Spiritual Defiance
Building a Beloved Community of Resistance
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pastor and social gospel prophet Meyers (The Underground Church) adapted his 2013 series of Yale Divinity School Lyman Beecher Lectures into this explosive call to religious progressives to resist cultural and economic injustice. Building up from the populist red dirt of his 30-year Oklahoma pastorate of a United Church of Christ congregation, and on to the lectern endowed by a 19th-century pillar of the American religious establishment, Meyers skillfully builds an argument of the church as a "beloved community of resistance."Using three poems by 20th century Polish poet Anna Kamie ska, Meyers explores the necessity of "falling off a horse" like Saul on the Damascus road, to disorient the ego; of resisting ossified theologies and a rapid-set faith and instead embracing the particularities of small, ordinary things (" It's not from the grand/ but from every tiny thing/ that grows enormous' "); and of waking up to acknowledge how we have been flattened by American political empire into soul-weariness. Meyers writes, "If the Body of Christ has become just one more peculiar gathering of loyal subjects of empire... then we have no Good News to offer, just religious propaganda." His writing is knowledgeable, engaging, and provocative.
