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Book Reviews The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America by Jim Wallis 336 pp., HarperCollins, 2008 Reviewed by Peter C. Hinde, O.Carm Jim Wallis, author of the New York Times best selling and provocative “God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It,” again challenges the Religious Right. Wallis himself out of the Evangelical Revivalist tradition has over the last 40 years come to draw more on Catholic social teaching for his own positions. Harkening to the revivalist inspiration for the abolition of slavery and voting rights of women in the late 1800s early 1900s, Jim announces a new day that he calls the “Revival Time” for evangelicals and christians generally for the social change needed today. Every chapter is rich in biblical theology as well as experiences drawn from everyday life of people he encounters in his perpetual round of talks and dialogues around the country and around the world. With his down-home wisdom and love of people he has been able to maintain the greatest credibility with Christian Evangelicals while challenging them to think more broadly and deeply, one can say more catholicly. In his chapter on “Life and Dignity” Wallis quotes extensively from Catholic leaders, especially from John Paul II’s social teaching, underlining the bottom line ethic of the “common good.” This is a perspective that has undergirded Catholic social doctrine since Pope Leo XIII, but has become especially emphasized to address these post-modern times. Wallis is a noted ecumenist who ought to be consulted more seriously by our own Catholic leaders. Backing Pope John Paul’s “consistent ethics of life” from conception to death, or as he says “from womb to tomb,” Wallis can be of tremendous help to Catholics on such a thorny political issue as the criminalization of abortion. Affirming important points on both sides and using both Scripture and reason he helps overcome the polarization around the Pro-Life versus the Pro-Choice options. His option for the poor ranges from the experience of poor women in the neighborhoods he and his Sojourner companions have lived in to the even more dramatic experience of women in Third World countries. Wallis dedicates this latest of his many books to his father who had died just prior to its publication. He has learned from his father who as a pastor himself started Jim on his way, but he learns as well and quotes here and there from his two pre-teen sons and his wife Joy. He is obviously an excellent listener. He reaches audiences and especially the youth with his stories and is in great demand for talks at youth rallies, as for students at his alma mater Harvard University.
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