Upcoming Books

Deena Guzder,  A HIGHER CALLING: American Religious Movements for Social Justice

Literary Nonfiction; Chicago Review Press (US & Canada); Tentative Publication Date: 2011

In January 1917, Alice Stokes Paul led mass demonstrations outside of the White House demanding women’s suffrage—she was imprisoned thrice in the U.S. and thrice in England, to which she responded by waging hunger strikes that were severe enough to require hospitalization. On May 4, 1961, James Zwerg participated in Freedom Rides to the segregated South and was greeted with chants of “Kill the nigger-loving son of a bitch!” as a mob of 3,000 used bats and pipes to beat the young white man nearly to death. On January 21, 1998, Roy Bourgeois was sentenced to six months in prison and fined $3,000 for illegally entering, disrupting and trying to close down the Fort Benning U.S. Army base that trained Latin American dictators such as Bolivia’s Hugo Banzer and Panama’s Manuel Noriega.

The common thread connecting Paul, Zwerg, and Bourgeois is not leftist politics or anarchist leanings, but religious convictions. Paul, a Quaker, believed that all people are created with an indistinguishable “Inner Light” regardless of their gender.  Zwerg, a minister in the United Church of Christ, regards his contribution to the civil rights movement as “an incredible religious experience” because he believed he was doing “God’s work” when protesting segregation. Bourgeois, an ordained Catholic Priest, denounced America’s support for dictatorships in Latin America and founded School of the Americas Watch, which seeks to shut down Fort Benning, in an effort to “live according to the justice and charity of Christ.”

A Higher Calling is the overlooked story of U.S. religious movements for social justice, a story about faith-based radicalism far removed from the most bombastic — and often least representative — voices of self-proclaimed “holy warriors” who brandish weapons in the name of their God(s). While pundits speak of the “Religious Right,” A Higher Calling focuses on the underreported story of Americans who are progressive because they are religious.