Spiritual defiance
Subtitle: building a beloved community of resistance
By: Robin Meyers
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 144
ISBN-13: 9780300203523
Subjects: Faith; Church renewal; Christianity
Description: During his thirty-year career as a parish minister and professor, Robin Meyers has focused on renewing the church as an instrument of social change and personal transformation. In this provocative and passionate book, he explores the decline of the church as a community of believers and calls readers back to the church's roots as a community of resistance. Shifting the conversation about church renewal away from theological purity and marketing strategies that embrace cultural norms, and toward "embodied noncompliance" with the dominant culture, Meyers urges a return to the revolutionary spirit that marked Jesus's ministry. Framing his discussion around three poems by twentieth-century Polish poet Anna Kamienska, Meyers casts the nature of faith as a force that stands against anything and everything that engenders death and indignity. He calls for active--sometimes even subversive--defiance of the ego's temptations, of what he terms "the heresy of orthodoxy itself," and of an uncritical acceptance of militarism and capitalism. Each chapter is a poignant and urgent invitation to recover the Jesus Movement as a Beloved Community of Resistance.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Prologue:; title: The church is dead, long live the church! --; title: Undone: faith as resistance to ego --; title: Undone: faith as resistance to orthodoxy --; title: Undone: faith as resistance to empire -- -- Epilogue:; title: Resisting the reign of the Christian status quo.