter fraud, campaign finance controls, and an uninformed electorate threaten the integrity of elections.
• The values that made America the greatest country in the world are being supplanted.
• Government’s attempts to make people’s lives better often have the opposite effect

What is causing this decay? What can we do?

Preserving Democracy was written to answer these questions.

Elgin Hushbeck, Jr. defends American constitutional government by:

1. focusing on specific ideas rather than personalities,
2. being ideologically sharp, yet non-partisan in tone
3. using clear and simple, but never simplistic, arguments.

Are you equipped for the task of Preserving Democracy?

Areopagus Critical Christan Issues

As the body of Christ, the church has a prophetic role in the world. Prophets have always spoken clearly to people in power. They have been willing to challenge the decisions made by people who thought they were not accountable to anyone. Sometimes the prophets were respected, sometimes persecuted, but they were never ignored or regarded as irrelevant. So why is it that the church today cannot speak truth effectively to power?

In The Politics of Witness, Dr. Allan R. Bevere asks these questions and proposes an answer. The church has come to depend too much on temporal power and has thus forgotten its divine authority. In finding this answer he goes back to the founding of the church and how it first became dependent on the state. He examines those who have followed, mostly building a political theory that takes the responsibility of ministry from the church and gives it to the state.

You’ll find some names in this that might surprise you. Any discussion of Christianity and the state will involve Emperor Constantine, but what about his modern lieutenants, such as Locke, Jefferson, Franklin, and others?

While the theology applies to the church in any country, Dr. Bevere takes a particular look at the peculiarly American view that the United States of America is somehow God’s chosen people, a nation of destiny in accomplishing the gospel mission.

This book balances brevity with a broad intellectual and historical reach. You will be taken from the founding and foundation structure of Christian theology today to a proposal for how we, as the Church can reclaim our prophetic witness.