Open Friendship in a Closed Society

Paul Harvey

Robert Elder, a grad. student at Emory who has guest-posted here before, has an extended review just up at Books and Culture of Peter Slade, Open Friendship in a Closed Society: Mission Mississippi and the Theology of Friendship (Oxford, 2010). A brief excerpt:

In Open Friendship in a Closed Society: Mission Mississippi and a Theology of Friendship, Peter Slade braids together theology, history, and sociology in an examination of a remarkable organization working to reconcile black and white Christians in Mississippi. Slade began the book as part of the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia, and he shares this scholarly community's concern with how theological beliefs shape social action. His book is a meditation, grounded in the particulars of place and time, on the relationship between justice and reconciliation in the body of Christ.

The tension here is between the personal and the structural, as is often the case, and Elder's review explores the contrast between this book, which emphasizes the personal, and Michael Emerson's Divided by Faith, which stresses how the personal can allow the powerful to ignore the structural. Well worth reading.