Ragamuffin: great awakening

… a broad social agenda

W

e heard Jim Wallis at the USA National Pastors Convention in San Diego in February. He has a heart for justice issues. He was there promoting his new book. He has been a controversial voice for social justice since his early-’70s days. But, he says “There is a Religious Left in this country, and I’m not a part of it.” His newest book is called, The Great Awakening. He says that theologically conservative evangelicals (especially young ones) are flocking to his message and are “deserting the Religious Right in droves” because it attempted to “restrict the language of ‘moral values’ to just two issues — abortion and gay marriage.”

“For years I have been called a progressive evangelical, but people said that was a misnomer,” says Wallis, who turns 60 in June. “The misnomer is becoming a movement.”

The Great Awakening is full of prescriptions on the broader social agenda: poverty, genocide in Darfur, global warming, the Iraq war, and more issues that were widely covered in Wallis’s Sojourners magazine and his previous books. The Great Awakening contains helpful hot-topics for our Salvation Army movement here and beyond.

Ragamuffin appears every Monday on theRubicon. Find past Ragamuffin posts and a bio of Capt. Jay Davis here.

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