Why Bush Must Go: A Bishop's Faith-based Challenge - Softcover

Sims, Bennett

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826416373 ISBN 13: 9780826416377

Publisher: Continuum, 2004

Synopsis

In a style that's both personal and analytical, retired Episcopal Bishop Bennett Sims offers a penetrating critique of the extremist religious and political assumptions that underlie the domestic and foreign policies of President George W. Bush. He contrasts two radically opposed conceptions of power. Both concepts are found in the Hebrew-Christian Scriptures.

The concept of power represented by the President is the centuries-old one of male-dominant, militarist imperialism, co-opted in recent history by a fierce Fundamentalism that forecasts an imminent and violent end of history. The other is the enduring power of compassion, justice, and nonviolence exemplified by the Hebrew prophets and Jesus of Nazareth. This book celebrates the movement of prophetic power from the shadows of history to the
foreground of political action.

About this title

About the Author

The Right Rev. Bennett J. Sims is retired Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta (1972-83), and Founding President of the Institute for Servant Leadership at Emory University (1988-99). A seminary professor before becoming a bishop, he returned to teaching, at Candler School of Theology, after his retirement as bishop of Atlanta. He is the author of three books: Invitation to Hope, Purple Ink: Theology and Social Ethics, and Servanthood: Leadership for the Third Millennium. From 1943 to 1946 he served in the U.S Navy as a line officer on destroyers, and in 1969 he received a PhD in theology from the Catholic University of America. He lives in Henderson, N.C., with his wife, Mary Page.

Reviews

Somewhere in the pages of this slim volume lurks the skeleton of a thoughtful and provocative book. The author, a retired Episcopal bishop, mixes autobiographical reflections with smatterings of paleontology, archeology, physics and biblical scholarship to make the case for a "global warming of the second kind," a renewal based on the principles of nonviolence and the unity of all life. While this poorly titled book does include a heated indictment of the current administration's policies in Iraq and elsewhere, Sims seems much more interested in making a case for a new social order. He is both chastened and hopeful about the possibility of environmental revitalization and world peace based on maturing human consciousness and feminist principles. The book is marred by periodic outbursts of tortured syntax and jargon. In his distress with environmental degradation and world events, Sims sometimes yields to the temptation to use epithets instead of ideas, as when he attacks "male-dominant fundamentalist sectors" of several world religions, examines the "dominator grip of the levers of control in America," and claims that the apostle Paul was converted from "Jewish rule-oriented rage." Readers sympathetic to Sims's alienation from the Bush administration and to his eclectic mix of religious philosophies may find encouragement and inspiration here. However, even they will have to be extremely persistent.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Continuum
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0826416373
• ISBN 13: 9780826416377
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144