Book Reviews

About the author:
Amy Sullivan is an editor of The Washington Monthly. She has written about religion and politics for publications including the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and The Washington Post, and has served as commentator for The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, NPR’s Morning Edition, and other news outlets. Previously, Sullivan served as a legislative assistant to U.S. Sen. Tom Daschle and as editorial director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. She holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Harvard Divinity School.

http://amysullivan.net

Notes on the book:
As late as the 1960s, religion was a decidedly nonpartisan affair in the United States. In the past forty years, however, despite abundant evidence that Americans care about their candidates’ personal faith, Democrats have beat a retreat in competition for religious voters and the discussion of morality, effectively ceding religion to the Republicans.

Sullivan skillfully traces the Democratic Party’s fall from grace among religious voters, beginning with the party’s ineffectual response to the rise of the religious right and culminates with John Kerry’s defeat in the 2004 presidential election. It examines how the Democratic Party became—largely due to its own efforts or lack thereof—to be regarded as the party of out-of-touch elites and secularists.

Sullivan demonstrates that there was nothing inevitable about the defection of Catholic and evangelical Christian voters to the GOP and the emergence of the God gap: it was not just a Republican achievement but the Democrats’ failure to embrace their own faith and engage religious Americans on social issues.

Citing examples of how Democratic leaders have overlooked and even snubbed religious voters in the past, Sullivan suggests strategies for how Democrats can effectively reach out to people of faith.

About the author:
John O’Donohue was an Irish poet, author, and Catholic scholar who lived in the solitude of a cottage in the west of Ireland and spoke Gaelic as his daily language. His acclaimed writings reveal an original thinker rooted in a blend of Irish heritage, German philosophy, western theology, and an intimate relationship with the wild, luminous landscape of his home.

For 19 years he served as a parish priest in the west of Ireland, but always felt the urge to write, as well as a mounting tension between Irish Catholicism’s traditional stance and his own liberal position. In a radio interview long after leaving the priesthood, he spoke of ministering to people in the parish: “I was trying to refine their fingers…so that they could undo so much of the false netting crippling their own spirits.”

O’Donohue is the author of several books, including the international bestsellers Anan Cara and Eternal Echoes, as well as two collections of poetry, Echoes of Memory and Conamara Blues.

http://johnodonohue.com
John’s Obituary at the Times

Notes on the book:
What does it mean to bless others and ourselves? O’Donohue focuses on bringing God’s blessings into the liminal spaces in our lives: times of transition, grieving, change or preparation for the unknown. In our overly busy culture, Donohue writes, he frequently race over the “crucial thresholds in life” without pausing to take note of their significance. A blessing is one of those protecting, encouraging and guiding rituals “as we cross over into the unknown.” The book closes with O’Donohue’s personal-and often profound-musings on the act of blessing, drawing on Celtic spirituality and practice.

About the author:
Susan Neiman is Director of the Einstein Forum. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman studied philosophy at Harvard and the Freie Universitat Berlin, and taught philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv University. She is author of Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant; and Evil in Modern Thought. She lives with her three children in Berlin.

http://susan-neiman.de

Notes on the book:
Susan Neiman is a moral philosopher committed to making the tools of her trade relevant to real life. In Moral Clarity, she shows how resurrecting a moral vocabulary—good and evil, heroism and nobility—can steer us clear of the dogmas of the right and the helpless pragmatism of the left.

In search of a framework for forming clear opinions and taking responsible action on today’s urgent political and social questions, Neiman reaches back to the eighteenth century, retrieving a set of virtues—happiness, reason, reverence, and hope—that were held high by every Enlightenment thinker. She shows that the pursuit of moral clarity is not a matter of religious faith but is open to all who are committed to these ideals, believers and nonbelievers alike.