Summer Reading from The Immanent Frame

The Immanent Frame, a blog on secularism, religion, and the public sphere hosted on the Social Science Research Council’s site, recently asked some of its contributors what they had read and liked over the summer. It is a great list and we were glad to see that a couple of contributors identified Kip Kosek’s award-winning book Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern Democracy, including Tracy Fessenden, who also recommended the forthcoming book After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement, edited by Courtney Bender and Pamela E. Klassen.

Also recommending the book is aforementioned Pamela Klassen, who writes:

“Kosek’s book tells the story of a “radical religious vanguard” of liberal Protestant pacifists in the United States between the two world wars. A mix of theologians, clergy, and lay activists, the Fellowship of Reconciliation forwarded a sophisticated political and religious critique of state violence that was informed as much by their interpretation of Jesus as by Gandhian satyagraha. Kosek’s attention to the uses of ritual in the movement, and the Fellowship’s influence on later versions of civil disobedience offers an important corrective to overly intellectualized portrayals of Protestant political dissent.”