The Universe Bends toward Justice: Radical Reflections on the Bible, the Church,and the Body Politic

In these passionate and wide-ranging essays Obery Hendricks offers a challenging engagement with spirituality, economics, politics, contemporary Christianity, and the abuses committed in its name. Among his themes: the gap between the spirituality of the church and the spirituality of Jesus; the ways in which contemporary versions of gospel music sensationalize today s churches into social and political irrelevance; how the economic principles and policies espoused by the religious right betray the most basic principles of the same biblical tradition they claim to hold dear; the domestication of Martin Luther King s message to foster a political complacency that dishonors King s sacrifices. He ends with a stinging rebuke of the religious right s idolatrous patriotism in a radical manifesto for those who would practice the politics of Jesus in the public sphere.