God's Politics by JIm Wallis

God's Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It- A New Vision for Faith and Politics in America,by Jim Wallis, challenges American politics and the American church like nothing I have read since Mark Hatfield's Between A Rock and A Hard Place from 1973. Wallis defines the prophetic imperative of Biblical faith as follows: get a vision of where the wind needs to be blowing and then to change the direction of the wind so it blows there. He asserts that God is always "personal" but never "private" and calls for a public discourse of faith that follows the models of Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah and their ilk. He reminds us that their public prophetic subjects were almost always political: poverty, single women, children, the nations, fraud, debt, greed.... He calls for a fourth political philosophy- conservative on social issues and for social justice. For Wallis, a budget is a moral document. This book, written in 2005, is even more compelling in the light of our current global circumstances. Perhaps too long, perhaps it should have been written as several shorter, more focused treatises, this book needs to become part of America's public debate as we move towards a new presidential election, as the earth shakes, wars continue, and the world's markets lose stability.

God's Politics, by Jim Wallis, (c) 2005, Harper Collins