Bennett J. Sims, Bishop Says Bush Must Go

In 1963, Bennett J. Sims, who was then an Episcopal parish priest, attended the March on Washington and heard the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I have a dream" speech.

Returning to his Baltimore church afterwards, Sims, who is white, preached a sermon on how the experience had transformed him from a die-hard conservative into a supporter of the civil rights movement. Fifty families left the congregation in protest.

Sims wasn't afraid of controversy then, and he remains unafraid today, when at age 83, he will publish his new book, Why Bush Must Go: A Bishop's Faith-Based Challenge (Continuum). The volume, which will be published in June, argues that the Bush administration mistakenly interprets Christian theology and conservative politics as bedfellows.

"This book is a critical appraisal of the political and religious assumptions of the Bush administration that presupposes violence as a proper means for conflict resolution," Sims tells PW. "My sense is that this attitude and set of commitments arises from a fundamentalist view of the Bible that is male-dominant in its use of power and expects—as a matter of fact it forecasts—an imminent and violent end of history, and therefore has very little promise of building a peaceful world."

When talking about war and violence, Sims speaks from personal experience. A Naval line officer on destroyers during World War II, Sims was in Nagasaki only 12 weeks after the atomic bomb was dropped on that city, an experience that he says shaped his views of war and peace. "Every church should stand for the dismantling of our nuclear arsenal beginning right now," he says.

Sims's religious commitments as a priest, bishop of Atlanta, and later the founder of the Institute for Servant Leadership at Emory University, has led him to articulate religion and politics as ideological partners that should be discussed together. "They're two sides of the same coin," he asserts. "Our spirituality, either consciously or subconsciously, dictates our politics. Politics is simply the external expression in terms of power of our spiritual inwardness."

As such, Sims ends his book with an appendix that outlines a series of spiritual exercises, including six "resolutions" and "a twelve-step spiritual discipline" that he urges readers to use to guide them in coming to their conclusions before they vote in November. The book does not mention presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry, but instead takes as its mission criticism of President Bush's views on war, national security and religion. "Any candidate on the other side of the issue is a better, though less than perfect, alternative to what we have now," he says, calling for a "revolution that will move us out of an adolescent kind of commitment to violence as a way of solving problems and into the value system of a more mature political arrangement."

Despite the vehemence of his argument to oust Bush in November, Sims says he intends the book to "prohibit a contemptuous and blaming attitude toward the current administration. Of President Bush, he says, "I don't attack him personally, I take issue with his politics and his value system."

Sims presents his alternative to Bush's reading of Christian theology as a nonviolent, peace- and justice-centered belief system, an interpretation his publisher sees as a message readers are looking for. "He seems to me to speak very clearly out of that American tradition of liberal Christianity," says Claire England, religion marketing director at Continuum.

Sims will be on hand to promote the book at the Religion Booksellers Trade Exhibit in June, and England says she anticipates good sales. "We believe that [message] will resonate very strongly with a very large part of the electorate, and certainly a large part of the church-going electorate."

—Holly Lebowitz Rossi

Stephen G. Austin, Overhauling Ethics

Stephen G. Austin says businesses need a morals-and-ethics lesson, and he's ready to give it. All the corporate scandals provide evidence of the need, and now the federal government requires such schooling. The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, for public company reform and investor protection, mandates employee training on ethics issues starting this year.

"I think life after Enron is really a new era. It's an era of reformation in the business world," says Austin, a CPA and former audit partner of Price Waterhouse. With Mary Steelman, he wrote Rise of the New Ethics Class (Charisma House/ Strang, Apr.), subtitled Life After Enron: Not Business as Usual. San Diego-based Austin considers a lack of biblical guidance and ethical behavior to be at the heart of recent business crimes and outrages. He says some people never got any ethical foundation; some were trained well but need to be nudged to have strong moral principles. "Unfortunately it is much wider spread than I even imagined," says Austin, who has been in public accounting some 30 years. "Every day there is some story referring to fraud and accounting scandals." In Rise of the New Ethics Class, he analyzes the situation, puts the responsibility on top executives, and talks about "how to change people's hearts and minds to do the right thing."

Austin is a managing partner of the CPA firm Swenson Advisors. Co-author Steelman, who has an education and retailing background, is president of the ethics training company Integrity Advisors Inc. in Tarpon Springs, Fla. Barry Minkow, the former whiz kid entrepreneur convicted in the late 1980s for the Zzzz Best con, wrote the foreword and will team with Austin to promote the book; Minkow is now a pastor in San Diego and chief consultant at the Fraud Discovery Institute.

Rise of the New Ethics Class offers biblical guidelines for restoration, and Austin feels the time is right to get companies' attention for this message. "I'd say they have an appetite for reformation now more than any other time in the last 100 years." The book calls for integrity training at home, school, church and in the workplace. It speaks both to individuals and to corporations in a position to openly discuss biblical values, with leadership setting the example.

For example, the book cites Chic-fil-A, an Atlanta-headquartered fast food chain that closes Sundays. The chicken restaurant company's Web site explains: "Our founder, Truett Cathy, wanted to ensure that every Chick-fil-A employee and restaurant operator had an opportunity to worship, spend time with family and friends or just plain rest from the work week. Made sense then, still makes sense now." Austin notes, "He has grown that business by only being open six days out of seven."

The book's intended audience, Austin says, includes chief executive officers, chief financial officers, board members and senior management, as well as anyone who considers himself or herself Christian but doesn't know how to execute those values in the business sector.

"This is sort of an unusual book for Strang Communications to do in that it's really a business book," says Tom Marin, v-p of sales and marketing. But he says Strang was intrigued by Austin's inside view as a Fortune 500 auditor—a background that businesspeople will respect. Promotion plans include advertising the book in national business publications and in newspapers' business pages, and trying to get Austin on business-oriented radio shows. Austin has been taking the message to CPAs, nonprofit executives, corporate directors, and classes on corporate governance, the structure by which companies govern themselves.

"We're in a window of teachable moments when corporate executives look out and see their peers going to prison," Austin says. "Five to 10 years ago, I don't think I could have given away these books, but now people are thirsty and hungry for this type of reformation." —Juli Cragg Hilliard

David Aikman, Passion for Politics

Perhaps few people are as qualified to write a book about President Bush's faith as former Time magazine senior correspondent and foreign correspondent David Aikman, known widely as a Christian journalist with high ethical standards. His newest book, A Man of Faith: The Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush (W Publishing, Apr.) examines the influence evangelical Christianity continues to have on the president and his policies.

Aikman's interest in politics and its intersection with religion would seem unlikely, given his upbringing. Born to an upper-middle-class British family in Surrey, England, he describes his parents as having nothing to do with politics. Religion was perfunctory: "They were as eager to talk about it as their underwear," he says. A self-described militant atheist until he was 21, Aikman became a Christian after an encounter with an Anglican clergyman while studying at Oxford; he graduated in 1965.

Rejected by the diplomatic service, Aikman left England for America, first working for a bank, then attending graduate school at the University of Washington in Seattle. "There I discovered that I enjoyed with equal gusto history and reporting," Aikman remembers. He joined Time in 1971, and spent 23 "very happy years" there, mostly as a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe, Israel and Beijing, until he was assigned back to Washington in 1985. His writing was forged in this crucible. "Time magazine 'writing to print' is a very disciplined, rather difficult, skill. Being groomed to write tightly by some of the best editors in the U.S. was a great—though sometimes painful—experience and a real privilege," Aikman says.

This experience shows in the tightly written A Man of Faith, on which Aikman says W Publishing gave him full editorial freedom. As a veteran writer of several Time "Man of the Year" profiles, Aikman says he wasn't nervous about profiling Bush. "President Bush puts on his pants one leg at a time like everyone else," Aikman says. "I regarded it as a privilege to report on a man I happen to admire greatly, but it never daunted me." When he researched the book, Aikman says he was surprised by Bush's personality before his renewal of faith. "He was more slovenly and jokey and boozy than I had realized, but he was also more disciplined and duty-oriented," Aikman notes. "It was as though two separate personalities overlapped in his life."

W Publishing Group plans a 90,000-copy printing, with publicity to include appearances on The O'Reilly Factor;Scarborough Country on MSNBC; Fox & Friends; The John Batchelor Show and the Monica Crowley Show. W also plans e-blasts to targeted Internet lists, according to senior v-p and publisher David Moberg. "This is exactly the kind of book that we enjoy doing, and that we do well," Moberg says. "It's engaging the culture on ideas that matter, from a thoughtful, well-articulated Christian perspective." Aikman, 60, became a U.S. citizen in 1992, and although he's happy in the States, he confesses he still misses the cozy informality of English pubs. He and his wife Nonie live in Virginia, where he works full-time as a writer. The passion that drives him is to "earn enough money to pay bills," Aikman says, his British accent adding flavor to his words. "Writing full-time is arduous and sometimes nerve-wracking. Occasionally, it is rather good fun, but only if the credit cards have recently been paid and the rent money is in the bank."

How do you follow up profiling the president? Aikman has several irons in the fire. He is completing another biography of an important American and is contracted to write three novels. On the back burner are ideas for a book about global diplomacy, and one on China. And one other, very practical, goal: "I would like to earn enough money to buy a house." —Cindy Crosby

Shannon Ethridge, Telling It Like It Is

When Shannon Ethridge first shopped her manuscript around to evangelical Christian publishers, no one wanted to touch it—including the house that eventually bought the book. After all, the logic went, who wants to buy a book on women struggling with sexual purity? That was a guy's domain... right? Today, 85,000 copies later, WaterBrook Press—and the Christian publishing industry at large—has changed its thinking on the taboo-breaking topic of women and the negative aspects of sexuality. Ethridge's Every Woman'sBattle, the first title in the Every Woman's series—counterpart to WaterBrook's million-copy-selling Every Man's series—will hit 100,000 copies in print before its first publishing anniversary this summer, when the sequel, Every Young Woman'sBattle (co-authored with Stephen Arterburn), releases in July.

Right from the start, Ethridge catches readers off guard with her let's-get-real frankness. But this is a good thing, considering the fact that her book, co-authored with Stephen Arterburn, tackles the nitty-gritty netherworld of teen girls' sexuality. "One of the reasons I started becoming so passionate about sexual purity in the first place was that I was a mortician," Ethridge tells PW . Okay. She explains: "As a 19-year-old graduate from mortuary college in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, I embalmed bodies for 13 funeral homes. I was amazed at how many young people I was embalming—people who had died from AIDS or committed suicide as a result of learning they were HIV-positive. I remember thinking, there but for the grace of God go I."

Indeed, earlier in her teen years—before a profound spiritual conversion—Ethridge had been sexually promiscuous. When her pastor asked her to get involved with youth ministry, she jumped at the chance, urging kids not to sacrifice their purity the way she had. As the years went by, she left the mortuary business for full-time youth ministry with a group called Teen Mania and was dismayed to find no materials on the market that talked about the real-world issues her teen girl flock dealt with on a daily basis—things like masturbation, lesbian experimentation, cybersex and school bathroom hookups. She self-published a book from her lecture notes, and much of the material was later adapted into Every Woman's Battle with Arterburn.

"When women my age [36] were growing up, the pressure to have sex was enormous," Ethridge says. "But for our daughters, the pressure is overwhelming. The teachers at my daughter's junior high school hear girls bragging about their sexual escapades. The pressure to dress in very provocative ways is there every time they walk into Abercrombie & Fitch."

Ethridge says most parents would be horrified to learn what really goes on in the sex-saturated teen world. "Teen girls see their friends being very flirtatious and chasing guys, and some of their friends are giving oral sex on the school bus. I'm sure many girls who meant to stay sexually pure are starting to think it may not be realistic," she adds.

But that's exactly the kind of thinking and peer pressure Ethridge hopes to neutralize in Every Young Woman'sBattle. In her trademark girl-to-girl tone, she covers fashion, flirting, masturbation, lesbian experimentation, oral sex, boundaries in relationships, guarding your heart, Internet chatrooms, and pursuing a love relationship with God first. A companion workbook is due simultaneously in July.

Publisher Don Pape says WaterBrook (a Random House division) has earmarked nearly a six-digit promo budget for Every Young Woman's Battle and plans to add other titles to the brand. "Interestingly, the general market has looked to CBA [sales] as the barometer on these books," Pape says. "As the CBA picked this up and it's risen on the bestseller list, so has the general market. Research shows there's little difference between Christian and non-Christian teens when it comes to sexual activity. Far be it from us to bury our heads in the sand."—A.J. Kiesling

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