Reviews and Articles

Book Review: The Universe Bends Toward Justice: Radical Reflections on the Church, the Bible, and the Body Politic by Obery M. Hendricks

Meadows, Dwayne

Obery M. Hendricks' The Universe Bends Toward Justice is a rigorous, highly nuanced, and skillful treatment of the paucity of prophetic Christian witness and critique in the church and in society. The author, who is an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, as well as an acclaimed scholar and intellectual and former seminary president, marshals significant evidence in setting forth the thesis that things have gone seriously awry in a nation that claims direct de- scent from the maker of all things. Not one to leave the reader languishing in some netherworld of political correctness or convoluted intellectualisms, Hendricks calls by name the besetting sin and deviltry that would rend the nation, with its lofty ideals of unanimity and love of truth, into a curious, contemptible mélange of atomistic, social hierarchies that bow at the great altar of Spencerian economic and social theory. "We are living in insane times," says Hendricks, "Like purveyors of a bad Orwellian joke, the religious right and right-wing politicians have hijacked the meanings of justice and equity and cynically perverted them into their very opposites." For the author, this tattered re-inversion of the Nietzschean "transvaluation of values" has led to "bizarre and unconscionable results" in both civic life and in the ekklesia—the assembly of those called out to bear witness to the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.

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Union Seminary Quarterly Review
Publisher
Union Theological Seminary

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Academic Units
Union Theological Seminary
Publisher
Union Theological Seminary
Series
Union Seminary Quarterly Review
Published Here
September 16, 2015