Prophet of Reconciliation

“Ellul speaks to our guts and our heads.”
Against the racial division and violence rampant in the American South in the 1960s, a group of Christians called the Committee of Southern Churchmen preached a powerful message of radical reconciliation. They published a journal, Katallagete (Be reconciled), inviting intellectuals, theologians, sociologists, and writers of many stripes into dialogue about the need to discover new communal forms to encourage renewed spiritual life. Foremost among these voices was the French sociologist and theologian Jacques Ellul (1912–1994). Ellul’s writings struck them as a timely prophetic word with the power to overturn the divisions which plagued America. His singular influence led them to dub Ellul the “patron saint of the Committee of Southern Churchmen.”

This volume collects ten of Ellul’s articles published in Katallagete from 1968–1987. Here we find the fruitful tension between sociology and theology which characterizes Ellul’s works presented in a nutshell. With a foreword from renowned theologian Gabriel Vahanian, and an introduction which situates the articles in Ellul’s thought, in their own time, and in our own, this volume invites the reader to careful reflection on what faithfulness to the priestly vocation of the Christian looks like in a fragmented world.

Jacob Marques Rollison is co-president of the International Jacques Ellul Society. He is co-author of Jacques Ellul in the Cascade Companions series and has translated Ellul's two-volume work To Will & To Do: An Introduction to Christian Ethics. He serves as a worker at L'Abri Fellowship in Huemoz, Switzerland.