Page 2 – Prophetic Encounters – Dan McKannan
The author of a previous book on the Catholic Worker and Camphill communities (Touching the World, 2007), McKannan pays attention to the sustaining role of communities for the Left. In many ways communities, like the Highlander School, settlement houses or the Catholic Worker houses, provided valuable nurturing to the leaders that would arise after WWII. It would have been good to have had more reflection on the role of intentional communities for the future of the Left in this century.
In McKannan’s portrait, socialism often seems to figure as the landscape background of the left from the late nineteenth century on. For McKannan while the hostility between religious faith and socialism is present from time to time, he takes care to craft a portrait in which religion is often an actively supportive partner to socialism or in which the two have a relatively peaceful, almost symbiotic, coexistence.
McKannan, who occupies a named chair Unitarian lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, is particularly attentive to identifying the role of the theologically unorthodox or religious outsider in the radical tradition. Paying particular attention to Jim Wallis and Sojourners, with a somewhat overdrawn critique, he does so in order to tell a story of diversity that evangelical Christianity does not dominate.
Noting the ways in which the liberal mainstream denominational establishment often took positions supportive of radicals in recent years, he tends to affirm their involvement of witness even as he insufficiently attends to their growing cultural irrelevance. For McKannan in many ways the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 represent the highlight of the recent radical efforts bringing labor, many working whites, African Americans and LGBTs into a rainbow coalition that represents the inclusiveness of the radical tradition.
From values of liberty, equality and solidarity that McKannan almost organically grounds in the American revolution, he looks to the future and wonders about the current powerful dynamic of resistance to the Right in relation to his grounding of the Left in a more personal model of encounter. Pondering where the Left might go from here, he considers the contemporary roles of queer theory and the Christian radicalism of John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas, but he believes that the cause of environmentalism to be most promising for giving the Left a future that positively builds from encounter across broadly diverse communities.
Appreciating how profoundly difficult the quest of the Left in American society has been and still is, McKannan said his goal was “to highlight important religious threads within the fabric of the Left.” (13) In this he admirably succeeded. He makes a convincing case that the Left in American society and history has an inescapably religious element and that this element has a breadth that is embodied beyond the commonplace thought of Protestant, Catholic and Jew to encompass faiths outside of the Christian tent. As even the prophet Amos noted (Amos 9:7), God brought both Israel up from Egypt and the Philistines from Caphtor. Among more confessional Christian communities, McKannan reminds us in Prophetic Encounters that the reconciliation of God’s kingdom that comes to us in Jesus of Nazareth extends beyond the boundaries of church as we know it, and indeed to all humanity and all creation.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
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