Two readings: National Economics and Southern Preachers

Here is an excerpt from a new book on Preachers in the South, focussing on the works of Will Campbell and Flannery O'Connor--reminds me there is also a new book out devoted to the writings and life of O'Connor--with this paragraph dig at ambitious Methodists:

Ramsey also considers the problems that most ministers face on a day-to-day basis. Church administration is the plague of those called to the ministry of "word, sacrament, and order." Someone must organize the various ministries of the congregation, and there is always the danger that the pastor will become captive to church politics. In this regard, he examines The Convention, Campbell's roman à clef about national struggles among the fundamentalists, and The Sunday Wife, Cassandra King's equally acerbic study of ambition among the Methodists.

Here is the link.

http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=6551

My friend Tom Edsall formerly of the Washington Post, author of 1984 New Politics of Inequality, a consciousness raising reading exercise for me in the decade in which I became no longer a promising young man; Edsall put things in best perspective yesterday before President Obama's press conference.
Edsall at huffingtonpost.com naming it "an awful mess."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-news/reporting/thomas-b-edsall