Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

Pastor and social gospel prophet Meyers (The Underground Church) adapted his 2013 series of Yale Divinity School Lyman Beecher Lectures into this explosive call to religious progressives to resist cultural and economic injustice. Building up from the populist red dirt of his 30-year Oklahoma pastorate of a United Church of Christ congregation, and on to the lectern endowed by a 19th-century pillar of the American religious establishment, Meyers skillfully builds an argument of the church as a "beloved community of resistance."Using three poems by 20th century Polish poet Anna Kamie%C5%84ska, Meyers explores the necessity of "falling off a horse" like Saul on the Damascus road, to disorient the ego; of resisting ossified theologies and a rapid-set faith and instead embracing the particularities of small, ordinary things ("%E2%80%8A%E2%80%98It's not from the grand/ but from every tiny thing/ that grows enormous'%E2%80%8A"); and of waking up to acknowledge how we have been flattened by American political empire into soul-weariness. Meyers writes, "If the Body of Christ has become just one more peculiar gathering of loyal subjects of empire... then we have no Good News to offer, just religious propaganda." His writing is knowledgeable, engaging, and provocative. (Apr.)