October 24, 2008

Books

A Battle of Wills

SovereigntyGod, State, and SelfJean Bethke ElshtainBasic Books, $35, 480 pp.

Eric Bugyis

In a 1970 letter to the editor of Commonweal, a graduate student named Jean Bethke Elshtain defended Jesuit priest and social activist Dan Berrigan against what the feminist scholar and theologian Rosemary Ruether had called his problematic “radical personalism.” Elshtain suggested that social criticism required going beyond “structural analysis of the political and econo (...)


 

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