What impels a Mohandas Gandhi or a Martin Luther King, Jr.? How does religious experience animate a lifetime of dedication and drive for social justice?
In this instructive and inspiring account, Christian ethicist Curtiss DeYoung profiles three of the most dynamic and influential religious activists of the twentieth century: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Malcolm X, and Aung San Suu Kyi---each from a different generation, a different faith community, and a different continent. His portraits show how their mystic faith drove them to justice commitments and beyond customary boundaries between people from other traditions, countries, and ways of life.
Living Faith is more than a set of inspiring portraits. It also powerfully analyzes how these figures---along with such other luminaries as Rigoberta Menchu, Nelson Mandela, Winona LaDuke, Fannie Lou Hamer, Elie Wiesel, Thich Nhat Hanh, and the Dalai Lama---shared a fiery core experience and common characteristics that empowered their lives and work.
"Curtiss DeYoung stands tall in the arena of public theology, pioneering a whole new academic movement in reconciliation studies. In times like these, we need empowering reminders of the mentors, heroes and saints whose living faith compelled them to re-imagine the world. For those hungry to explore the connection between spirituality and social justice, DeYoung provides the book we've been waiting for."
-Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get ItCurtiss Paul DeYoung is Professor of Reconciliation Studies at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. A well-known advocate and activist, he is author of United by Faith and Beyond Rhetoric: Reconciliation as a Way of Life.
