An American Gospel
NPR carries an interview with the author of An American Gospel: On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God, Erik Reece.
... Reece grew up the grandson of a fundamentalist preacher, but left the church in search of a less punitive religion. In his new book, An American Gospel: On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God, Reece describes his struggle to find a form of Christianity with which he would feel comfortable — and the guidance he received from the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman and other American writers.
Excerpts from his book:
Christianity did not have to form such an easy and ultimately unholy alliance with industrialism, consumerism, and corporatism. There is another, subversive spirit that runs throughout our history, a strain of thought that provides a religious, ecological, and radically democratic alternative to where we are right now. It is, I believe, a uniquely American Gospel, one we sorely need to recover.What follows is a parallel narrative-a personal history of how I slowly came to discover and understand this gospel, and a history of how that gospel arrived and evolved in this country.
Listen to the interview here.
