Charles E. Gutenson is a church consultant and former chief operating officer at Sojourners. His most recent book is Church Worth Getting Up For.
Posts By This Author
What Else Will Our Children Pay For?
Peacemaking, Power, and Politics: Books for Reflection
Torture and the Currency of Human Rights
In this land that has inherited through our forebears the noblest understandings of the rule of law, our government has deliberately chosen the way of barbarism ...
Working Against Torture
Torture is a moral issue. On Sept. 11-12, 2008, in Atlanta, Georgia, Christians will be sharing their grave concerns over the United States' position on this practice at "A National Summit on Torture: Religious Faith, Torture, and our National Soul."
In order to bring this subject to the forefront of the church's dialogue, Sojourners is proud to help sponsor the conference, alongside Mercer University, Evangelicals for Human Rights, and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture -- in [...]
Thank God For George W. Bush
In the late summer of 2004, a seminary colleague and I pondered the possibility of another four years of Bush 43. The polls were very close, and it seemed highly possible that we could be faced with four more years of G.W. Bush, coupled with both houses of Congress under the Republicans. My colleague observed ruefully, "Perhaps unified Republican rule would be the best education for the people to see just how much they don't want it." Before I could respond, he added, "Though, I [...]
'Ghosts of Abu Ghraib'
The words of Jesus are unambiguous when it comes to expressing how we
are to love each other--we are to love others as we love ourselves. In
fact, the paradigmatic, the normative test case for Christian love is love
of enemy. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus tells us that we
are to love our enemies and to do good to them. Surely we can agree that it
is exceptionally difficult to see how one can genuinely love the other who
is enemy to us at the same time that one is engaged in [...]