An Alien in a Strange Land

Theology in the Life of William Stringfellow

Anthony Dancer

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781597529068
  9781498210492
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621892939
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

This unique theological biography traces the emergence of William Stringfellow's theology and the place of biblical politics within it. It highlights the centrality of life and work to his theology, and the inseparability of one from another. It tells the story of an ordinary life made less ordinary, radicalized through becoming a biblical person. Amidst periods in America of threat and prosperity (1950s), and later dissent and protest (1960s), Dancer examines not only how Stringfellow held America to account, but the way in which he offered a hopeful alternative in which the place of the Bible and the world were both central. It explores the way Stringfellow learned that the Bible makes sense of us and not us of it. This is biblical politics--a radicalizing, organizing engagement with the person and the world of which the church seems to sadly have lost both sight and interest. The advocacy of Karl Barth, his love of the circus, his scholarship to LSE, the National Conference on Religion and Race, his love for his parable of hope, Anthony Towne, and his prophetic confrontation with Johnson's "Great Society," all offer clues and insights into this radicalizing force at work in his life. Yet it was a life-threatening illness and personal confrontation with death in many ways became the final point of radicalization that lead to the production of Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land-ethics as pertinent to today as they are to any age.

Table of contents

• An Alien in a Strange Land
• Foreword
• 1 Outlook and Orientation
• 2 Social Context I
• PART ONE: Location—The Law and the Church
• PART TWO: Movement—Faith and Politics
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Name Index