Bill of Wrongs or Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st Century

Bill of Wrongs: The Executive Branch's Assault Against America's Fundamental Rights

Author: Molly Ivins

Throughout her long career of “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted,” the cause closest to Molly Ivins’s heart was working to protect the freedoms we all value. Sadly, today we’re living in a time when dissent is equated with giving aid to terrorists, when any of us can be held in prison without even knowing the charges against us, and when our constitutional rights are being interpreted by a president who calls himself “The Decider.”

Ivins got the idea for Bill of Wrongs while touring America to honor her promise to speak out, gratis, at least once a month in defense of free speech. In her travels Ivins met ordinary people going to extraordinary measures to safeguard our most precious liberties, and when she first started writing this book, she intended it to be a joyous celebration of those heroes. But during the Bush years, the project’s focus changed. Ivins became concerned about threats to our cherished freedoms–among them the Patriot Act and the weakening of habeas corpus–and she observed with anger how dissent in the defense of liberties was being characterized as treason by the Bush administration and its enablers.

From illegal wiretaps, the unlawful imprisonment of American citizens, and the undermining of freedom of the press to the creeping influence of religious extremism on our national agenda and the erosion of the checks and balances that prevent a president from seizing unitary powers, Ivins and her longtime collaborator, Lou Dubose, co-author of Shrub and Bushwacked, describe the attack on America’s vital constitutional guarantees. With devastating humorand keen eyes for deceit and hypocrisy, they show how severe these incursions have become, and they ask us all to take an active role in protecting the Bill of Rights.

In life and on the printed page, Molly Ivins was too cool to offer a posthumous valedictory (or even to take a victory lap for her many triumphs over inane, vainglorious, and addlepated politicos). But in Bill of Wrongs, her final and perhaps greatest book, the irrepressible Molly Ivins really does have the last word.

Publishers Weekly

The threats to the Bill of Rights cited by the late populist gadfly Ivins and Texas journalist Dubose (coauthors of Bushwhacked) in this scattershot survey run the gamut from physical to political violations. Dire indeed were the infringements of rights endured by Murat Kurnaz, an innocent German Muslim of Turkish descent held as an enemy combatant by the U.S. military for five years and subjected to waterboarding and electroshock. The Dover, Pa., school board's effort to insinuate intelligent design into biology courses has been much covered, though perhaps less bluntly than here (the defense lawyers "just weren't as smart" as those for the plaintiffs). As for the Second Amendment, the authors castigate President Bush for being too protective of the right to bear arms. In between there are mentions of journalists jailed for shielding sources, librarians gagged by Kafkaesque government secrecy rules and a slew of citizens arrested for peaceably protesting in the vicinity of the president. (Many of these cases were quickly resolved once the ACLU got involved.) If, as Ivins and Dubose hint, there's a concerted assault on our freedoms, there 's still plenty of ineptitude: in one instance they cite, the feds accidentally sent top secret records of illegal electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists to the suspects' lawyers. (Oct. 23)

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Cynthia Harrison - Library Journal

Ivins, the scathingly funny political columnist, died in January 2007. This posthumous publication is her third with political journalist Dubose. She leaves us with her last words on George W. Bush and his gang. In eight chapters, we hear of the Bush administration's depredations of the Bill of Rights, e.g., the attacks on free speech such as Bush operatives removing protestors from presidential speeches; the disdain for secular public education; the support of "intelligent design"; the hostility to a free press by subjecting uncooperative reporters to contempt charges; the assault on privacy through implementation of the Patriot Act; scorn for the rights of the accused, and the humiliation and torture of prisoners accused of terrorist activities. The uninitiated, more than the well-informed, will get a decent education in constitutional protections, although some of the incidents the authors cover have yet to be resolved by the courts. One wishes this book showed more of Ivins's spark and less repetition. Recommended for public libraries where there may be demand owing to a big push by the publishers. [See Prepub Alert, LJ6/1/07.]

New interesting book: Hubris or Let Them In

Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st Century: The Classic that Woke Up the Church

Author: Walter Rauschenbusch

In the wake of the success of God's Politics, comes an anniversary edition of Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis, a book which outsold every other religious volume for three years and which has become a classic and mainstay for any Christian seriously interested in social justice.

PBS has named Rauschenbusch one of the most influential American religious leaders in the last 100 years, and Christianity Today named this book one of the top books of the century that have shaped contemporary religious thought. So it seems fitting on the 100th anniversary of the publication of Christianity and the Social Crisis that Rauschenbush's great-grandson should bring this classic back into print, adding a response to each chapter by a well-known contemporary author such as Jim Wallis, Tony Camplo, Cornel West, Richard Rorty, Stanley Hauerwas, and others.

Between 1886 and 1897, he was pastor of the Second German Baptist Church in the "Hell's Kitchen" area of New York City, an area of extreme poverty. As he witnessed massive economic insecurity, he began to believe that Christianity must address the physical as well as the spiritual needs of humankind. Rauschenbusch saw it as his duty as a minister and student of Christ to act with love by trying to improve social conditions.

This, in fact, inspired leaders such as Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and Bishop Desmond Tutu. "Christianity is in its nature revolutionary" Rauschenbusch wrote, and the significance of his work is that it spoke of society's responsibility to the poor and downtrodden.

In the present atmosphere of heightened debate and even antagonism between political and religious viewpoints Christianity and the Social Crisis will again be a book that will provoke intense responses by people on every side. As the disparity between the rich and the poor in America continues to widen in the 21st century, the book's explication of the radical social message of Jesus is as applicable today as it was 100 years ago.

Wesley A. Mills - Library Journal

In this reintroduction of Baptist minister Rauschenbusch's classic 1907 social gospel treatise, Christianity and the Social Crisis, several contributors offer chapter-by-chapter commentary, among them pastor and evangelist Tony Campolo, author and scholar Cornel West, and philosopher Richard Rorty. As with a colorful sports broadcast, they offer up their particular viewpoints concerning Rauschenbusch's now-famous and still controversial ideas, e.g., his disbelief in original sin and his preaching of a social gospel. Many of the societal concerns and questions of 1907, e.g., his alarm over inner-city poverty, societal injustice, crime, and ineffectual government, are just as relevant today. The only seeming difference is in the voices of the individuals addressing these issues. It is interesting to read what each has to say about the hopes and dreams of Rauschenbusch, one of the original social gospel architects. Certainly not all are in agreement with his (or one another's) theology, eschatology, Christology, anthropology, and soteriology, but all acknowledge the need to attend to and address societal ills. Recommended for larger specialized university collections.