For the Common Good
Good and Bad Ways to Think
About Religion and Politics
by Robert Benne
Eerdmans, 2010
(128 pages, $14.00, paperback)
reviewed by J. Daryl Charles
Robert Benne, Director of the Roanoke College Center for Religion and Society and Jordan-Trexler Professor of Religion (Emeritus) at Roanoke College, writes from within the confessional Lutheran tradition. In his latest book he is concerned with the mode by which people of religious conviction interact with the political process. He begins with a brief sketch of several factors that have helped galvanize cultural reaction to religion since the 1960s. Among these were the election of Jimmy Carter, a professed Evangelical Christian, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that found a constitutional “right” to abortion, the subsequent emergence of groups such as the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition, and the very public faith—and influence—of John Paul II.
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J. Daryl Charles is the Acton Institute Affiliated Scholar in Theology & Ethics. He is the author or editor of twenty books, including Retrieving the Natural Law (2008), Natural Law and Religious Freedom (2018), and, most recently, Just War and Christian Traditions (forthcoming). He is also co-editor of Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace: God's Gifts for a Fallen World, Volume 3 (2020). He is a contributing editor to Touchstone.
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